2007 Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalists

Fiction
1. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverhead Books) / Junot Díaz
2. Be Near Me (Harcourt) / Andrew O’Hagan
3. Last Night at the Lobster (Viking) / Stewart O’Nan
4. Out Stealing Horses (Graywolf Press) / Per Petterson
5. The Shadow Catcher (Simon & Schuster) / Marianne Wiggins

Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction
1. Skylark Farm (trans. by Geoffrey Brock) (Alfred A. Knopf) / Antonia Arslan
2. Twenty Grand and Other Tales of Love and Money (Harper Perennial) / Rebecca Curtis
3. The Understory (Ironweed Press) / Pamela Erens
4. The Last Chicken in America: A Novel in Stories (W.W. Norton) / Ellen Litman
5. The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (Riverhead Books) / Dinaw Mengestu

Mystery/Thriller
1. Christine Falls (Henry Holt) / Benjamin Black
2. Frozen Tracks: An Inspector Erik Winter Novel (Viking) / Åke Edwardson
3. The Indian Bride (trans. by Charlotte Barslund) (Harcourt) / Karin Fossum
4. In the Woods (Viking) / Tana French
5. Ice Moon (trans. by John Brownjohn0 (Harcourt) / Jan Costin Wagner

Poetry
1. Mars Being Red (Copper Canyon Press) / Marvin Bell
2. Ripple Effect: New and Selected Poems (Coffee House Press) / Elaine Equi
3. The Kitchen Sink: New and Selected Poems, 1972-2007 (Graywolf Press) / Albert Goldbarth
4. Old Heart: Poems (W.W. Norton) / Stanley Plumly
5. Little Boat (Wesleyan University Press) / Jean Valentine

Biography
1. Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr (Viking) / Nancy Isenberg
2. Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer (Yale University Press) / Tim Jeal
3. Young Stalin (Alfred A. Knopf) / Simon Sebag Montefiore
4. Boone: A Biography (A Shannon Ravenel Book/Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill) / Robert Morgan
5. Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War (Alfred A. Knopf) / Michael J. Neufeld

Current Interest
1. A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier (Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus & Giroux) / Ishmael Beah
2. The Father of All Things: A Marine, His Son, and the Legacy of Vietnam (Pantheon) / Tom Bissell
3. The Second Civil War: How Extreme Partisanship Has Paralyzed Washington and Polarized America (The Penguin Press) / Ronald Brownstein
4. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Company) / Naomi Klein
5. Soldier’s Heart: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) / Elizabeth D. Samet

History
1. The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It (Houghton Mifflin) / David A. Bell
2. Nixon and Mao: The Week that Changed the World (Random House) / Margaret Macmillan
3. The Greatest Battle: Stalin, Hitler, and the Desperate Struggle for Moscow that Changed the Course of World War II (Simon and Schuster) / Andrew Nagorski
4. Troublesome Young Men: The Rebels Who Brought Churchill to Power and Helped Save England (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) / Lynne Olson
5. Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (Doubleday) / Tim Weiner

Science & Technology
1. Animal Architects: Building and the Evolution of Intelligence (Basic Books) / James L. and Carol Grant Gould
2. I Am A Strange Loop (Basic Books) / Douglas Hofstadter
3. The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language (Viking) / Christine Kenneally
4. On Deep History and the Brain (University of California Press) / Daniel Lord Smail
5. Faust in Copenhagen: A Struggle for the Soul of Physics (Viking) / Gino Segrè

Young Adult Fiction
1. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (Little, Brown Young Readers) / Sherman Alexie
2. The White Darkness (HarperTeen) / Geraldine McCaughrean
3. What They Found: Love on 145th Street (Wendy Lamb Books/Random House) / Walter Dean Myers
4. Darkwing (Eos Books/HarperCollins) / Kenneth Oppel
5. A Darkling Plain (The Hungry City Chronicles) (Eos Books/HarperCollins) / Philip Reeve