National Book Awards Finalists

From the New York Times:

October 13, 2005
NATIONAL BOOK AWARDS NAMES FINALISTS
By Edward Wyatt

Historical novels and first-time nominees dominate the list of finalists announced yesterday for the National Book Awards.

As always, sprinkled among the new names are a few giants of American letters, like E. L. Doctorow, whose sweeping fictional account of Sherman's march to the sea, "The March," published by Random House, is perhaps the best selling of the group of fiction finalists. Mr. Doctorow, who won the award in 1986 for "World's Fair," is the only previous winner among the fiction finalists.

The National Book Awards, for books written by an American citizen and published from December 2004 through November of this year, will be announced on Nov. 16. Awards for lifetime contributions to American literature and the literary community will also be awarded at that time to Normal Mailer and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a founder of City Lights Books in San Francisco.

The National Book Awards is no longer the only show in town, of course; the number of new awards is growing only slightly more slowly than the number of books published each year. Two more recent entries relied on different approaches to reach much the same result: the Quill Book Awards, which relied on summer voting, and The Book Standard Honors, which used sales data to pick winners. Both named "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" (Scholastic) as their book of the year. J. K. Rowling, the British author of the Potter series, is not eligible for a National Book Award.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

THE 2005 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALISTS

FICTION
• "The March," by E. L. Doctorow
• "Veronica," by Mary Gaitskill
• "Trance," by Christopher Sorrentino
• "Holy Skirts," by Renè Steinke
• "Europe Central," by William T. Vollmann

NONFICTION
• "Out of Eden: An Odyssey of Ecological Invasion," Alan Burdick
• "Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius," by Leo Damrosch
• "The Year of Magical Thinking," by Joan Didion
• "102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers,"

by Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn
• "Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves,"

by Adam Hochschild

POETRY
• "Where Shall I Wander," by John Ashbery
• "Star Dust: Poems," by Frank Bidart
• "Habitat: New and Selected Poems, 1965-2005," by Brendan Galvin
• "Migration: New and Selected Poems," by W. S. Merwin
• "The Moment's Equation," by Vern Rutsala

YOUNG PEOPLE'S LITERATURE
• "The Penderwicks," by Jeanne Birdsall
• "Where I Want to Be," by Adele Griffin
• "Inexcusable," by Chris Lynch
• "Autobiography of My Dead Brother," by Walter Dean Myers
• "Each Little Bird That Sings," by Deborah Wiles