Diaz & Alvarez make National Book Critics Circle Awards list

[Dolores]

Junot Diaz for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Julia Alvarez with Once Upon a Quinceañera have made the prestigious finalist list of the National Book Critics Circle Awards. See release below:

National Book Critics Circle Announces Awards Finalists
In keeping with its goal to represent book culture throughout the nation, the National Book Critics Circle met in San Francisco today (18 January) to choose the finalists for its annual awards. One author received nominations in two categories. Joyce Carol Oates got the nod in fiction for The Gravedigger’s Daughter and in autobiography for The Journals. Other fiction finalists reflected the theme of national inclusiveness, with Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverhead), and Marianne Wiggins’s The Shadow Catcher (S., & S.), a meditation on the life of photographer Edward Curtis, famed for his images of Native Americans, that encompasses the final settling of the American West.

Poetry nods to the international scene include books by poet Tadeusz Rozewicz (New Poems, Archipelago), with other finalists including Mary Jo Bang (Elegy, Graywolf) and Michael O’Brien (Sleeping and Waking, Flood). In autobiography, a relatively new category for the NBCC, both Joshua Clark’s Heart Like Water: Surviving Katrina and Life in Its Disaster Zone (Free Press) and Edwidge Danticat’s Brother, I'm Dying (Knopf) remind us of trouble close to home.

Biography focuses especially on authors (Hermione Lee’s Edith Wharton, Knopf; Arnold Rampersad’s Ralph Ellison, Knopf; and Claire Tomalin’s Thomas Hardy, Penguin Press) Criticism ranged widely from Susan Faludi’s The Terror Dream, Metropolitan/Holt) to Ben Ratliff (Coltrane: The Story of a Sound, Farrar, Straus) to Julia Alvarez (Once Upon a Quinceañera, Viking).

The finalists were announced at a Saturday night event by a host of former NBCC winners and finalists, including Frederick Crews, Dave Eggers, Troy Jollimore, Jason Roberts, and Maxine Hong Kingston, at San Francisco’s famed City Lights Books (261 Columbus Avenue at Broadway). In addition, winners were announced for the NBCC’s Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, which went to Sam Anderson, and this year’s Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award, who is Emilie Buchwald. Book award winners will be announced in New York City on Thursday, March 6, 2008, at the New School University’s Tishman Auditorium.