AP News, March 8th, 2007
Novelists Cormac McCarthy, Richard Ford and Dave Eggers were among the finalists Thursday night for the 33rd annual National Book Critics Circle prize.
McCarthy's "The Road," Ford's "The Lay of the Land" and Eggers' "What Is the What" all were nominees for the fiction prize. Other finalists were Kiran Desai's "The Inheritance of Loss," winner last year of Britain's Man Booker Prize, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's "Half of a Yellow Sun."
Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma" and Simon Schama's "Rough Crossings" were both nominated for general nonfiction. "At Canaan's Edge," the third of Taylor Branch's award-winning trilogy about the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement, was a biography finalist.
There are no cash prizes.
Besides Pollan and Schama, nonfiction finalists were Patrick Cockburn's "The Occupation," Ann Fessler's "The Girls Who Went Away" and Sandy Tolan's "The Lemon Tree." Nominees for biography included Debby Applegate's "The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher," Julie Phillips' "James Tiptree, Jr: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon," Frederick Brown's "Flaubert" and Jason Roberts' "A Sense of the World: How a Blind Man Became History's Greatest Traveler."
"A Strange Piece of Paradise," in which author Terri Jentz writes of being attacked by an ax-wielding man, was nominated for best memoir. Others cited were Alison Bechdel's "Fun Home," Alexander Masters' "Stuart: A Life Backwards," Daniel Mendelsohn's "The Lost" and Donald Antrim's "The Afterlife."
Eighty-one year-old W.D. Snodgrass, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and numerous other awards, was a poetry finalist for "Not for Specialists." Fellow nominees included Daisy Fried's "My Brother Is Getting Arrested Again," Frederick Seidel's "Ooga-Booga," the late Miltos Sachtouris' "Poems 1945-1971" and Troy Jollimore's "Tom Thomson in Purgatory."
The finalists for criticism: Bruce Bawer's controversial "While Europe Slept," which even members of the NBCC have called racist and anti-Muslim; Frederick Crews' "Follies of the Wise," Daniel C. Dennett's "Breaking the Spell," Lawrence Weschler's "Everything That Rises" and Lia Purpura's "On Looking."
Two honorary prizes for criticism were to be given. Stephen G. Kellman, whose work has appeared in The Texas Observer, The Georgia Review and other publications, won the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. Longtime critic John Leonard, who has written for The New York Times, The New York Review of Books and The Nation among others, won the Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award.
The National Book Critics Circle, founded in 1974, has nearly 500 members.
