The National Book Critics Circle has announced the finalists for its literary awards, given each year to outstanding books published in the United States.
Percival Everett’s Dr. No made the fiction shortlist; the novelist was the winner of last year’s NBCC Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award. Ling Ma’s Bliss Montage: Stories and Namwali Serpell’s The Furrows were also named fiction finalists alongside two translated books: Jon Fosse’s A New Name: Septology VI-VII, translated by Damion Searls, and Mieko Kawakami’s All the Lovers in the Night, translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd.
Ed Yong’s An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us was named a finalist in the nonfiction category; the book was a Kirkus Prize finalist and the winner of this year’s Andrew Carnegie Medal for nonfiction. Also making the shortlist were Isaac Butler’s The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned To Act, Kelly Lytle Hernández’s Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands, Joseph Osmundson’s Virology: Essays for the Living, the Dead, and the Small Things in Between, and Annie Proulx’s Fen, Bog, & Swamp: A Short History of Peatland Destruction and Its Role in the Climate Crisis.
Tess Gunty’s National Book Award–winning The Rabbit Hutch made the shortlist for the John Leonard Prize, given to an outstanding first book in any genre, along with Jessamine Chan’s The School for Good Mothers, Jonathan Escoffery’s If I Survive You, Zain Khalid’s Brother Alive, Maud Newton’s Ancestor Trouble, Morgan Talty’s Night of the Living Rez, and Vauhini Vara’s The Immortal King Rao.
Winning this year’s Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award is Joy Harjo, the former U.S. poet laureate, while bookstore and publisher City Lights was named the winner of the Toni Morrison Achievement Award, given to an institution that has made contributions to book culture.
The winners of this year’s NBCC Awards will be announced at a ceremony in New York on March 23. A full list of finalists is available on the NBCC website.
Michael Schaub, a journalist and regular contributor to NPR, lives near Austin, Texas.
