The National Book Awardswere established in 1950 by a consortium of publishing groups that wanted to bring to the public's attention exceptional books written by Americans, as well as encourage reading in general.

Today, the awards are give in four genres: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and young people's literature. The winners, chosen by five-member, independent judging panels for each genre, receive a $10,000 cash award and a bronze statue.

The Award is one the 'big three 'American book awards alongside the Pulitzer and the National Book Critics Choice. The Nationals Five Under 35 Award is also worth having a look at.

2009 | 2008 Winners | 2008 Five Under 35 | 2007 | 2006 | Winners 1950- 2005

2010 National Book AwardWinners & Finalists

There were 1,115 total submissions this year for arguably America's leading book awards, the National,  The winners are:

Fiction: Lord of Misrule, by Jaimy Gordon
Nonfiction: Just Kids, by Patti Smith
Poetry: Lighthead, by Terrance Hayes
Young people’s literature: Mockingbird, by Kathryn Erskine
Lifetime achievement award: Tom Wolfe

National Book Award 2009 -

Nov 19 - A novel about life in New York City in the 1970s and a biography of U.S. tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt were among the winners at the United States 60th annualNational Book.

Colum McCann (left) won the fiction award with Let the Great World Spin published by Random House, while The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt, by T.J. Stiles and published by Alfred A. Knopf, won the nonfiction award.

"From 10 ordinary lives he crafts an indelibly hallucinatory portrait of a decaying New York City," the judges said of Irish-born McCann.

Stiles traced Vanderbilt's life from his birth in New York to the creation of his transport empire and family dynasty.

Phillip Hoose won the Young People's Literature award for Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

The book tells the true story of Colvin, who was a teenager in 1955 when she refused to give up her seat to white woman on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama -- nine months before Rosa Parks took the same stand. But instead of being celebrated as Parks was, Colvin was jailed.

"Because of this woman, our lives have changed," said Hoose, as he accepted his award with Colvin by his side

The National Book Award for Poetry was awarded to Keith Waldrop for Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy, published by University of California Press.

Past National Book Award winners include John Updike, Philip Roth and Ralph Ellison. In 2009, 193 publishers submitted 1,129 books for prizes.

2009 National Book Award Winners & Finalists

Fiction:

• Winner - Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann -
• American Salvage by Bonnie Jo Campbell
• In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin
• Lark and Termite by Jayne Anne Phillips
• Far North by Marcel Theroux

Nonfiction:

• Winner - The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt by T.J. Stiles
• Following the Water: A Hydromancer's Notebook by David M. Carroll
• Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origins of Species by Sean B. Carroll
• Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City by Greg Grandin
• The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome's Deadliest Enemy by Adrienne Mayor

Poetry:

• Winner - Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy by Keith Waldrop
• Versed by Rae Armantrout
• Or to Begin Again by Ann Lauterbach
• Speak Low by Carl Phillips
• Open Interval by Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon

Young People's Literature:

• Winner - Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice by Phillip Hoose
• Charles and Emma: The Darwins' Leap of Faith by Deborah Heiligman
• Stitches by David Small
• Lips Touch: Three Times by Laini Taylor
• Jumped by Rita Williams-Garcia

2008 National Book Award Winners- 19th November

Over 3 hours of Video footage from Shortlisted Authors for the 2008 National Book Awards on BookAwardtv. Go to On Demand Menu- National 2008 including Mark Doty Interview and The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family by Annette Gordon-Reed lecture series

2008 Winners Fiction | Non-fiction |Poetry | Young People's Literature | 2008 Finalists

2008 Winner Fiction Shadow Country by Peter Matthiessen (excerpt) Peter Matthiessen’s great American epic–Killing Mister Watson, Lost Man’s River, and Bone by Bone–was conceived as one vast mysterious novel, but because of its length it was originally broken up into three books. In this bold new rendering, Matthiessen has cut nearly a third of the overall text and collapsed the time frame while deepening the insights and motivations of his characters with brilliant rewriting throughout. In Shadow Country, he has marvelously distilled a monumental work, realizing his original vision. Inspired by a near-mythic event of the wild Florida frontier at the turn of the twentieth century, Shadow Country reimagines the legend of the inspired Everglades sugar planter and notorious outlaw E. J. Watson, who drives himself relentlessly toward his own violent end at the hands of neighbors who mostly admired him, in a killing that obsessed his favorite son. Shadow Country traverses strange landscapes and frontier hinterlands inhabited by Americans of every provenance and color, including the black and Indian inheritors of the archaic racism that, as Watson’s wife observed, "still casts its shadow over the nation." Peter Matthiessen’s lyrical and illuminating work in the Watson narrative has been praised highly by such contemporaries as Saul Bellow, William Styron, and W. S. Merwin. Joseph Heller said "I read it in great gulps, up each night later than I wanted to be, in my hungry impatience to find out more and more." Praise for Shadow Country “Shadow Country is altogether gripping, shocking, and brilliantly told, not just a tour de force in its stylistic range, but a great American novel, as powerful a reading experience as nearly any in our literature. This magnificent, sad masterpiece about race, history, and defeated dreams can easily stand comparison with Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men. Little wonder, too, that parts of the story of E.J. Watson call up comparisons with Dostoevsky, Conrad, and, inevitably, Faulkner. In every way, Shadow Country is a bravura performance, at once history, fiction, and myth–as well as the capstone to the career of one of the most admired and admirable writers of our time.” — The New York Review of Books “Magnificent and capacious…. I'll just say right here that the book took my sleeve and like the ancient mariner would not let go. Matthiessen has made his three-part saga into a new thing…. Finally now we have these books welded like a bell, and with Watson's song the last sound, all the elements fuse and resonate….a breathtaking saga.” — The Los Angeles Times “Gorgeously written and unfailingly compelling, Shadow Country is the exhilarating masterwork of [Matthiessen’s] career, every bit as ambitious as Moby Dick.” — National Geographic Adventure magazine “Peter Mattiessen consolidates his epic masterpiece of Florida -- and crafts something even better…[He] deserves credit for decades of meticulous research and obsessive details and soaring prose that converted the Watson legend into critically acclaimed literature….Anyone wanting an explanation for what happened to Florida can now find it in a single novel, a great American novel.” — Miami Herald “Matthiessen is writing about one man's life in Shadow Country, but he is also writing about the life of the nation over the course of half a century. Watson's story is essentially the story of the American frontier, of the conquering of wild lands and people, and of what such empires cost….Even among a body of work as magnificent as Matthiessen's, this is his great book.” — St. Petersburg Times “Shadow Country is a magnum opus. Matthiessen is meticulous in creating characters, lyrical in describing landscapes, and resolute in dissecting the values and costs that accompanied the development of this nation.” --Seattle Times “Shadow Country” is an ambitious, lasting, and meaningful work of literature that will not soon fade away. It is a testament to Mr. Matthiessen’s integrity as an artist that he felt compelled to return to the Watson material to produce this work and satisfy his original vision….a multifaceted work that can be read variously or simultaneously as a psychological novel, a historical novel, a morality tale, a political allegory, or a mystery. -- East Hampton Star “Matthiessen’s Watson trilogy is a touchstone of modern American literature…this reworking…is remarkable….Where Watson was a magnificent character before, he comes across as nothing short of iconic here; it’s difficult to find another figure in American literature so thoroughly and confincingly portrayed.” — Publishers Weekly, starred review, Pick of the Week “Matthiessen has reinvigorated and rejoined the trilogy’s novels…a mosaic about the life and lynch-mob death of a turn-of-the century Florida Everglades sugar planter and serial killer named E. J. Watson — into the 900-plus-page Shadow Country. This is no mere repackaging: Four hundred pages were cut from the novels, previous background characters now tromp to the foreground, and the books’ rangy, Faulknerian essence is rendered more digestible. Deliciously digestible, that is; this is a thick porterhouse of a novel.” — Men’s Journal "The fiction of Peter Matthiessen is the reason a lot of people in my generation decided to be writers. No doubt about it. SHADOW COUNTRY lives up to anyone's highest expectations for great writing." -- Richard Ford "Peter Matthiessen is a brilliantly gifted and ambitious writer, an inspired anatomist of the American mythos. His storytelling skills are prodigious and his rapport with his subject is remarkable." -- Joyce Carol Oates "Peter Matthiessen's work, both in fiction and non-fiction, has become a unique achievement in his own generation and in American literature as a whole. Everything that he has written has been conveyed in his own clear, deeply informed, elegant and powerful prose. The Watson saga-in-the-round, to which he has devoted nearly thirty years, is his crowning achievement. SHADOW COUNTRY, his distillation of the earlier trilogy, is his transmutation of it to represent his original vision. It is the quintessence of his lifelong concerns, and a great legacy." -- W.S. Merwin About the Author Peter Matthiessen has written eight novels, including At Play in the Fields of the Lord (nominated for the National Book Award) and Far Tortuga, and also a book of short stories, On the River Styx. His parallel career as a naturalist and environmental activist has produced numerous acclaimed works of nonfiction, most of them serialized in The New Yorker; these include The Tree Where Man Was Born (another National Book Award nominee) and The Snow Leopard (a National Book Award winner). He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1974.
2008 Winner Nonfiction The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family by Annette Gordon-Reed (excerpt) This is a scholar's book: serious, thick, complex. It's also fascinating, wise and of the utmost importance. Gordon-Reed, a professor of both history and law who in her previous book helped solve some of the mysteries of the intimate relationship between Thomas Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings, now brings to life the entire Hemings family and its tangled blood links with slave-holding Virginia whites over an entire century. Gordon-Reed never slips into cynicism about the author of the Declaration of Independence. Instead, she shows how his life was deeply affected by his slave kinspeople: his lover (who was the half-sister of his deceased wife) and their children. Everyone comes vividly to life, as do the places, like Paris and Philadelphia, in which Jefferson, his daughters and some of his black family lived. So, too, do the complexities and varieties of slaves' lives and the nature of the choices they had to make—when they had the luxury of making a choice. Gordon-Reed's genius for reading nearly silent records makes this an extraordinary work. 37 illus. Review The Hemingses of Monticello explores a thorny but important chapter in American history with distinction and clarity, offering a poignant, if also often ugly, chronicle of slavery, secrecy and family tension. (Ron Wynn -Bookpage 20081002) The Hemingses of Monticello makes a powerful argument for the historical significance of the Hemings family not only for its engagement with a principal architect of the early Republic, but also for the ways the family embodies the complexities and contradictions of slavery in the United States. (James Smethurst -The Boston Globe Old dominion 20080928) The Hemingses of Monticello may stir old passions by taking everything that is documented about this family's tangled, tragic history – and then pushing the tale further. Gordon-Reed's interpretation is provocative and persuasive. Not least, it's also a profound meditation on the fluid and conditional nature of something many Americans have regarded as fixed: our individual racial heritage.Were the children of Jefferson and Hemings white or black? Both? Neither? In antebellum Virginia, the answers to those questions meant freedom or bondage. In our country, will there ever come a day when those answers mean nothing? (Peter Rowe -San Diego Union-Tribune The human stain 20081005) An epic saga of the Hemings family, whose bloodline has been mixed with that of Thomas Jefferson since our third president took slave Sally Hemings as a mistress. (Dallas Morning News Fall books preview 20081002) As the title suggests, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family brings an entire family out of the historic shadows that have been cast across Jefferson’s famous Virginia home. The book succeeds on this score by showing how generations of Hemingses labored at Monticello. It offers a stunning illustration of the tragedy that slavery could wreak. (Michael A. Elliott -The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Tangled tragedy of a slave family 20080928) Because of Gordon-Reed, Hemings and her ancestors and descendants achieve full personhood. For that, the author deserves praise and lots of readers. (Steve Weinberg -Minneapolis Star-Tribune 20081003) Gordon-Reed has written not only a fair-minded and, where appropriate, critical account of Jefferson's behavior, but also an affecting account of slavery's toll. This is an important book. (Judith Chettle -Richmond Times-Dispatch A look at Jefferson and Hemings family 20080928) Not since Fawn Brodie's masterwork biography has there been a better depiction of Thomas Jefferson's life at Monticello than Gordon-Reed's story of the Hemings family. This is American history at its best. (Rick Tamble -The Tennessean 20081005) With Gordon-Reed's new book, the story of Hemings and her extended family receives a worthy biography. (Steve Weinberg -St. Louis Post-Dispatch 20080928) [...] Annette Gordon-Reed, a historian and law professor, is a doorstop corrective to early American history, painting a composite portrait of a family that stood at the wellspring of the nation's beginnings. These pages on Thomas Jefferson, slave Sally Hemings, their children and kin fascinate and surprise. (Karen R. Long -Cleveland Plain Dealer Fall foreword, or the big books of autumn 20081005) [...] In her new book Gordon-Reed has not abandoned her incisive legal approach to evidence, but here she has essentially become a historian, and a superb one. She has set out to do what she thinks professional historians should have been doing all along. With great historical imagination, she has done far more than put together a convincing case for the Jefferson-Hemings relationship. She has also reconstructed the complicated and intimate relations between black and white families in Jefferson's household over several generations. And perhaps most important, she has uncovered the many expressions of humanity by both blacks and whites existing within a fundamentally inhumane institution. (Gordon S. Wood -The New Republic American Unions 20081022)
2008 Winner Poetry Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems by Mark Doty (poem)- Mark Doty's Fire to Fire collects the best of Mark Doty's seven books of poetry, along with a generous selection of new work. Doty's subjects—our mortal situation, the evanescent beauty of the world, desire's transformative power, and art's ability to give shape to human lives—echo and develop across twenty years of poems. His signature style encompasses both the plainspoken and the artfully wrought; here one of contemporary American poetry's most lauded, recognizable voices speaks to the crises and possibilities of our times. About the Author Mark Doty's books of poetry and nonfiction prose have been honored with numerous distinctions, including the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and, in the United Kingdom, the T. S. Eliot Prize. He is a professor at the University of Houston, and he lives in New York City. Review "...showcases Doty’s abiding fondness for examining the human condition" -- Washington Post Book World "Doty displays a gift for interweaving arresting image with tender narrative." -- Slate "Doty’s facility with his chosen form...is so natural that the craft in his work is all but invisible; he makes the damnably difficult look deceptively simple." -- Booklist "If words this moving do not constitute great poetry, I’d like to know what does." -- Pittsburgh Post-Gazette "[Doty] uses language as a way to highlight a moment, elevate it, and unearth hidden depth and meaning...Striking imagery and a powerful imagination are two of his best tools..." -- Christian Science Monitor "[FIRE TO FIRE] should solidify his position as a star of contemporary American poetry…The title poem is a gorgeous meditation on the way that life’s fire infuses the world…The poems combine close attention to the fragile, contingent things of the world with the constant, almost unavoidable chance of transcendence." -- Publishers Weekly (Boxed Signature Review by Reginald Shepherd)
2008 Winner Young People’s Literature What I Saw and How I Lied by Judy Blundell- (Jude Watson) JuWinner Blundell, author of Star Wars novelizations, turns out a taut, noirish mystery/coming-of-age story set in 1947; it's easy to picture it as a film starring Lana Turner, who is mentioned in these pages. When first met, 15-year-old Evie and her best friend are buying chocolate cigarettes to practice smoking. Evie sheds that innocence on a trip to Florida, where her stepfather, Joe, back from the war in Europe, abruptly takes her and her beautiful mother, Beverly, and where Evie falls in love with glamorous Peter, an army buddy whom Joe is none too happy to see. But after a boating accident results in a suspicious death and an inquest, Evie is forced to revisit her romance with Peter and her relationships with Joe and her mother, and to consider that her assumptions about all three may have been wrong from the beginning. Blundell throws Evie's inexperience into high relief with slangy, retro dialogue: Peter calls Evie pussycat ; Beverly says her first husband kicked through love like it was dust and he kept on walking. Readers can taste Evie's alienation and her yearning; it's a stylish, addictive brew. --Publisher's Weekly About the Author JUDY BLUNDELL lives in Katonah, New York, with her husband and daughter. Under a pen name, she has written many New York Times bestselling novels.
Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters Maxine Hong Kingston Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community Barney Rosset

2008 National Book Award Finalists

15th October The finalists for this years awards have been announced in Chicago. A nice sense of winds of change with this years selections- we like it....... Winners Nov 19th.

2008 National Book Award Finalists at Amazon | 2008 Brief Book & Author Details | 2007 Winners | 2006 Winners | Past Winners 1950-2005 | 2008 Five under 35

Fiction

• Home by Marilynne Robinson (excerpt, a most anticipated book)
• The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon (excerpt)
• Telex from Cuba by Rachel Kushner (excerpt)
• Shadow Country by Peter Matthiessen (excerpt) - Winner
• The End by Salvatore Scibona (excerpt)

Nonfiction

• This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust (excerpt)
• The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family by Annette Gordon-Reed (excerpt)- Winner
• The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals by Jane Mayer (excerpt)
• Final Salute: A Story of Unfinished Lives by Jim Sheeler (excerpt)
• The Suicide Index: Putting My Father's Death in Order by Joan Wickersham (excerpt)

 

Poetry

• Watching the Spring Festival by Frank Bidart (in The Quarterly Conversation)
• Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems by Mark Doty (poem)- Winner
• Creatures of a Day by Reginald Gibbons (poem)
• Without Saying by Richard Howard (poem)
• Blood Dazzler by Patricia Smith (recordings)

 

Young People’s Literature

• Chains by Laurie Halse Anderson (excerpt)
• The Underneath by Kathi Appelt (excerpt)
• What I Saw and How I Lied by Judy Blundell- Winner
• The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks by E. Lockhart (excerpt)
• The Spectacular Now by Tim Tharp (excerpt)

 

 The 2008 “5 Under 35” are (click on the names for more information from National Book Foundation):

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Five young fiction writers have been recognized by the National Book Foundation at the “5 Under 35” celebration at Tribeca Cinemas on Monday, November 17, Three of this year's young honorees were born outside the United States. The five writers have each been selected by a previous National Book Award Finalist or Winner as someone whose work is particularly promising and exciting and is among the best of a new generation of writers. 

Matthew Eck, The Farther Shore (Milkweed Editions, 2007)
Selected by Joshua Ferris, 2007 Fiction Finalist for Then We Came to the End 

Keith Gessen, All the Sad Young Literary Men (Viking Press, 2008)
Selected by Jonathan Franzen, 2001 Fiction Winner for The Corrections

Sana Krasikov, One More Year: Stories (Spiegel & Grau, 2008)
Selected by Francine Prose, 2000 Fiction Finalist for Blue Angel

Nam Le, The Boat (Knopf, 2008)
Selected by Mary Gaitskill, 2005 Fiction Finalist for Veronica

Fiona Maazel, Last Last Chance (FSG, 2008)
Selected by Jim Shepard, 2007 Fiction Finalist for Like You’d Understand, Anyway

Brief Book Descriptions and Author Bio's 2008 National Book Awards Finalists
Fiction
ALEKSANDER HEMON, THE LAZARUS PROJECT (Riverhead)
The Lazarus Project is an epic narrative born from a historical event: the 1908 killing of Lazarus Averbuch, a 19-year-old Jewish immigrant who was shot dead by the Chicago chief of police when he showed up at the chief’s home to deliver a note.

Born in Sarajevo, Aleksander Hemon was visiting Chicago in 1992 when fighting erupted in Bosnia. Stranded in the U.S. with only a limited understanding of English, he was given political asylum and adopted Chicago as his new home. He completed his first short story within three years of learning to write in English, and since then his work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, and The Paris Review. He is the author of a collection of short stories, The Question of Bruno, and a previous novel, Nowhere Man, which was a finalist for the NBCC fiction award.

RACHEL KUSHNER, TELEX FROM CUBA (Scribner)
This first novel, set in the American community in Cuba during the years leading up to Castro’s revolution, tells the story of the Americans who were driven out in 1958.

Rachel Kushner was an editor at Grand Street and Bomb and now co-edits Soft Targets. A frequent contributor to Artforum, she has a BA from the University of California at Berkeley and an MFA from Columbia University. She lives in Los Angeles.

PETER MATTHIESSEN, SHADOW COUNTRY (Modern Library)
In Snow Country, Matthiessen consolidates his Watson trilogy into one novel to tell the legendary story of Florida sugarcane farmer and infamous murderer, Edgar J. Watson.

Peter Matthiessen was born in New York City in 1927. Among his books are At Play in the Fields of the Lord, which was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1966, and six other works of fiction, including Far Tortuga and Killing Mr. Watson. His parallel career as a naturalist and explorer has resulted in numerous works of nonfiction, including The Tree Where Man Was Born, a National Book Award Finalist in 1973, and The Snow Leopard, which won the National Book Award in 1979.

MARILYNNE ROBINSON, HOME (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
In her third novel, Home, Robinson tells the story of a wayward son coming home and trying to make peace with his past.

Marilynne Robinson is the author of the novels Gilead, which won the Pulitzer Prize and the NBCC award in ficiont, and Housekeeping, a National Book Award finalist as a paperback in 1983. She is also the author of two books of nonfiction, Mother Country, a National Book Award Finalist in 1989, and The Death of Adam. She teaches at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

SALVATORE SCIBONA, THE END (Graywolf Press)
Part novel, part epic prose poem, The End is about a single day in 1953 as lived by six people in an Ohio carnival crowd.

Salvatore Scibona’s fiction has been published in The Threepenny Review and the Pushcart Prize anthology. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he is the writing coordinator at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. The End is his first novel.

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Nonfiction
DREW GILPIN FAUST, THIS REPUBLIC OF SUFFERING: Death and the American Civil War (Alfred A. Knopf)
Historian Gilpin Faust’s sixth book is an illuminating study of the American struggle to comprehend the meaning and practicalities of death in the face of the unprecedented carnage of the Civil War.

Drew Gilpin Faust is president of Harvard University, where she also holds the Lincoln Professorship in History. Dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study from 2001 to 2007, she came to Harvard after twenty-five years on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania. Among her previous books is Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War, which won the Francis Parkman Prize and the Avery Craven Prize. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

ANNETTE GORDON-REED, THE HEMINGSES OF MONTICELLO: An American Family (W.W. Norton & Company)
This is the multigenerational story of Thomas Jefferson’s hidden slave family.

Annette Gordon-Reed is a professor of law at New York Law School and a professor of history at Rutgers University. She is the author of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy. She lives in New York City.

JANE MAYER, THE DARK SIDE: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals (Doubleday)
The Dark Side chronicles the terrible decisions made by the United States in the pursuit of terrorists around the world and relates the incalculable losses in terms of our country’s moral standing and place in the world.

Jane Mayer is the co-author of Landslide: The Unmaking of the President, 1984-1988 and Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas, which was a Finalist for the National Book Award in 1994. She is currently a Washington-based staff writer for The New Yorker, specializing in political and investigative reporting. Before that she was a senior writer and front-page editor for The Wall Street Journal, as well as the Journal’s first female White House correspondent. She lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland.

JIM SHEELER, FINAL SALUTE: A Story of Unfinished Lives (Penguin)
Based on his Pulitzer-prize winning story, Final Salute takes us into the mind of a casualty notification officer and offers an unprecedented look at the way our country honors its dead.

Jim Sheeler is a scholar in residence at the University of Colorado and a freelance reporter. He won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing while reporting for the Rocky Mountain News. He is the author of one previous book, Obit. He has a BA in journalism from Colorado State University and an MA in journalism from the University of Colorado.

JOAN WICKERSHAM, THE SUICIDE INDEX: Putting My Father’s Death in Order (Harcourt)
Sixteen years ago, Wickersham’s father shot himself in the head. This book is her philosophical and deeply personal exploration of this chaotic and incomprehensible fact – and a loving elegy to her father.

Joan Wickersham is the author of a novel, The Paper Anniversary. Her work has appeared in the Best American Short Stories series. An excerpt from The Suicide Index earned her the 2007 Ploughshares Cohen Award for Best Short Story. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Poetry
FRANK BIDART, WATCHING THE SPRING FESTIVAL (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Best known for his long, book-length poems, Bidart here writes in the short lyric form for the first time. The poems are preoccupied with the imminence of death and feature such subjects as Marilyn Monroe, the Russian ballerina Ulanova, and the 8th century Chinese Imperial Court as described by the poet Du Fu.

Frank Bidart’s most recent collections of poetry are Star Dust (2005), Music Like Dirt (2002), a Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and Desire (1997), which was a Finalist for the National Book Award. Bidart came to national attention in the 1970s with his collections, Golden State (1973) and The Book of the Body (1977). In 2007, he received Yale University’s Bollingen Prize for lifetime achievement in poetry. He is a professor at Wellesley College.

MARK DOTY, FIRE TO FIRE (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Fire to Fire collects the best of Doty’s seven books of poetry, along with a generous selection of new work.

Mark Doty is the author of seven previous books of poems, including School of the Arts, Source, and My Alexandria, which was a Finalist for the National Book Award in 1993. He has also published four volumes of nonfiction prose. He lives in New York City and Houston, Texas, where he is a professor in the graduate program at the University of Houston.

REGINALD GIBBONS, CREATURES OF A DAY (Louisiana State University Press)
This new collection includes five odes woven from interactions with others, thirteen shorter poems, and “Fern-Texts,” a biographical and autobiographical essay in syllabic verse on the parallel decades of the English 1790s and the American 1960s.

Reginald Gibbons is the author of seven previous volumes of poetry, translations of Spanish and Mexican poetry and ancient Greek tragedy, a short story collection, and a novel. He served as editor of TriQuarterly from 1981 to 1997. A native of Texas, he now lives in Evanston, Illinois, where he is professor of English and classics at Northwestern University.

RICHARD HOWARD, WITHOUT SAYING (Turtle Point Press)
In this collection, Howard returns to the kinds of poems for which he is best known – elaborate dramatic monologues, impersonations and dialogues that are intricately alert to literary history and sexual desire.

Richard Howard has been nominated for a National Book Award seven times and won the award in 1983 for his translation, Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal. He was nominated in the poetry category in 1975 for Two-Part Inventions and again in 1994 for Like Most Revelations. Other volumes of poetry include Trappings (1999), No Traveller (1989), and Untitled Subjects (1969), for which he received the Pulitzer Prize. He has published more than 150 translations from the French. He is a former Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets and lives in New York City, where he teaches in the Writing Division of the School of the Arts, Columbia University.

PATRICIA SMITH, BLOOD DAZZLER (Coffee House Press)
These poems chronicle the physical, emotional and psychological toll exacted by Hurricane Katrina.

A record-setting poetry slam champion, Patricia Smith has performed at the Sorbonne, in Carnegie Hall, on tour with Lollapalooza, in the film “Slamnation,” and on HBO’s “Def Poetry Jam.” Her other books are: Teahouse of the Almighty, Close to Death, Big Towns, Big Talk, and Life According to Motown. She is also the author of a children’s book, Janna and the Kings, and the history book, Africans in America.

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Young People’s Literature

LAURIE HALSE ANDERSON, CHAINS (Simon & Schuster)
In Chains, a thirteen-year-old slave girl during the American Revolution goes to extraordinary lengths to win her freedom.

Laurie Halse Anderson was a Finalist for the National Book Award in 1999 for her first novel, Speak. More recent novels for young people include Fever 1793 and Twisted. She writes chapter books for elementary age children and picture books for the pre-school set. She lives in central New York.

KATHI APPELT, THE UNDERNEATH (Atheneum)
A kitten’s curiosity sets off an astonishing chain of events.

Kathi Appelt is the author of numerous books for children and young adults, but The Underneath is her first novel. She is on the faculty at Vermont College of Fine Arts in their MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults program. She lives in Texas.

JUDY BLUNDELL, WHAT I SAW AND HOW I LIED (Scholastic)
A teenage girl becomes involved in a complicated and deceptive relationship with an ex-GI solider who served in her father’s company during World War II.

Judy Blundell lives in Katonah, New York. Under her pen name, Jude Watson, she has written several bestselling books in the Star Wars and Ghostwriter series as well as two teen psychological thrillers, Premonitions and Disappearance.

E. LOCKHART, THE DISREPUTABLE HISTORY OF FRANKIE LANDAU-BANKS (Hyperion)
Frankie Landau-Banks is a high school sophomore who falls in love with one of the cool seniors, but does not lose her sense of self.

E. (Emily) Lockhart is the author of numerous books, including The Boyfriend List, Fly on the Wall, Dramarama, How to Be Bad, and The Boy Book. She graduated from Vassar and received her doctorate in English from Columbia. She lives in New York City.

TIM THARP, THE SPECTACULAR NOW (Alfred A. Knopf)
Party guy Sutter Keely’s life changed forever when he meets Aimee and finds he has the power to make a difference in someone else’s life – or ruin it forever.

Tim Tharp is also the author of the YA novel Knights of the Hill Country, an ALA-YALSA Best Book for Young Adults. He lives in Midwest City, Oklahoma and teaches at Rose State College.

2007 National Book Award Winners

Vietnam, CIA, A Part-Time Indian and Former Poet Laureate Get the Glory as 2007 National Book Awards Decided

Tree of Smoke, a wide ranging novel by Denis Johnson (right) about the Vietnam War that features intersecting stories of an array of American and Vietnamese soldiers and intelligence officers, has won the 2007 National Book Award for fiction.

Mr. Johnson, was a hot favorite to take the prize was onassignment in Iraq. His wife, Cindy Lee Johnson, accepted the award. She read from a speech Mr. Johnson had prepared, in which he said he was “very sorry to miss this one chance to dress up in a tuxedo in front of so many representatives of the world of literature and say thank you.”

Reviews Tree of Smoke: New York Times by Micciko Kakutani- Washington Post by David Ignatius- Boston Globe by Gail Caldwell

In the nonfiction category, Tim Weiner, a reporter at The New York Times, took the prize for Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (Doubleday). Mr. Weiner, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on national security programs, examined more than 50,000 documents and interviewed hundreds of C.I.A. veterans for his book, a critical history of C.I.A. failures.

Accepting the award, Mr. Weiner (left) said his work was “a testament to the power of the record revealed and maybe to the fact that our democracy, in spite of everything, is still open enough to see a glimpse of what we have wrought abroad.

In presenting the nonfiction prize, David Shields, the chairman of the judges’ panel, hinted at a battle among the judges in selecting the winner. “We quarreled, we tussled, we cajoled, we tossed verbal brick-bats, we walked out, we walked back in,” Mr. Shields said.

Reviews Legacy of Ashes: Washington Post by David Wise- New York Times by Evan Thomas- Boston Globe by Ann Blackman

Seattle based Sherman Alexie (right) won the Young People's Literature Award for The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian(Little, Brown & Company), an autobiographical story of a 14-year-old Spokane Indian who leaves his poverty-stricken reservation school and moves to a wealthy, all-white school. The win by Alexi marks the second year in a row that a Seattle writer was named as a finalist for the National Book Award. Timothy Egan was a finalist last year and ultimately won the non-fiction prize with his masterful Dust Bowl saga, The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl.

Based on the author's own experiences, Alexie's book chronicles the adolescence of one contemporary Native American boy as he attempts to break away from the life he seems destined to live.

"It's such a validation," Alexie said of the win. "The book is about a kid who finds his way off the Rez and into a better life and now standing up before these literary giants it's wonderful to realize that an Indian kid got here."

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Review: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian- New York Times by Bruce Barcott

Former Poet Laureate, Robert Haas (left), won the Poetry Award for his book of poems Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005 published by Ecco/HarperCollins. These poems are grounded in the beauty and energy of the physical world, and in the bafflement of the present moment in American culture. From 1995 to 1997, Hass was poet laureate of the United States, a tenure he distinguished with a weekly column, Poet's Choice, for the Washington Post's book section in which he spotlighted the work of other poets. He organized Watershed, a series of conferences that brought together novelists, poets and storytellers to talk about writing, nature and community.

He's a MacArthur Fellow, a two-time National Book Critics Circle Award winner and a UC Berkeley faculty member since 1989. Like most poets, he's little-known outside his field. Among his peers, he's regarded as one of the best.

"I think of him as that quintessential American poet, one of the great inheritors of Wordsworth and the meditative poets," says Karr.

Review: Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005 - New York Times by Stephen Burt

The National Book Foundation also awarded its Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters to Joan Didion. Ms. Didion, the essayist and novelist, won the National Book Award for nonfiction in 2005 for “The Year of Magical Thinking.”

In presenting the award, the novelist Michael Cunningham said: “I cannot think of another contemporary writer who has so thoroughly shown us to ourselves.”

Ms. Didion, who received a standing ovation, also paid tribute to Mr. Mailer, who won the same award in 2005 and died last week. “There was someone who really, truly knew what writing was for,” she said.

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Winners may not Necessarily Sell

The influence of a National Book Award at bookstores can be mixed. Last year’s fiction winner, The Echo Maker: A Novel by Richard Powers, sold 52,000 copies in hardcover and 31,000 copies in paperback, according to Nielsen BookScan, which measures about 70 percent of retail sales. But the previous year’s fiction winner, Europe Central by William T. Vollmann, sold only 6,000 copies in hardcover and 26,000 copies in paperback.

2007 FICTION

Mischa Berlinski, Fieldwork: A Novel (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Lydia Davis, Varieties of Disturbance: Stories (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End: A Novel(Little, Brown & Company)
Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke: A Novel (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) Winner
Jim Shepard,Like You'd Understand, Anyway: Stories (Alfred A. Knopf)

Fiction judges: Francine Prose (chair), Andrew Sean Greer,
Walter Kirn, David Means, and Joy Williams.

2007 NONFICTION

Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I'm Dying (Alfred A. Knopf)
Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
(Twelve/Hachette Book Group USA)
Woody Holton, Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution
(Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Arnold Rampersad, Ralph Ellison: A Biography (Alfred A. Knopf)
Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (Doubleday) Winner

Nonfiction judges: David Shields (chair), Deborah Blum,
Caroline Elkins, Annette Gordon-Reed, and James Shapiro.

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2007 POETRY

Linda Gregerson, Magnetic North (Houghton Mifflin Company)
Robert Hass, Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005 (Ecco/HarperCollins) Winner
David Kirby, The House on Boulevard St.: New and Selected Poems (Southern Messenger Poets)(Louisiana State University Press)
Stanley Plumly, Old Heart: Poems(W.W. Norton & Company)
Ellen Bryant Voigt, Messenger: New and Selected Poems 1976-2006
(W.W. Norton & Company)

Poetry Judges: Charles Simic (chair), Linda Bierds, David St. John,
Vijay Seshadri, and Natasha

2007 YOUNG PEOPLE'S LITERATURE

Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian Winner
(Little, Brown & Company)
Kathleen Duey, Skin Hunger (A Resurrection of Magic)
(Atheneum Books for Young Readers)
M. Sindy Felin, Touching Snow (Atheneum Books for Young Readers)
Brian Selznick, The Invention of Hugo Cabret (Scholastic Press)
Sara Zarr, Story of a Girl(Little, Brown & Company)

Young People’s Literature Judges: Elizabeth Partridge (chair),
Pete Hautman, James Howe, Patricia McCormick, and Scott Westerfeld.

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And the Finalists in the NBA"5 Under 35 for 2007" ........

Kirstin Allio, Garner
(Coffee House Press, 2005) Review by David Abrams
Selected by Dana Spiotta, 2006 NBA Fiction Finalist for Eat the Document

Dinaw Mengestu, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears
(Riverhead Books, 2007)
Selected by Jess Walter, 2006 NBA Fiction Finalist for The Zero

Asali Solomon, Get Down: Stories
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006)
Selected by Jennifer Egan, 2001 NBA Fiction Finalist for Look at Me

Anya Ulinich, Petropolis
(Viking Press, 2007) Selected by Ken Kalfus, 2006 NBA Fiction Finalist for A Disorder Peculiar to the Country

Charles Yu, Third Class Superhero
(Harcourt, 2006)
Selected by Richard Powers, 2006 NBA Fiction Winner for The Echo Maker 

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2006 National Book Award Winners

Fiction: The Echo Maker: A Novelby Richard Powers (FSG)

Nonfiction: The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowlby Timothy Egan (Houghton Mifflin) -- A January Book Sense Pick

Poetry: Splay Anthem (New Directions Paperbook) by Nathaniel Mackey (New Directions)

Young People's Literature: The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation: Volume One: The Pox Party (Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation)by M.T Anderson

Reviews of The Echo Maker

Washington Post review by Sebastian Faulks

San Francisco Chronicle review by William Kowinski

Seattle Times review by Steve Weinbe

 

 

National Book Award Winners (1950-2005)

2005
Fiction: Europe Central by William T. Vollmann (Viking)
Nonfiction: The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion (Knopf) -- An October 2005 Book Sense Notable
Poetry: Migration by W.S. Merwin (Copper Canyon Press)
The Penderwicks by Jeanne Birdsall (Knopf Books for Young Readers) -- A Summer 2005 Top Ten Book Sense Children's Pick

2004
Fiction: Lily Tuck, The News from Paraguay: A Novel (HarperCollins)
Nonfiction: Kevin Boyle, Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age (Holt)
Poetry: Jean Valentine, Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems, 1965-2003 (Wesleyan Poetry) (Wesleyan Univ. Press)
Young People's Literature: Pete Hautman, Godless (S&S Books for Young Readers)

2003
Fiction: Shirley Hazzard, The Great Fire: A Novel (FSG)
Nonfiction: Carlos Eire, Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy (Free Press/S&S) -- a March/April 2003 Book Sense 76 Pick
Poetry: C.K. Williams, The Singing: Poems (FSG)
Young People's Literature: Polly Horvath, The Canning Season (FSG)

2002
Fiction: Julia Glass, Three Junes (Pantheon Books) -- a Book Sense 76 pick
Nonfiction: Robert A. Caro, Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (Alfred A. Knopf)
Poetry: Ruth Stone, In the Next Galaxy (Copper Canyon Press)
Young People's Literature: Nancy Farmer, The House of the Scorpion (A Richard Jackson Book/Atheneum Books for Young Readers) -- a Winter 2002-2003 Children's Book Sense 76 Top Ten Pick

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2001
Fiction: Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections
Nonfiction: Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression
Poetry: Alan Dugan, Poems Seven: New and Complete Poetry
Young People's Literature: Virginia Euwer Wolff, True Believer

2000
Fiction: In America, Susan Sontag
Nonfiction: In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, Nathaniel Philbrick
Poetry: Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988-2000, Lucille Clifton
Young People's Literature: Homeless Bird,Gloria Whelan

1999
Fiction: Waiting, Ha Jin
Nonfiction: Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, John W. Dower
Poetry: Vice: New and Selected Poems, Ai
Young People's Literature: When Zachary Beaver Came to Town, Kimberly Willis Holt

Biography/Autobiography: Robert Kennedy and His Times, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
Children's Book: The Great Gilly Hopkins, Katherine Paterson
Contemporary Thought: The Snow Leopard, Peter Matthiessen
Fiction: Going After Cacciato, Tim O'Brian
History: Intellectual Life in the Colonial South, 1585-1760, Richard Beale Davis
Poetry: Mirabell: Books of Number, James Merrill
Translation: Cesar Vallejo's The Complete Posthumous Poetry, Clayton Eshleman and Jose Rubin Barcia

1998
Fiction: Charming Billy, Alice McDermott
Nonfiction: Slaves in the Family, Edward Ball
Poetry: This Time: New and Selected Poems, Gerald Stern
Young People's Literature: Holes, Louis Sachar

1997
Fiction: Cold Mountain, Charles Frazier
Nonfiction: American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson, Joseph J. Ellis
Poetry: Effort at Speech: New & Selected Poems, William Meredith
Young People's Literature: Dancing on the Edge, Han Nolan

1996
Fiction: Ship Fever and Other Stories, Andrea Barrett
Nonfiction: An American Requiem: God, My Father, and the War That Came Between Us, James Carroll
Poetry: Scrambled Eggs & Whiskey, Hayden Carruth
Young People's Literature: Parrot in the Oven: Mi Vida, Victor Martinez

1995
Fiction: Sabbath's Theater, Philip Roth
Nonfiction: The Haunted Land: Facing Europe's Ghosts After Communism, Tina Rosenberg
Poetry: Passing Through: The Later Poems, Stanley Kunitz

1994
Fiction: A Frolic of His Own, William Gaddis
Nonfiction: How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter, Sherwin B. Nuland
Poetry: A Worshipful Company of Fletchers, James Tate

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1993
Fiction: The Shipping News, E. Annie Proulx
Nonfiction: United States: Essays 1952-1992, Gore Vidal
Poetry: Garbage, A. R. Ammons

1992
Fiction: All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy
Nonfiction: Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story, Paul Monette
Poetry: New & Selected Poems, Mary Oliver

1991
Fiction: Mating, Norman Rush
Nonfiction: Freedom, Orlando Patterson
Poetry: What Work Is, Philip Levine

1990
Fiction: Middle Passage, Charles Johnson
Nonfiction: The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance, Ron Chernow

1989
Fiction: Spartina, John Casey
Nonfiction: From Beirut to Jerusalem, Thomas L. Friedman

1988
Fiction: Paris Trout, Pete Dexter
Nonfiction: A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam, Neil Sheehan

1987
Fiction: Paco's Story, Larry Heinemann
Nonfiction: The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Richard Rhodes

1986
Fiction: World's Fair, E.L. Doctorow
Nonfiction: Arctic Dreams, Barry Lopez

1985
Fiction: White Noise, Don DeLillo
First Work of Fiction: Easy in the Islands, Bob Shacochis
Nonfiction: Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families, J. Anthony Lukas

1984
Fiction: Victory Over Japan: A Book of Stories, Ellen Gilchrist
First Work of Fiction: Stones for Ibarra, Harriet Doerr
Nonfiction: Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Democracy, 1833-1845, Robert V. Remini

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1983
Autobiography/Biography (hardcover): Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller, Judith Thurman
Autobiography/Biography (paperback): Nathaniel Hawthorne in His Time, James R. Mellow
Children's Book, Fiction (hardcover): Homesick: My Own Story, Jean Fritz
Children's Book, Fiction (paperback): A Place Apart, Paula Fox; Marked By Fire, Joyce Carol Thomas
Children's Book, Nonfiction: Chimney Sweeps, James Cross Giblin
Children's Picture Book (hardcover): Miss Rumphius, Barbara Cooney; Doctor De Soto, William Steig
Children's Picture Book (paperback): A House Is a House for Me, Mary Ann Hoberman
Fiction (hardcover): The Color Purple, Alice Walker
Fiction (paperback): The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty, Eudora Welty
First Novel: The Women of Brewster Place, Gloria Naylor
General Nonfiction (hardcover): China: Alive in the Bitter Sea, Fox Butterfield
General Nonfiction (paperback): National Defense, James Fallows
History (hardcover): Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin and The Great Depression, Alan Brinkley
History (paperback): Utopian Thought in the Western World, Frank E. Manuel and Fritzie P. Manuel
Original Paperback: The Red Magician, Lisa Goldstein
Poetry: Selected Poems, Galway Kinnell; Country Music: Selected Early Poems, Charles Wright
Science (hardcover): "Subtle Is the Lord...": The Science and Life of Albert Einstein, Abraham Pais
Science (paperback): The Mathematical Experience, Philip P. Davis and Reuben Hersh
Translation: Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal, Richard Howard

1982
Autobiography/biography (hardcover): Mornings on Horseback, David McCullough
Autobiography/biography (paperback): Walter Lippmann and the American Century, Ronald Steel
Children's Book, Fiction (hardcover): Westmark, Lloyd Alexander
Children's Book, Fiction (paperback): Words by Heart, Ouida Sebestyen
Children's Book, Nonfiction: A Penguin Year, Susan Bonners
Children's Book, Picture Book (hardcover): Outside Over There, Maurice Sendak
Children's Book, Picture Book (paperback): Noah's Ark, Peter Spier
Fiction (hardcover): Rabbit Is Rich, John Updike
Fiction (paperback): So Long, See You Tomorrow, William Maxwell
First Novel: Dale Loves Sophie to Death, Robb Forman Dew
General Nonfiction (hardcover): The Soul of a New Machine, Tracy Kidder
General Nonfiction (paperback): Naming Names, Victor S. Navasky
History (hardcover): People of the Sacred Mountain: A History of the Northern Cheyenne Chiefs and Warrior Societies, 1830-1879, Father Peter John Powell
History (paperback): The Generation of 1914, Robert Wohl
Poetry: Life Supports: New and Collected Poems, William Bronk
Science (hardcover): Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind, Donald C. Johanson and Maitland A. Edey
Science (paperback): Taking the Quantum Leap: The New Physics for Nonscientists, Fred Alan Wolf
Translation: Higuchi Ichiyo's In the Shade of Spring Leaves, Robert Lyons Danly; The Ten Thousand Leaves: A Translation of the Man'Yoshu, Japan's Premier Anthology of Classical Poetry, Ian Hideo Levy

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1981
Autobiography/biography (hardcover): Walt Whitman, Justin Kaplan
Autobiography/biography (paperback): Samuel Beckett, Deidre Bair
Children's Book, Fiction (hardcover): The Night Swimmers, Betsy Byars
Children's Book, Fiction (paperback): Ramona and Her Mother, Beverly Cleary
Children's Book, Nonfiction (hardcover): Oh, Boy! Babies, Alison Cragin Herzig and Jane Lawrence Mali
Fiction (hardcover): Plains Song, Wright Morris
Fiction (paperback): The Stories of John Cheever, John Cheever
First Novel: Sister Wolf, Ann Arensberg
General Nonfiction (hardcover): China Men, Maxine Hong Kingston
General Nonfiction (paperback): The Last Cowboy, Jane Kramer
History (hardcover): Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality, John Boswell
History (paperback): Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery, Leon F. Litwak
Poetry: The Need to Hold Still, Lisel Mueller
Science (hardcover): The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections on Natural History, Stephen Jay Gould
Science (paperback): The Medusa and the Snail, Lewis Thomas
Translation: The Letters of Gustave Flaubert, Francis Steegmuller; Arno Schmidt's Evening Edged in Gold, John E. Woods

1980
Autobiography (hardcover): By Myself, Lauren Bacall
Autobiography (paperback): And I Worked at the Writer's Trade, Malcolm Cowley
Biography (hardcover): The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, Edmund Morris
Biography (paperback): Max Perkins:Editor of Genius, A. Scott Berg
Children's Book (hardcover): A Gathering of Days: A New England Girl's Journal, Joan W. Blos
Children's Book (paperback): A Swiftly Tilting Planet, Madeleine L'Engle
Current Interest (hardcover): Julia Child and More Company, Julia Child
Current Interest (paperback): The Culture of Narcissism, Christopher Lasch
Fiction (hardcover): Sophie's Choice, William Styron
Fiction (paperback): The World According to Garp, John Irving
First Novel: Birdy, William Wharton
General Nonfiction (hardcover): The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe
General Nonfiction (paperback): The Snow Leopard, Peter Matthiessen
General Reference (hardcover): The Complete Directory, Elder Witt, ed.
General Reference (paperback): Complete Directory to Prime Network TV Shows: 1946-Present, Tim Brooks and Earle Marsh
History (hardcover): White House Years, Henry A. Kissinger
History (paperback): A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, Barbara W. Tuchman
Mystery (hardcover): The Green Ripper, John D. MacDonald
Mystery (paperback): Stained Glass, William F. Buckley, Jr.
Poetry: Ashes, Philip Levine
Religion/Inspiration (hardcover): The Gnostic Gospels, Elaine Pagels
Religion/Inspiration (paperback): A Severe Mercy, Sheldon Vanauken
Science (hardcover): Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, Douglas Hofstadter
Science (paperback): The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics, Gary Zukav
Science Fiction (hardcover): Jem, Frederick Pohl
Science Fiction (paperback): The Book of the Dun Cow, Walter Wangerin, Jr.
Translation: Cesare Pavese's Hard Labor, William Arrowsmith; Osip E. Mandelstam's Complete Critical Prose and Letters, Jane Gary Harris and Constance Link
Western: Bendigo Shafter, Louis L'Amour

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1978
Biography/Autobiography: Samuel Johnson, W. Jackson Bate
Children's Literature: The View from the Oak, Herbert Kohl and Judith Kohl
Contemporary Thought: Winners and Losers, Gloria Emerson
Fiction: Blood Ties, Mary Lee Settle
History: The Path Between the Seas: Creation of the Panama Canal 1870-1914, David McCullough
Poetry: The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov, Howard Nemerov
Translation: Uwe George's In the Deserts of This Earth, Clara Winston and Richard Winston

1977
Biography/Autobiography: Norman Thomas: The Last Idealist, W.A. Swanberg
Children's Book: The Master Puppeteer, Katherine Paterson
Contemporary Thought: The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, Bruno Bettleheim
Fiction: The Spectator Bird, Wallace Stegner
History: World of Our Fathers, Irving Howe
Poetry: Collected Poems, 1930-1976, Richard Eberhart
Translation: Master Tung's Western Chamber Romance, Li-Li Ch'en

1976
Arts and Letters: The Great War and Memory, Paul Fussell
Children's Literature: Bert Breen's Barn, Walter D. Edmonds
Contemporary Affairs: Passage to Ararat, Michael J. Arlen
Fiction: Jr, William Gaddis
History: The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823, David Brion Davis
Poetry: Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, John Ashbery

1975
Arts and Letters: Marcel Proust, Roger Shattuck; The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher, Lewis Thomas
Biography: The Life of Emily Dickinson, Richard B. Sewall
Children's Book: M.C. Higgins The Great, Virginia Hamilton
Contemporary Affairs: All Gods Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw, Theodore Rosengarten
Fiction: Dog Soldiers, Robert Stone; The Hair of Harold Roux, Thomas Williams
History: The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson, Bernard Bailyn
Philosophy and Religion: Anarchy, State and Utopia, Robert Nozick
Poetry: Presentation Piece, Marilyn Hacker
Science: Interpretation of Schizophrenia, Silvano Arieti
Translation: Miguel D. Unamuno's The Agony of Christianity and Essays on Faith, Anthony Kerrigan

1974
Arts and Letters: Deeper into the Movies, Pauline Kael
Biography: Malcolm Lowry: A Biography, Douglas Day; Macaulay: The Shaping of the Historian, John Clive
Children's Book: The Court of the Stone Children, Eleanor Cameron
Contemporary Affairs: The Briar Patch, Murray Kempton
Fiction: A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories, Isaac Bashevis Singer;Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
History: Macaulay: The Shaping of the Historian, John Clive
Philosophy and Religion: Edmund Husserl: Philosopher of Infinite Tasks, Maurice Natanson
Poetry: Diving into the Wreck: Poems, 1971-72, Adrienne Rich;The Fall of America: Poems of These States, Allen Ginsberg
Science: Life: The Unfinished Experiment, S.E. Lurie
Translation: Octavio Paz's: Alternating Current, Helen R. Lane; Paul Valery's Monsieur Teste, Jackson Matthews

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1973
Arts and Letters: Diderot, Arthur M. Wilson
Biography: George Washington, Vol. IV: Anguish and Farewell, 1793-1799, James Thomas Flexner
Children's Book: The Farthest Shore, Ursula K. LeGuin
Contemporary Affairs: Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam, Frances Fitzgerald
Fiction: Chimera, John Barth; Augustus, John Williams
History: The Children of Pride: A True Story of Georgia and the Civil War, Robert Manson Myers; Judenrat: The Jewish Councils in Eastern Europe under Nazi Occupation, Isaiah Trunk
Philosophy and Religion: A Religious History of the American People, S.E. Ahlstrom
Poetry: Collected Poems: 1951-1971, A.R. Ammons
Science: The Serengeti Lion: A Study of Predator-Prey Relations, George B. Schaller
Translation: Virgil's Aeneid, Allen Mandelbaum

1972
Arts and Letters: The Classical Style: Hayden, Mozart, Beethoven, Charles Rosen
Biography: Eleanor and Franklin:The Story of Their Relationship, Based on Eleanor Roosevelt's Private Papers, Joseph P. Lash
Children's Book: The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine or the Hithering Thithering Djinn, Donald Bartheleme
Contemporary Affairs: The Last Whole Earth Catalog, Stewart Brand, ed.
Fiction: The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor, Flannery O'Connor
History: Ordeal of the Union, Vols. VII & VIII: The Organized War, 1863-1864 and The Organized War to Victory, Allen Nevins
Philosophy and Religion: Righteous Empire: The Protestant Experience in America, Martin E. Marty
Poetry: The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara, Frank O'Hara; Selected Poems, Howard Moss
Science: The Blue Whale, George L. Small
Translation: Jacques Monod's Chance and Necessity, Austryn Wainhouse

1971
Arts and Letters: Cocteau: A Biography, Francis Steegmuller
Children's Book: The Marvelous Misadventures of Sebastian, Lloyd Alexander
Fiction: Mr. Sammler's Planet, Saul Bellow
History and Biography: Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom, James MacGregor Burns
Poetry: To See, To Take, Mona Van Duyn
Science: Science in the British Colonies of America, Raymond Phineas Stearns
Translation: Bertolt Brecht's Saint Joan of the Stockyards, Frank Jones; Yasunari Kawabata's The Sound of The Mountain, Edward G. Seidensticker

1970
Arts and Letters: An Unfinished Woman, A Memoir, Lillian Hellman
Children's Book: A Day of Pleasure: Stories of a Boy Growing Up in Warsaw, Isaac Bashevis Singer
Fiction: Them, Joyce Carol Oates
History and Biography: Huey Long, T. Harry Williams
Philosophy and Religion: Gandhi's Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence, Erik H. Erikson
Poetry: The Complete Poems, Elizabeth Bishop
Translation: Celine's Castle to Castle, Ralph Manheim

1969
Arts and Letters: The Armies of the Night: History As A Novel, The Novel As History, Norman Mailer
Children's Literature: Journey from Peppermint Street, Meindert DeJong
Fiction: Steps, Jerzy Kosinski
History and Biography: White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812, Winthrop D. Jordan
Poetry: His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, John Berryman
Science: Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima, Robert J. Lifton
Translation: Calvino's Cosmicomics, William Weaver

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1968
Arts and Letters: Selected Essays, William Troy
Fiction: The Eighth Day, Thornton Wilder
History and Biography: Memoirs: 1925-1950, George F. Kennan
Poetry: The Light Around the Body, Robert Bly
Science, Philosophy, and Religion: Death at an Early Age, Jonathan Kozol
Translation: Soren Kirkegaard's Journals and Papers, Edna Hong and Howard Hong

1967
Arts and Letters: Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain, Justin Kaplan
Fiction: The Fixer, Bernard Malamud
History and Biography: The Enlightenment, Vol. 1: An Interpretation, Peter Gay
Poetry: Nights and Days, James Merrill
Science, Philosophy, and Religion: La Vida, Oscar Lewis
Translation: Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch, Gregory Rabassa;Casanova's History of My Life, Willard Trask

1966
Arts and Letters: Paris Journal, 1944-1965, Janet Flanner
Fiction: The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter, Katherine Anne Porter
History and Biography: A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
Poetry: Buckdancer's Choice: Poems, James Dickey

1965
Arts and Letters: Oysters of Lockmariaquer, Eleanor Clark
Fiction: Herzog, Saul Bellow
History and Biography: The Life of Lenin, Louis Fisher
Poetry: The Far Field, Theodore Roethke
Science, Philosophy, and Religion: God and Golem, Inc.: A Comment on Certain Points Where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion, Norbert Wiener

1964
Arts and Letters: John Keats: The Making of a Poet, Aileen Ward
Fiction: The Centaur, John Updike
History and Biography: The Rise of the West, William H. McNeill
Poetry: Selected Poems, John Crowe Ransom
Science, Philosophy, and Religion: Man-Made America, Christopher Tunnard and Boris Pushkarev

1963
Fiction: Morte d'Urban, J.F. Powers
Nonfiction: Henry James: Vol. II, The Conquest of London; Vol. III, The Middle Years, Leon Edel
Poetry: Traveling Through the Dark, William Stafford

1962
Fiction: The Moviegoer, Walker Percy
Nonfiction: The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects, Lewis Mumford
Poetry: Poems, Alan Dugan

1961
Fiction: The Waters of Kronos, Conrad Richter
Nonfiction: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, William L. Shirer
Poetry: The Woman at the Washington Zoo, Randall Jarrell

1960
Fiction: Goodbye Columbus, Philip Roth
Nonfiction: James Joyce, Richard Ellman
Poetry: Life Studies, Robert Lowell

1959
Fiction: The Magic Barrel, Bernard Malamud
Nonfiction: Mistress to an Age: A Life of Madame De Stael, J. Christopher Herold
Poetry: Words for the Wind, Theodore Roethke

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1958
Fiction: The Wapshot Chronicle, John Cheever
Nonfiction: The Lion and the Throne, Catherine Drinker Bowen
Poetry: Promises: Poems, 1954-1956, Robert Penn Warren

1957
Fiction: The Field of Vision, Wright Morris
Nonfiction: Russia Leaves the War, George F. Kennan
Poetry: Things of the World, Richard Wilbur

1956
Fiction: Ten North Frederick, John O'Hara
Nonfiction: An American in Italy, Herbert Kubly
Poetry: The Shield of Achilles, W.H. Auden

1955
Fiction: A Fable, William Faulkner
Nonfiction: The Measure of Man, Joseph W. Krutch
Poetry: The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, Wallace Stevens

1954
Fiction: The Adventures of Augie March, Saul Bellow
Nonfiction: A Stillness at Appomattox, Bruce Catton
Poetry: Collected Poems, Conrad Aiken

1953
Fiction: Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
Nonfiction: The Course of an Empire, Bernard A. De Voto
Poetry: Collected Poems, 1917-1952, Archibald MacLeish

1952
Fiction: From Here to Eternity, James Jones
Nonfiction: The Sea Around Us, Rachel Carson
Poetry: Collected Poems, Marianne Moore

1951
Fiction: The Collected Stories of William Faulkner, William Faulkner
Nonfiction: Herman Melville, Newton Arvin
Poetry: The Auroras of Autumn, Wallace Stevens

1950
Fiction: The Man with the Golden Arm, Nelson Algren
Nonfiction: Ralph Waldo, Ralph L. Rusk
Poetry: Paterson: Book III and Selected Poems, William Carlos Williams

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