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Wednesday, Oct 10, 2012 5:20 PM UTC

Junot Díaz, Dave Eggers among National Book Award finalists

This year's National Book Award finalist list includes many big-name authors VIDEO

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Topics: robert a. caro, national book foundation, National Book Award, Junot Diaz, Morning Joe, literature, Anthony Shadid, Dave Eggers, Nonfiction, Fiction, Books, national book award finalists, , ,

Junot Díaz, Dave Eggers among National Book Award finalists (Credit: Skoda)

It’s been a great year for Junot Díaz: The Pulitzer Prize-winning author recently won a coveted MacArthur genius grant, and his latest book, “This Is How You Lose Her,” is a bestseller. Now “Lose Her” has  landed him on the finalist list for the National Book Award. Díaz is joined by veteran writer and McSweeney’s founder Dave Eggers (“A Hologram for the King“), Pulitzer Prize finalist Louise Erdrich (“The Round House“), Ben Fountain (“Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk“) and newcomer Kevin Powers (“The Yellow Birds”).

Nonfiction finalists include New Yorker staff writer Katherine Boo’s journey in an Indian slum (“Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity”), tireless biographer and journalist Robert A. Caro, for his fourth book on Lyndon B. Johnson (“The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson”) and a posthumous nomination for New York Times foreign correspondent Anthony Shadid (“House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family and a Lost Middle East”), who died earlier this year while on assignment in Syria.

David Steinberger, chairman of the National Book Foundation’s Board of Directors, made the announcement on this morning’s “Morning Joe.” Steinberger emphasized that the award is given to the “best American books” written each year, limited to 20 finalists from “tens of thousands” of books. This year’s list, however, features more well-known authors than previous years: According to the New York Times, the National Book Foundation seems to have responded to criticism “that its nominations went to obscure works that sold few copies.”

The National Book Foundation also named finalists in poetry and young people’s literature. The full list is available here. Watch the announcement below. The award recipients will be announced on Nov. 14.

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Prachi Gupta is an Assistant News Editor for Salon, focusing on pop culture. Follow her on Twitter at @prachigu or email her at pgupta@salon.com. More Prachi Gupta.

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What To Read Awards: Top 10 Books of 2012 slide show

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  • 10. "The Guardians" by Sarah Manguso: "Though Sarah Manguso’s 'The Guardians' is specifically about losing a dear friend to suicide, she pries open her intelligent heart to describe our strange, sad modern lives. I think about the small resonating moments of Manguso’s narrative every day." -- M. Rebekah Otto, The Rumpus

  • 9. "Beautiful Ruins" by Jess Walter: "'Beautiful Ruins' leads my list because it's set on the coast of Italy in 1962 and Richard Burton makes an entirely convincing cameo appearance. What more could you want?" -- Maureen Corrigan, NPR's "Fresh Air"

  • 8. "Arcadia" by Lauren Groff: "'Arcadia' captures our painful nostalgia for an idyllic past we never really had." -- Ron Charles, Washington Post

  • 7. "Gone Girl" by Gillian Flynn: "When a young wife disappears on the morning of her fifth wedding anniversary, her husband becomes the automatic suspect in this compulsively readable thriller, which is as rich with sardonic humor and social satire as it is unexpected plot twists." -- Marjorie Kehe, Christian Science Monitor

  • 6. "How Should a Person Be" by Sheila Heti: "There was a reason this book was so talked about, and it’s because Heti has tapped into something great." -- Jason Diamond, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

  • 4. TIE "NW" by Zadie Smith and "Far From the Tree" by Andrew Solomon: "Zadie Smith’s 'NW' is going to enter the canon for the sheer audacity of the book’s project." -- Roxane Gay, New York Times "'Far From the Tree' by Andrew Solomon is, to my mind, a life-changing book, one that's capable of overturning long-standing ideas of identity, family and love." -- Laura Miller, Salon

  • 3. "Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk" by Ben Fountain: "'Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk' says a lot about where we are today," says Marjorie Kehe of the Christian Science Monitor. "Pretty much the whole point of that novel," adds Time's Lev Grossman.

  • 2. "Bring Up the Bodies" by Hilary Mantel: "Even more accomplished than the preceding novel in this sequence, 'Wolf Hall,' Mantel's new installment in the fictionalized life of Thomas Cromwell -- master secretary and chief fixer to Henry VIII -- is a high-wire act, a feat of novelistic derring-do." -- Laura Miller, Salon

  • 1. "Behind the Beautiful Forevers" by Katherine Boo: "Like the most remarkable literary nonfiction, it reads with the bite of a novel and opens up a corner of the world that most of us know absolutely nothing about. It stuck with me all year." -- Eric Banks, president of the National Book Critics Circle

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