Because we all know that I like to populate my blog with award nomination and winners lists, here is the recently released National Book Critics Circle Award Nominees.

Autobiography
Heart Like Water: Surviving Katrina and Life in Its Disaster Zone by Joshua Clark
Brother, I’m Dying by Edwidge Danticat
The Journals of Joyce Carol Oates, 1973–1982 by Joyce Carol Oates
Writing in an Age of Silence by Sara Paretsky
A Russian Diary: A Journalist’s Final Account of Life, Corruption, and Death in Putin’s Russia by Anna Politkovskaya

Nonfiction
American Transcendentalism by Philip Gura
What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America 1815-1848 by Daniel Walker Howe
Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present by Harriet Washington
Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA by Tim Weiner
The World Without Us by Alan Weisman

Fiction
Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra
The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
In The Country of Men by Hisham Matar
The Gravedigger’s Daughter by Joyce Carol Oates
The Shadow Catcher by Marianne Wiggins

Biography
Stanley: The Impossible Life Of Africa’s Greatest Explorer by Tim Jeal
Edith Wharton by Hermione Lee
Ralph Ellison by Arnold Rampersad
The Life Of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932 by John Richardson
Thomas Hardy by Claire Tomalin

Poetry
Elegy by Mary Jo Bang
Modern Life by Matthea Harvey
Sleeping and Waking by Michael O’Brien
The Ballad of Jamie Allan by Tom Pickard
New Poems by Tadeusz Rozewicz

Criticism
Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints by Joan Acocella
Once Upon a Quniceanera by Julia Alvarez
The Terror Dream by Susan Faludi
Coltrane: The Story of a Sound by Ben Ratliff
The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross

Chandra or Diaz could both easily take in the award (Junot Diaz’s debut is incredible by the way) but I have a feeling that Joyce Carol Oates will probably take it home. Anyone banking on her to pull in that Nobel sometime in the next few years too?

The National Book Award Winners were announced yesterday. I have not read any of these quite yet, but Tree of Smoke has been sitting on my bookshelf waiting to be read for a few weeks now and I’ve been a long time fan of Sherman Alexie (I attended the University of Washington where he frequently teaches). I’ll have to pick his latest up, even if it is a children’s book.

• Fiction: Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson
• Nonfiction: Legacy of Ashes by Tim Weiner
• Poetry: Time and Materials by Robert Hass
• Young People’s Literature: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie