Ta-Nehisi Coates, already a National Book Award winner for “Between the World and Me,” now has a chance to add a National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism to his mantel. Mr. Coates’s book, a meditation on racism in America written in the form of a letter to his son, joins works by the novelist Lauren Groff, the memoirist and critic Vivian Gornick and the poet Ada Limón among those nominated for the awards.
The awards, determined by a jury of critics and book review editors, honor excellence in six categories – autobiography, biography, criticism, fiction, nonfiction and poetry. The winners will be named on March 17. On Monday, however, the group announced the recipients of its two annual citations: Wendell Berry, an environmentalist, farmer and novelist, won the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, while Carlos Lozada, the nonfiction critic for The Washington Post, captured the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing.
Besides Ms. Groff’s nomination for “Fates and Furies,” the fiction finalists include: Paul Beatty’s “The Sellout,” Valeria Luiselli’s “The Story of My Teeth,” Anthony Marra’s “The Tsar of Love and Techno” and Ottessa Moshfegh’s “Eileen.”
Nominees in other categories follow:
Nonfiction
Mary Beard, “SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome” (Liveright)
Ari Berman, “Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Jill Leovy, “Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America” (Spiegel & Grau)
Sam Quinones, “Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic” (Bloomsbury)
Brian Seibert, “What the Eye Hears: A History of Tap Dancing” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Autobiography
Elizabeth Alexander, “The Light of the World” (Grand Central Publishing)
Vivian Gornick, “The Odd Woman and the City” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
George Hodgman, “Bettyville” (Viking)
Margo Jefferson, “Negroland” (Pantheon)
Helen Macdonald, “H Is for Hawk” (Grove Press)
Biography
Terry Alford, “Fortune’s Fool: The Life of John Wilkes Booth” (Oxford University Press)
Charlotte Gordon, “Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley” (Random House)
T.J. Stiles, “Custer’s Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America”(Alfred A. Knopf)
Rosemary Sullivan, “Stalin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva” (Harper)
Karin Wieland and Shelly Frisch, “Dietrich and Riefenstahl: Hollywood, Berlin, and a Century in Two Lives” (Liveright)
Criticism
Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Between the World and Me” (Spiegel & Grau)
Leo Damrosch, “Eternity’s Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake” (Yale University Press)
Maggie Nelson, “The Argonauts” (Graywolf)
Colm Tóibín, “On Elizabeth Bishop” (Princeton University Press)
James Wood, “The Nearest Thing to Life” (Brandeis University Press)
Poetry
Ross Gay, “Catalogue of Unabashed Gratitude” (University of Pittsburgh Press)
Terrance Hayes, “How to Be Drawn” (Penguin)
Ada Limón, “Bright Dead Things” (Milkweed Editions)
Sinéad Morrissey, “Parallax: And Selected Poems” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Frank Stanford, “What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford”(Copper Canyon Press)
article by Lorne Manly via nytimes.com
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