2008 National Book Critics Circle Awards

Fiction Finalists:
Roberto Bolaño, 2666.
Marilynne Robinson, Home.
Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project.
M. Glenn Taylor, The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart.
Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kittredge.
Autobiography Finalists:
Rick Bass, Why I Came West.
Helene Cooper, The House On Sugar Beach.
Honor Moore, The Bishop’s Daughter.
Andrew X. Pham, The Eaves Of Heaven.
Ariel Sabar, My Father’s Paradise: A Son’s Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq.
Biography Finalists:
Paula J. Giddings, Ida, A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching.
Steve Coll, The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family In An American Century.
Patrick French, The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul.
Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family.
Brenda Wineapple, White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson & Thomas Wentworth Higginson.
Nonfiction Finalists:
Dexter Filkins, The Forever War.
Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the Civil War.
Jane Mayer, The Dark Side.
Allan Lichtman, White Protestant Nation.
George C. Herring, From Colony to Superpower: US Foreign Relations Since 1776.
Poetry Finalists:
August Kleinzahler, Sleeping It Off in Rapid City.
Juan Felipe Herrera, Half the World in Light.
Devin Johnston, Sources.
Pierre Martory (translated by John Ashbery), The Landscapist.
Brenda Shaughnessy, Human Dark with Sugar.
Criticism Finalists:
Richard Brody, Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life Of Jean-Luc Godard.
Vivian Gornick, The Men in My Life.
Joel L. Kraemer, Maimonides: The Life and World of One of Civilization’s Greatest Minds.
Reginald Shepherd, Orpheus in the Bronx: Essays on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry.
Seth Lerer, Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History: Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter.
The National Book Critics Circle, founded in 1974 at the Algonquin, is a nonprofit, tax-exempt organization consisting of some 700 active book reviewers who are interested in honoring quality writing and communicating with one another about common concerns. It is managed by a 24-member all-volunteer board of directors.