The literary awards season continued as the National Book Critics Circle, a nonprofit organization of more than 700 book reviewers, announced its  finalists for the 33rd annual NBCC awards. For the third year, the announcements were made January 20 at a festive Soho gathering graciously hosted by Housing Works Used Books Cafe. The first year I attended there was a raging blizzard, which failed to dampen spirits; unfortunately, cold weather and a bad case of the flu kept me housebound this year, but you can check out the goings-on at Critical Mass, the NBCC blog.

Nonfiction

• Patrick Cockburn, The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq (Verso)
• Anne Fessler, The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe V. Wade (Penguin Press)
• Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (Penguin Press)
• Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution (Ecco)
• Sandy Tolan, The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew and the Heart of the Middle East (Bloomsbury)

Fiction

• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun (Knopf)
• Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss (Grove/Atlantic)
• Dave Eggers, What is the What (McSweeney’s)
• Richard Ford, The Lay of the Land (Knopf)
• Cormac McCarthy, The Road (Knopf)

Memoir/Autobiography

• Donald Antrim, The Afterlife (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Alison Bechdel, Fun Home (Houghton Mifflin)
• Alexander Masters, Stuart: A Life Backwards (Delacorte)
• Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (HarperCollins)
• Teri Jentz, Strange Piece of Paradise (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Poetry

• Daisy Fried, My Brother is Getting Arrested Again. (University of Pittsburgh Press)
• Troy Jollimore, Tom Thomson in Purgatory. (Margie/Intuit House)
• Miltos Sachtouris, Poems (1945-1971) (Archipelego Books)
• Frederick Seidel, Ooga-Booga (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• W.D. Snodrass, Not for Specialists: New and Selected Poems (BOA Editions)

Criticism

• Bruce Bawer: While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the WestFrom Within (Doubleday)
• Frederick Crews, Follies of the Wise: Dissenting Essays (Shoemaker & Hoard)
• Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion As A Natural Phenomenon(Viking)
• Lia Purpura, On Looking: Essays (Sarabande Books)
• Lawrence Wechsler, Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences(McSweeney’s)

Biography

• Debby Applegate: The Most Famous Man in Amerca: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher (Doubleday)
• Taylor Branch, At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-1968 (Simon& Schuster)
• Frederick Brown, Flaubert: A Biography (Little, Brown)
• Julie Phillips, James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon (St.Martin’s Press)
• Jason Roberts, A Sense of the World: How a Blind Man Became History’s Greatest Traveler (HarperCollins)