2011 National Book Award Finalists Announced

Posted on October 12, 2011

The finalists for the 2011 National Book Awards have been announced. Poet and essayist Adrienne Rich is among the poetry finalists with her poetry collection, Tonight No Poetry Will Serve: Poems 2007-2010. The finalists also include Columbia University professor Manning Marable, who died days before his book about Malcolm X was published. Tea Obreht, 26, is the youngest of the finalists. Here is the list of finalists:

Fiction

• Andrew Krivak, The Sojourn (Bellevue Literary Press)
• Tea Obreht, The Tiger's Wife (Random House)
• Julie Otsuka, The Buddha in the Attic (Alfred A. Knopf)
• Edith Pearlman, Binocular Vision (Lookout Books)
• Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones (Bloomsbury USA)

• Deborah Baker, The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism (Graywolf Press)
• Mary Gabriel, Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution (Little, Brown)
• Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (W. W. Norton)
• Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (Viking Press)
• Lauren Redniss, Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie, A Tale of Love and Fallout (It Books)

• Nikky Finney, Head Off & Split (TriQuarterly)
• Yusef Komunyakaa, The Chameleon Couch (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Carl Phillips, Double Shadow (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Adrienne Rich, Tonight No Poetry Will Serve: Poems 2007-2010 (W.W. Norton)
• Bruce Smith, Devotions (University of Chicago Press)

• Franny Billingsley, Chime (Dial Books)
• Debby Dahl Edwardson, My Name Is Not Easy (Marshall Cavendish)
• Thanhha Lai, Inside Out and Back Again (Harper)
• Albert Marrin, Flesh and Blood So Cheap: The Triangle Fire and Its Legacy (Alfred A. Knopf)
• Lauren Myracle, Shine (Amulet Books)
• Gary D. Schmidt, Okay for Now (Clarion Books)