Jennifer Egan. Photo by Pieter Van Hattem/Vistalux
The National Book Critics Circle’s nominees for 2010 include Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom and Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad.
Other finalists for fiction, which were announced Saturday in New York, include To the End of the Land by David Grossman, an Israeli, and Comedy in a Minor Key by Hans Keilson, a German Jew who survived World War II by hiding in Holland. Irish author Paul Murray was nominated for Skippy Dies.
Two literary biographies, Sarah Bakewell’s How To Live, or a Life of Montaigne and Selina Hastings’ The Secret Lives Of Somerset Maugham, were nominated, along with books about the lives of Crazy Horse, Simon Wiesenthal and the fictional Charlie Chan.
In the autobiography and memoir category, Patti Smith is nominated for Just Kids, her memoir of Robert Mapplethorpe and coming of age in New York City, along with Kai Bird, David Dow, Christopher Hitchens, Rahna Reiko Rizzuto and Darin Strauss.
The non-fiction nominees are Barbara Demick for Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, S.C. Gwynne for Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, Jennifer Homans for Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet, Siddhartha Mukherjee for The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer and Isabel Wilkerson for The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration.
Poetry nominees include National Book Award winner Terrance Hayes and former U.S. poet laureate Kay Ryan.
The criticism category ranges from Elif Batuman’s The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them to Clare Cavanagh’s Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics: Russia, Poland, and the West.
