2008 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALISTS

Click here to watch author Scott Turow announce the 20 Finalists for the
2008 National Book Awards from the stage of the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago.

Fiction

Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project (Riverhead)

Rachel Kushner, Telex from Cuba (Scribner)

Peter Matthiessen, Shadow Country (Modern Library)

Marilynne Robinson, Home (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Salvatore Scibona, The End (Graywolf Press)

Nonfiction

Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (Alfred A. Knopf)

Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (W.W. Norton & Company)

Jane Mayer, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals (Doubleday)

Jim Sheeler, Final Salute: A Story of Unfinished Lives (Penguin)

Joan Wickersham, The Suicide Index: Putting My Father’s Death in Order (Harcourt)

Poetry

Frank Bidart, Watching the Spring Festival (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Mark Doty, Fire to Fire: New and Collected Poems (HarperCollins)

Reginald Gibbons, Creatures of a Day (Louisiana State University Press)

Richard Howard, Without Saying (Turtle Point Press)

Patricia Smith, Blood Dazzler (Coffee House Press)

Young People’s Literature

Laurie Halse Anderson, Chains (Simon & Schuster)

Kathi Appelt, The Underneath (Atheneum)

Judy Blundell, What I Saw and How I Lied (Scholastic)

E. Lockhart, The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks (Hyperion)

Tim Tharp, The Spectacular Now (Alfred A. Knopf)

Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters
Maxine Hong Kingston

Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community
Barney Rosset