The National Book Foundation, which celebrates great writing, has announced its 2013 finalists. Winners will be announced at a ceremony on November 20 in New York.
Fiction
Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers, Scribner/Simon & Schuster
Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland, Alfred A. Knopf/Random House
James McBride, The Good Lord Bird, Riverhead Books/Penguin Group (USA)
Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, The Penguin Press/Penguin Group (USA)
George Saunders, Tenth of December, Random House
Nonfiction
Jill Lepore, The Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin, Alfred A. Knopf/Random House
Wendy Lower, Hitler's Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
George Packer, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Alan Taylor, The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832, W.W. Norton & Company
Lawrence Wright, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, & the Prison of Belief, Alfred A. Knopf/Random House
Poetry
Frank Bidart, Metaphysical Dog, Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Lucie Brock-Broido, Stay, Illusion, Alfred A. Knopf
Adrian Matejka, The Big Smoke, Penguin Poets/Penguin Group USA
Matt Rasmussen, Black Aperture, Louisiana State University Press
Mary Szybist, Incarnadine: Poems, Graywolf Press
Young People's Literature
Kathi Appelt, The True Blue Scouts of Sugar Man Swamp, Atheneum Books for Young Readers/Simon & Schuster
Cynthia Kadohata, The Thing About Luck, Atheneum Books for Young Readers/ Simon & Schuster
Tom McNeal, Far Far Away, Alfred A. Knopf/Random House
Meg Rosoff, Picture Me Gone, G.P. Putnam's Sons/Penguin Group (USA)
Gene Luen Yang, Boxers & Saints, First Second/Macmillan
For more information about the Finalists for the 2013 National Book Awards, Lifetime Achievement Award Winners, and details about the Awards ceremony, visit the National Book Foundation.
The National Book Award is one of the nation's most prestigious literary prizes and has a stellar record of identifying and rewarding quality writing. In 1950, William Carlos Williams was the first Winner in Poetry, the following year William Faulkner was honored in Fiction, and so on through the years.
Many previous Winners of a National Book Award are now firmly established in the canon of American literature, such as Sherman Alexie, Louise Erdrich, Jonathan Franzen, Denis Johnson, Joyce Carol Oates, and Adrienne Rich.
