Maw Books Blog

And the winners of the National Book Critics Circle Award are. . .
Criticism
Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Joan Acocella, Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints: Essays (Pantheon)
Julia Alvarez, Once Upon a Quinceañera: Coming of Age in the USA (Viking)
Susan Faludi, The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America (Metropolitan/Holt)
Ben Ratliff, Coltrane: The Story of a Sound (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Poetry
Mary Jo Bang, Elegy (Graywolf Press)
Matthea Harvey, Modern Life (Graywolf Press)
Michael O’Brien, Sleeping and Waking (Flood Editions)
Tom Pickard, The Ballad of Jamie Allan (Flood Editions)
Tadeusz Ró?ewicz, New Poems, trans. by Bill Johnston (Archipelago Books)

Biography
Tim Jeal, Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer (Yale University Press)
Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton (Knopf)
Arnold Rampersad, Ralph Ellison: A Biography (Knopf)
John Richardson, The Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917–1932 (Knopf)
Claire Tomalin, Thomas Hardy (Penguin Press)

General Nonfiction
Harriet Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present (Doubleday)
Philip Gura, American Transcendentalism: A History (Hill & Wang)
Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America 1815-1848 (Oxford University Press)
Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA (Doubleday)
Alan Weisman, The World Without Us (Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s)

Autobiography
Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I’m Dying (Knopf)
Joshua Clark, Heart Like Water: Surviving Katrina and Life in Its Disaster Zone (Free Press)
Joyce Carol Oates, The Journals of Joyce Carol Oates, 1973–1982 (Ecco Press)
Sara Paretsky, Writing in an Age of Silence (Verso)
Anna Politkovskaya, Russian Diary: A Journalist’s Final Account of Life, Corruption and Death in Putin’s Russia (Random House)

Fiction
Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverhead Books)
Vikram Chandra, Sacred Games (HarperCollins
Hisham Matar, In the Country of Men (Dial Press)
Joyce Carol Oates, The Gravedigger’s Daughter (Ecco Press)
Marianne Wiggins, The Shadow Catcher (Simon & Schuster)

Congrats to all the winners. Read the liveblog has it happened at the National Book Critics Circle Awards ceremony.

As I’m reading 2007 award winners for fiction this year, looks like I’ll be adding The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao to my TBR. I look forward to it.