Didion, Doctorow finalists for National Book Award

NEW YORK (Reuters) – E.L. Doctorow’s Civil War novel “The
March,” and Joan Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking,” a
memoir of her husband’s death and daughter’s illness, were
among finalists announced on Wednesday for the National Book
Award.

The U.S. National Book Foundation’s annual awards for
fiction, nonfiction, poetry and young people’s literature will
be presented at a November 16 at a ceremony in Manhattan, where
novelist Norman Mailer and poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti are to
receive lifetime achievement awards.

In nonfiction, the five nominated books also cover topics
from slavery to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ecology and efforts to
save lives in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.

Besides Didion’s book, published by Alfred A. Knopf, the
nonfiction nominees were Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn’s “102
Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the
Twin Towers,” published by Times Books; Alan Burdick for “Out
of Eden: An Odyssey of Ecological Invasion,” from Farrar,
Straus & Giroux; Leo Damrosch for “Jean-Jacques Rousseau:
Restless Genius,” published by Houghton Mifflin, and Adam
Hochschild for “Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the
Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves,” from Houghton Mifflin.

Didion and Doctorow are among the best-known and popular of
the nominees, after the foundation came under fire last year
for nominating a narrow range of obscure writers.

Didion’s works include her essay collection “Slouching
Toward Bethlehem” and the novel “The Last Thing He Wanted.”
Doctorow is the author of such best-sellers as “Ragtime” and
“Billy Bathgate.”

Joining Doctorow among the fiction nominees were
“Veronica,” by Mary Gaitskill and published by Pantheon;
“Trance, by Christopher Sorrentino and published by Farrar,
Straus & Giroux; “Holy Skirts,” by Rene Steinke and published
by William Morrow; and “Europe Central,” by William Vollmann
and published by Viking. Doctorow’s “The March” was published
by Random House.

Influential poets John Ashbery, for “Where Shall I Wander,”
published by Ecco, and W.S. Merwin, for “Migration,” from
Copper Canyon Press, were among the poetry nominees. The others
were Frank Bidart for “Star Dust,” published by Farrar, Straus;
Brendan Galvin for “Habitat,” from Louisiana State University
Press, and Vern Rutsala for “The Moment’s Equation,” published
by Ashland Poetry Press.

Walter Dean Myers, whose gritty children’s books have been
banned from some U.S. school libraries, was among the nominees
in young people’s literature, for “Autobiography of My Dead
Brother,” published by HarperTempest.

The category’s other nominees were Jeanne Birdsall for “The
Penderwicks,” published by Knopf; Adele Griffin for “Where I
Want to Be,” published by Putnam; Chris Lynch for
“Inexcusable,” published by Atheneum; and Deborah Wiles for
“Each Little Bird That Sings,” published by Harcourt.