2012 National Book Award Finalists Announced

The 20 finalists for the National Book Awards in Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, and Young People’s Literature were announced on Wednesday morning, October 10, on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, hosted by Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski, and Willie Geist. Chairman of the National Book Foundation’s Board of Directors, David Steinberger, was a guest on the show. The finalists are:

 FICTION

• Junot Díaz, This Is How You Lose Her (Riverhead Books/Penguin Group (USA)
• Dave Eggers, A Hologram for the King (McSweeney’s Books)
• Louise Erdrich, The Round House (Harper/HarperCollins)
• Ben Fountain, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk  (Ecco/HarperCollins)
• Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds (Little, Brown)

 NONFICTION

• Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1945-1956 (Doubleday)
• Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity (Random House)
• Robert A. Caro, The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume 4 (Knopf)
• Domingo Martinez, The Boy Kings of Texas (Lyons Press/Globe Pequot)
• Anthony Shadid, House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

 POETRY

• David Ferry, Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations (University of Chicago Press)
• Cynthia Huntington, Heavenly Bodies (Southern Illinois University Press)
• Tim Seibles, Fast Animal (Etruscan Press)
• Alan Shapiro, Night of the Republic (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
• Susan Wheeler, Meme (University of Iowa Press)

 YOUNG PEOPLE’S LITERATURE

• William Alexander, Goblin Secrets (Margaret K. McElderry Books/S&S Children’s)
• Carrie Arcos, Out of Reach (Simon Pulse, S&S Children’s)
• Patricia McCormick, Never Fall Down (Balzer+Bray/HarperCollins)
• Eliot Schrefer, Endangered (Scholastic)
• Steve Sheinkin, Bomb: The Race to Build — and Steal  — the World’s Most Dangerous Weapon (Flash Point/ Roaring Brook Press)

The winners will be announced at the 63rd National Book Awards Ceremony and Benefit Dinner at Cipriani, Wall Street, in New York City on Wednesday, November 14, 2012.