March 17 is approaching much faster than you think, but don’t worry, we know what you’ll be doing and we’ve got you covered with everything you need for the best National Book Critics Circle awards bash! Wait, what? You thought we were talking about St. Patrick’s Day? Why sit around and drink disgusting green beer when you could be celebrating the some of the finest literature from 2015? Good, glad you agree.
This year’s nominees include Ta-Nehisi Coates for his already award–winning Between the World and Me, Brooklyn author Colm Tóibín for his meditations on poet Elizabeth Bishop), and Margo Jefferson‘s brilliant autobiography Negroland. The NBCC’s lifetime achievement award will be given to Wendell Berry. Check out the full shortlist for the 2016 NBCC awards below.
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Elizabeth Alexander, The Light of the World
Vivian Gornick, The Odd Woman and the City
George Hodgman, Bettyville
Margo Jefferson, Negroland
Helen Macdonald, H Is for Hawk
BIOGRAPHY
Terry Alford, Fortune’s Fool: The Life of John Wilkes Booth
Charlotte Gordon, Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley
T. J. Stiles, Custer’s Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America
Rosemary Sullivan, Stalin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva
Karin Wieland, translated by Shelley Frisch, Dietrich and Riefenstahl: Hollywood, Berlin, and a Century in Two Lives
CRITICISM
Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me
Leo Damrosch, Eternity’s Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake
Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts
Colm Tóibín, On Elizabeth Bishop
James Wood, The Nearest Thing to Life
FICTION
Paul Beatty, The Sellout
Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies
Valeria Luiselli, The Story of My Teeth, translated by Christina MacSweeney
Anthony Marra, The Tsar of Love and Techno
Ottessa Moshfegh, Eileen
NONFICTION
Mary Beard, SPQR: A History of Rome
Ari Berman, Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America
Jill Leovy, Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America
Sam Quinones, Dreamland: The True Story of America’s Opiate Epidemic
Brian Seibert, What the Eye Hears: A History of Tap Dancing
POETRY
Ross Gay, Catalogue of Unabashed Gratitude
Terrance Hayes, How to Be Drawn
Ada Limón, Bright Dead Things
Sinéad Morrissey, Parallax and Selected Poems
Frank Stanford, What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford
JOHN LEONARD PRIZE
Kirstin Valdez Quade, Night at the Fiestas
NONA BALAKIAN CITATION FOR EXCELLENCE IN REVIEWING
Carlos Lozada
IVAN SANDROF LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD
Wendell Berry
(via Flavorwire)
