National Book Awards

The winners of the National Book Awards were announced yesterday. Click on the link for information about all of the finalists. Stop in the library to pick up a copy of a winner or finalist.

Fiction winner Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson, "covers the Vietnam War and the U.S. intervention in Southeast Asia — and the life of a CIA agent whose career grows with the war."

"Based on more than 50,000 documents, primarily from the archives of the CIA itself, and hundreds of interviews with CIA veterans," Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA" by Tim Weiner won for non-fiction.





The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie received the Young People's Literature award. "Based on the author’s own experiences, this heartbreaking yet funny story chronicles the adolescence of one contemporary Native American boy as he attempts to break away from the life he seems destined to live."

Time and Materials by Robert Hass is the poetry winner

Other finalists included:

FICTION
Mischa Berlinski, Fieldwork

Lydia Davis, Varieties of Disturbance

Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End

Jim Shepard, Like You’d Understand, Anyway

NONFICTION
Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I’m Dying

Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

Woody Holton, Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution

Arnold Rampersad, Ralph Ellison: A Biography

POETRY
Linda Gregerson, Magnetic North

David Kirby, The House on Boulevard St.

Stanley Plumly, Old Heart

Ellen Bryant Voigt, Messenger: New and Selected Poems 1976-2006

YOUNG PEOPLE’S LITERATURE
Kathleen Duey, Skin Hunger: A Resurrection of Magic, Book One
M. Sindy Felin, Touching Snow

Brian Selznick, The Invention of Hugo Cabret

Sara Zarr, Story of a Girl