The 2006 National Book Award finalists

Yesterday the National Book Foundation announced the 2006 National Book Award finalists.

Dana Spiotta's Eat the Document is the only nominated title I've read. Spiotta is the only woman nominated in the fiction and nonfiction categories.

Fiction

Mark Z. Danielewski, Only Revolutions (Pantheon)

Ken Kalfus, A Disorder Peculiar to the Country (Ecco/HarperCollins)

Richard Powers, The Echo Maker (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Dana Spiotta, Eat the Document (Scribner/Simon & Schuster)

Jess Walter, The Zero (Judith Regan Books/HarperCollins)

Nonfiction

Taylor Branch, At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68 (Simon & Schuster)

Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone (Alfred A. Knopf)

Timothy Egan, The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl (Houghton Mifflin)

Peter Hessler, Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China’s Past and Present (HarperCollins)

Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (Alfred A. Knopf)

Poetry

Louise Glück, Averno (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

H.L. Hix, Chromatic (Etruscan Press)

Ben Lerner, Angle of Yaw (Copper Canyon Press)

Nathaniel Mackey, Splay Anthem (New Directions)

James McMichael, Capacity (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Young People's Literature

M.T. Anderson, The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Vol. 1: The Pox Party (Candlewick Press)

Martine Leavitt, Keturah and Lord Death (Front Street Books/Boyds Mills Press)

Patricia McCormick, Sold (Hyperion Books for Children)

Nancy Werlin, The Rules of Survival (Dial/Penguin)

Gene Luen Yang, American Born Chinese (First Second/Roaring Brook Press/Holtzbrinck)

--Marshal Zeringue