The weekend was filled with analyses of the Oscar nominees (winners will be announced on Feb. 24). One of the big surprises was the number of major nominations for the indie flick, Beasts of the Southern Wild. which is up for four categories, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actress. The latter goes to Quvenzhane Wallis, the youngest person ever to be nominated (in a neat bit of symmetry, this category also includes the oldest person ever nominated, Emmanuelle Riva, 85, for Amour). Beasts is also nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay. It is based on the one-act play Juicy and Delicious, by Lucy Alibar (not the  short story by Doris Betts).

Only one of the nominated films is based on a children’s book [UPDATE: one of our readers points out that, as much silly fun as they may be, Defoe's books are published, reviewed and classified as adult. The film, however, is aimed at kids]. The Pirates! Band of Misfits is up for Best Animated Feature Film and faces some stiff competition, including Brave! which just won a Golden Globe Award. According to the Hollywood Reporter, director Peter Lord was taken by surprise by the nomination, saying, “I had kind of given up, you know? The movie came out in March, after all.”

The movie is based on the first two books from a series by British children’s author [see above], Gideon Defoe. Official Movie Web site: ThePirates-Movie.com. The movie tie-in (RH/Vintage) was released in April, 2012.

Following the jump, the full list of the other ten nominees based on books, with tie-ins:

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Winning an award for a hatchet job may not sound like a good thing. The Ominvore (not to be confused with Omnivoracious, Amazon’s book blog) begs to differ. They created “The Hatchet Job of The Year” award in 2011 for the year’s most scathing book review, in an effort to ”crusade against dullness, deference and lazy thinking. It rewards critics who have the courage to overturn received opinion, and who do so with style.”

So, congrats to one of EarlyWord‘s favorite reviewers, the Washington Post‘s Ron Charles, who is one of eight nominees for the “Hatchet Job 2012” for his review of Martin Amis’s Lionel Asbo. His review is one of just two that appeared in American publications (the other is Zoë Heller’s review of  Joseph Anton by Salman Rushdie in the New York Review of Books).

Here’s hoping that Ron wins a well-deserved year’s supply of potted shrimp (supplied by The Fish Society, the “UK’s premier mail order and online fishmonger,” which sponsors the award — we leave it up to you to speculate on why).

01:0The National Book Awards, given last night went to (annotations are from the National Book Awards site):

Fiction

The Round House, Louise Erdrich, Harper

One Sunday in the spring of 1988, a woman living on a reservation in North Dakota is attacked. The details of the crime are slow to surface as Geraldine Coutts is traumatized and reluctant to relive or reveal what happened, either to the police or to her husband, Bazil, and thirteen-year-old son, Joe.

Nonfiction

Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, Katherine Boo, Random House

Annawadi is a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport. As India starts to prosper, Annawadians are electric with hope: Individual stories of courage set against the backdrop of tensions over religion, caste, sex, power and economic envy.

Young People’s Literature

Goblin Secrets, William Alexander, S&S.Margaret K. McElderry

Rownie, the youngest in Graba the witchworker’s household of stray children, escapes and goes looking for his missing brother. Along the way he falls in with a troupe of theatrical goblins and learns the secret origins of masks.

Poetry

Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations, David Ferry, University of Chicago Press

The passionate nature and originality of Ferry’s poems modulates beautifully between plainspoken high eloquence and colloquial vigor, making his distinctive speech one of the most interesting and ravishing achievements of the past half century.
 

Videos of the event are available on the National Book Foundation’s web site.

The winners of the National Book Awards will be announced tomorrow night. As the New York Times details, efforts have been made to add some glitz to the event, such as moving the venue from the midtown Marriott to the “cavernously ornate Cipriani Wall Street” and announcing the finalists on TV this year.

Underlying the changes is a desire to make the American awards as influential as the U.K.’s Booker Award (we have often noted that the Bookers have a greater effect on book sales, even in this country).

After the jump, the current Amazon sales rankings for the finalists (as tracked on Publishers Marketplace), along with the highest rankings to date, for titles in the Fiction, Nonfiction and Young People’s categories. We’ll check them again after the winners are announced.

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This week’s Parade Magazine‘s cover story features National Book Awards Finalist Kevin Powers, “A Soldier’s Story: Returning Home From Iraq.”

Powers’s novel, The Yellow Birds (Hachette/Little, Brown; Thorndike Press; Hachette Audio), debuts at #13 on the new NYT Hardcover Fiction Best Seller list. It was on the cover of the NYT Book Review last month.

This issue of Parade also includes a list of “10 Books by the Latest Generation of War Veterans.”

Louise Erdrich, nominated for the National Book Award for her 14th novel, The Round House (Harper; HarperLuxe larger type), talks about her writing and the “quixotic endeavor” of owning a bookstore on the PBS NewsHour.

The National Book Award winners will be announced on Nov. 11th.

Watch Conversation: Louise Erdrich, Author of ‘The Round House’ on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.

Now that Hilary Mantel has won her second Booker in a row, the media takes a look at the stats. She is the…

First person to win for a direct sequel – the BBC

First woman to win the prize twice — The Daily Mail

First British author to win twice — The Independent

Third double winner — the BBC

In August, it was announced that the two books, Wolf Hall and its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies, are being adapted as a BBC2 series, expected to air late in 2013 in the UK.

Of course, both Bring up the Bodies, and its predecessor, Wolf Hall, are rising on Amazon’s sales ranking. Mantel has written many others, a total of twelve, as outlined by the BBC. For more about Mantel’s earlier work, check the essay, “Devil’s Work,” in 28 Artists & 2 Saints by Joan Acocella (RH/Pantehon, 2007). Written before Mantel became well-known in the US, it calls her “one of England’s most interesting contemporary novelists” and notes that she “has experimented with her gift; her books jump from genre to genre,” which is clear from the following list of her titles (unless otherwise noted, the quotes are from the BBC. Links are to the US editions):

Every Day Is Mother’s Day, 1985 — her first published novel about “an agoraphobic clairvoyant, her daughter and their social worker…inspired  by the author’s experiences as a social work assistant at a geriatric hospital.” The publisher describes it as “Stephen King meets Muriel Spark.”

Vacant Possession, 1986 — sequel to the above.

Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, 1988 — draws on Mantel’s experiences while living in Saudi Arabia with her husband, a geologist, in the 1970s.

Fludd, 1989 — “this dark, often surreal fable” about a newcomer’s impact on a small mill town in Northern England won several prizes in the UK. It was reviewed in the NYT BR.

A Place of Greater Safety, 1992 — a historical novel set during the French Revolution. It won the Sunday Express Book of the Year award. It was reviewed in the New York Times.

A Change of Climate, 1994 — “about a missionary couple who lose a child.”

An Experiment in Love, 1995 — “about three schoolfriends from northern England,” it was a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year and was reviewed in the NYT BR by Margaret Atwood, who called Mantel “an exceptionally good writer.”

The Giant, O’Brien, 1998 — “about an Irishman who comes to London to make his fortune as a sideshow attraction,” it is set in London in 1782 and was a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year  as well as a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year.

Giving Up the Ghost: A Memoir, 2003 — “about her early childhood, her Catholic upbringing and how she came to be a writer. The title referred to the ‘ghosts of other lives you might have led,’ as the author realised she was ‘staring 50 in the face’,”

Beyond Black, 2005 — “about a medium who is tormented by her acquaintances, both the living and the dead.” It was shortlisted for a Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Orange Prize for Fiction. It was also a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.

Wolf Hall, 2009 — the book “that really made her name.”

Hilary Mantel wins her second Booker Award, for Bring up the Bodies, Macmillan/Holt. It’s the second in a planned trilogy about Thomas Cromwell, which began with Wolf Hall, for which Mantel was awarded her first Booker.

She is currently at work on the third in the series, The Mirror and the Light (no pub date has been announced yet).

The former head of the Swedish Academy, which awards the Nobel Prize in Literature, Horace Engdahl, said in 2008, “The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining,”

As if to refute that accusation, Americans sent translations of the new Nobel Prize winner, Mo Yan’s books, zooming up Amazon’s sales rankings, one of them well ahead of all the recently announced National Book Award finalists.

Red Sorghum: a Novel of China (Penguin/Viking) rose to #16 this morning. The highest ranking NBA finalist, This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz, rose to #44 on the news of its nomination. Red Sorghum was featured as the lead-in to an interview with Mo’s primary English translator, Howard Goldblatt, on NPR’s All Things Considered yesterday.

Also on the rise are the following, published by Arcade Publishing. Norton, which distributes Arcade, has alerted us that reprints will be available on Monday through wholesalers:

#73 (was #114,315) – Life and Death are Wearing Me Out 

#129 (previously unranked) —  The Garlic Ballads 

#165 (was #239,260) – Big Breasts and Wide Hips

Unranked (listed on Amazon as out of print; reprint coming on Monday) — The Republic of Wine, (excerpted in the Wall Street Journal this week).

In an appraisal of the author’s work in today’s New York Times, Howard Goldblatt, described as “Mr. Mo’s adroit translator,” offers this advice to people who want to read Mo’s books,

If you like Poe, you’ll love the forthcoming Sandalwood Death [University of Oklahoma Press; early January 2013]; if you’re more Rabelaisian, The Republic of Wine will appeal, and if you’re fond of a fabulist, I recommend Life and Death are Wearing Me Out.

The NYT also offers brief excerpts the books.

As we noted earlier, the Guardian gives a handy rundown of “Mo Yan’s best books — in pictures.”

The “gateway book” to the Nobel winner’s work

Mo Yan became the first Chinese writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature today, confounding expectations of UK bettors, who had him running well behind the lead, Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami.

According to the citation, “Through a mixture of fantasy and reality, historical and social perspectives, Mo Yan has created a world reminiscent in its complexity of those in the writings of William Faulkner and Gabriel García Márquez, at the same time finding a departure point in old Chinese literature and in oral tradition.”

The Guardian gives a handy rundown of “Mo Yan’s best books — in pictures.”

According to a scholar quoted by the Guardian, the author is “probably the most translated living Chinese writer.” Several of his titles are published here by Arcade Publishing (distributed by Norton; UPDATE: the publisher sent out an alert that reprints are in the works):

Big Breasts and Wide Hips; the Guardian notes, “Mo Yan’s most recent novel, tells of the consequences of the single-child policy implemented in China through the story of a rural gynaecologist.”

Life and Death are Wearing Me Out; called “a brilliant extended fable” by translator Howard Goldblatt

The Garlic Ballads; an earlier edition from Penguin/Viking is owned by many libraries. According to the Guardian, “Nobel permanent secretary Peter Englund picked out The Garlic Ballads, first published in English in 1995, as Mo Yan’s gateway book.”

The Republic of Wine  – the 2000 Arcade edition is owned many libraries;  translator, Goldblatt says this ”may be the most technically innovative and sophisticated novel from China I’ve read.”

Shifu, You’ll Do Anything for a Laugh  -- the 2001 Arcade edition is owned by many libraries; a collection of short stories that “ranges from comedy to tragedy via fantasy and fable.”

The following title is published by Penguin/Viking:

Red Sorghum: a Novel of China – the Guardian says this is “Mo Yan’s best-known work in the west, thanks to Zhang Yimou’s 1987 film, which was based on the first two chapters of the novel, Red Sorghum follows three generations of a family as they survive all the horrors that the 20th century unleashed on rural China.”

A few of the nominees for the National Book Awards moved up Amazon’s sales rankings after yesterday’s announcement. The lesser-known, or most recently released titles made the greatest leaps.

Only two of the finalists are currently in the Amazon top ten. Junot Diaz’s This Is How You Lose Her (Penguin/Riverhead) is at #44 (up slightly from the day before). It’s moved down since a high of #16 after a string of reviews, culminating in the 9/20 NYT Book Review

The Round House, by Louise Erdrich, Harper is at #82. The nomination came shortly after its publication on 10/2 and a week of multiple reviews (Minneapolis Star Tribune, Kansas City Star, USA Today, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Miami Herald).

Third in sales rankings of the nominees is The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers, (Hachette/ Little, Brown), at #169, up slightly from the previous day and down from a high of #80 after this Sunday’s cover review in the  NYT BR.

After the jump, all the  finalists by Amazon Sales Rankings, excluding poetry, as of this morning (gathered via Publishers Marketplace‘s Book Tracker tool). Note that the NBA has far less effect on sales rankings for children’s titles than the Newbery/Caldecott/Printz Awards. Most of those winners and honorees moved into the top 100 immediately following their announcements.

National Book Award Finalists by Amazon Rankings (as of 8 a.m. 10/11/12)

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Below is the video of yesterday’s announcement of the National Book Awards finalists.

Let’s hope the Today Show takes the hint and returns to featuring the Newbery/Caldecott winners the day after they are announced.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The Poetry Finalists, just announced on Morning Joe: (annotations from the National Book Foundation)

David Ferry
Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations
University of Chicago Press

The passionate nature and originality of Ferry’s poems modulates beautifully between plainspoken high eloquence and colloquial vigor, making his distinctive speech one of the most interesting and ravishing achievements of the past half century

Cynthia Huntington
Heavenly Bodies
Southern Illinois University Press

In this blistering collection of lyric poems, Cynthia Huntington gives an intimate view of the sexual revolution and rebellion in a time before the rise of feminism.

Tim Seibles
Fast Animal
Etruscan Press

The newest collection from one of America’s foremost African-American poets threads the journey from youthful innocence to the whittled-hard awareness of adulthood

Alan Shapiro
Night of the Republic
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

In Night of the Republic, Alan Shapiro takes us on an unsettling night tour of America’s public places―a gas station restroom, a shoe store, a convention hall, and a race track, among other locations―and in stark, Edward Hopper-like imagery reveals the surreal and dreamlike features of these familiar but empty night spaces.

Susan Wheeler
Meme
University of Iowa Press

A meme is a unit of thought replicated by imitation. Occupy Wall Street is a meme, as are internet ideas and images that go viral. But what could be more potent memes than those passed down by parents to their children? Susan Wheeler reconstructs her mother’s voice—down to its cynicism and its mid-twentieth-century Midwestern vernacular—in “The Maud Poems,” a voice that takes a more aggressive, vituperative turn in “The Devil—or —The Introjects.”

The Nonfiction Finalists, just announced on Morning Joe: (annotations from the National Book Foundation)

Anne Applebaum
Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1945-1956
RH/Doubleday

Iron Curtain describes how the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe were created and what daily life was like once they were complete, how political parties, the church, the media, young people’s organizations―the institutions of civil society on every level―were eviscerated, how the secret police services were organized, how ethnic cleansing was carried out, and how some people were forced to collaborate while others managed to resist.

Katherine Boo
Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity
Random House

Annawadi is a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport. As India starts to prosper, Annawadians are electric with hope: Individual stories of courage set against the backdrop of tensions over religion, caste, sex, power and economic envy.

Robert A. Caro
The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume 4
RH/Knopf

The fourth installment in Robert Caro’s monumental work on President Lyndon Johnson, The Passage of Power follows Johnson through both the most frustrating and the most triumphant periods of his career: 1958 to 1964

Domingo Martinez
The Boy Kings of Texas
Globe Pequot Press/Lyons Press

Domingo Martinez lays bare his interior and exterior worlds as he struggles to make sense of the violent and the ugly, along with the beautiful and the loving, in a Texas border town in the 1980s. First Book

Anthony Shadid
House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

In the spring of 2011, when Anthony Shadid—one of four New York Times reporters captured in Libya as the region erupted—was freed, he went to his ancestral home, Marjayoun, Lebanon…to an ancient estate built by his great-grandfather, a place filled with memories of a lost era when the Middle East was a world of grace, grandeur, and unexpected departures, and tells the story of the house’s re-creation, revealing its mysteries and recovering the lives that have passed through it. Shadid died on February 16, 2012 from an asthma attack while on assignment on the Syrian border.

Just announced on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, the National Book Awards finalists for fiction (annotations from the National Book Foundation):

This Is How You Lose Her, Junot Diaz, Penguin/Riverhead

Diaz’s second collection of short stories featuring the alter ego “Yunior”, who as a boy and young man was the central character in his first collection “Drown”. His voice is distinctive, mixing popular and high culture, comic books and literature.

The Yellow Birds, Kevin Powers, Hachette/ Little, Brown

In Al Tafar, Iraq, twenty-one-year-old Private Bartle and eighteen-year-old Private Murphy cling to life as their platoon launches a bloody battle for the city. First Novel

The Round House, Louise Erdrich, Harper

One Sunday in the spring of 1988, a woman living on a reservation in North Dakota is attacked. The details of the crime are slow to surface as Geraldine Coutts is traumatized and reluctant to relive or reveal what happened, either to the police or to her husband, Bazil, and thirteen-year-old son, Joe.

Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, Ben Fountain, HarperCollins/Ecco

After a ferocious firefight with Iraqi insurgents at “the battle of Al-Ansakar Canal”—three minutes and forty-three seconds of intense warfare caught on tape by an embedded Fox News crew—has transformed the eight surviving men of Bravo Squad into America’s most sought-after heroes, the Bush administration has sent them on a media-intensive nationwide Victory Tour to reinvigorate public support for the war, including being featured as part of the halftime show at a Dallas Cowboys game, alongside the superstar pop group Destiny’s Child. First Novel

A Hologram for the King, Dave Eggers, McSweeney’s Books

In a rising Saudi Arabian city, far from weary, recession-scarred America, a struggling businessman pursues a last-ditch attempt to stave off foreclosure, pay his daughter’s college tuition, and finally do something great, with mixed results.