National Book Awards; Fiction Finalists

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.

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