NEW YORK (AP) — Robert Caro, Junot Diaz and the late Anthony Shadid were among the finalists announced Wednesday for the National Book Awards.
Other nominees included the novelists Dave Eggers and Louise Erdrich and nonfiction writers Anne Applebaum and Katherine Boo. Twenty authors, five each in four competitive categories, were picked. The winners will be announced Nov. 14.
Major New York publishers have complained in recent years that such high profile books as Jonathan Franzen’s “Freedom” and Jeffrey Eugenides’ “The Marriage Plot” have been overlooked in favor of more obscure titles. But this year’s picks include some of the most talked about literary works of 2012, from Caro’s “The Passage of Power,” the fourth of his epic Lyndon Johnson series; to Diaz’s “This is How You Lose Her,” a series of stories about love; to Katherine Boo’s “Behind the Beautiful Forevers:
Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity,” widely praised as a masterpiece of nonfiction narrative.
The nominees include five Pulitzer Prize winners (Caro, Shadid and Anne Applebaum among them), a National Book Award winner (Caro) and two MacArthur “genius” grant recipients, most recently Diaz. Judges also picked five debut books, including Kevin Powers’ “The Yellow Birds,” which some critics have cited as a rare major novel about the Iraq war; and Domingo Martinez’s “The Boy Kings of Texas,” a memoir.
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