Announced Saturday night in San Francisco, the NBCC nominees this year were unusual in that Joyce Carole Oates was cited in two categories, fiction and autobiography (the latter category was itself a recent addition). The winners will be announced March 8 in New York City.

Autobiography
Joshua Clark, Heart Like Water: Surviving Katrina and Life in Its Disaster Zone
Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I’m Dying
Joyce Carol Oates, The Journals of Joyce Carol Oates, 1973–1982
Sara Paretsky, Writing in an Age of Silence
Anna Politkovskaya, Russian Diary: A Journalist’s Final Account of Life, Corruption and Death in Putin’s Russia

Nonfiction
Philip Gura, American Transcendentalism
Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America 1815-1848
Harriet Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present
Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA
Alan Weisman, The World Without Us

Fiction
Vikram Chandra, Sacred Games
Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao
Hisham Matar, In The Country of Men
Joyce Carol Oates, The Gravediggers Daughter
Marianne Wiggins, The Shadow Catcher

Biography
Tim Jeal, Stanley: The Impossible Life Of Africa’s Greatest Explorer
Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton
Arnold Rampersad, Ralph Ellison
John Richardson, The Life Of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932
Claire Tomalin, Thomas Hardy

Poetry
Mary Jo Bang, Elegy
Matthea Harvey, Modern Life
Michael O’Brien, Sleeping and Waking
Tom Pickard, The Ballad of Jamie Allan
Tadeusz Rozewicz, New Poems

Criticism
Acocella, Joan. Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints
Alvarez, Julia. Once Upon a Quniceanera
Faludi, Susan.The Terror Dream
Ratliff, Ben. Coltrane: The Story of a Sound
Ross, Alex. The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing:

Sam Anderson — winner
Finalists:
Brooke Allen
Ron Charles
Walter Kirn
Adam Kirsch

Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award
Emilie Buchwald, writier, editor, and publisher of Milkweed Editions in Minneapolis