The NBCC nominees ...

... were announced today. As usual, although there are familiar enough titles on the list, such as Cormac McCarthy's The Road or Kirin Desai's The Inheritance of Loss, which already won the Man Booker Prize, the National Book Critics Circle has chosen books that are more learned, less well-known (and one might admit, with more foreign authors) than the typical National Book Award fare. We wouldn't want it any other way. Or to put it differently: They always make me feel I didn't read enough last year.

From Critical Mass, the NBCC's blog, here are this year's nominees:

The Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing:
Winner: Steven G. Kellman

The finalists: Ron Charles, Donna Rifkind, Gideon Lewis-Kraus, Kathryn Harrison

The Sandrof Award for Lifetime Achievement:
John Leonard

Nonfiction:
Patrick Cockburn, The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq
Anne Fessler, The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe V. Wade
Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution
Sandy Tolan, The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew and the Heart of the Middle East

Fiction
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun
Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss
Dave Eggers, What is the What
Richard Ford, The Lay of the Land
Cormac McCarthy, The Road

Memoir/Autobiography
Donald Antrim, The Afterlife
Alison Bechdel, Fun Home
Alexander Masters, Stuart: A Life Backwards
Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million
Teri Jentz, Strange Piece of Paradise

Poetry
Daisy Fried, My Brother is Getting Arrested Again
Troy Jollimore, Tom Thomson in Purgatory
Miltos Sachtouris, Poems (1945-1971)
Frederick Seidel, Ooga-Booga
W.D. Snodrass, Not for Specialists: New and Selected Poems

Criticism
Bruce Bawer, While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West From Within
Frederick Crews, Follies of the Wise: Dissenting Essays
Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion As A Natural Phenomenon
Lia Purpura, On Looking: Essays
Lawrence Wechsler, Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences

Biography
Debby Applegate, The Most Famous Man in Amerca: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher
Taylor Branch, At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-1968
Frederick Brown, Flaubert: A Biography
Julie Phillips, James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon
Jason Roberts, A Sense of the World: How a Blind Man Became History's Greatest Traveler