By Dennis Abrams
The finalists for the 2013 National Book Award have been announced, and for the first time, the National Book Foundation is making available a free ebook series with samples of all the finalists’ work available for download.
The five finalists in each category were selected from previously announced 10-title longlists.
The finalists for fiction are:
- Rachel Kushner for The Flamethrowers (Scribner/Simon & Schuster)
- Jhumpa Lahiri for The Lowland (Alfred A Knopf/Random House)
- James McBride for The Good Lord Bird (Riverhead Books/Penguin Group USA)
- Thomas Pynchon for Bleeding Edge (The Penguin Press/Penguin Group USA)
- George Saunders for Tenth of December (Random House)
The finalists in nonfiction are:
- Jill Lepore for Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin (Alfred A. Knopf/Random House)
- Wendy Lower for Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
- George Packer for The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
- Alan Taylor for The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832 (W.W. Norton & Company)
- Lawrence Wright for Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood & the Prison of Belief (Alfred A. Knopf/Random House)
The finalists for poetry are:
- Frank Bidart for Metaphysical Dog (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
- Lucie Brock-Broido for Stay, Illusion (Alfred A. Knopf)
- Adrian Matejka for The Big Smoke (Penguin Poets/Penguin Group USA)
- Matt Rasmussen for Black Aperture (Louisiana State University Press)
- Mary Szybist for Incarnadine: Poems (Graywolf Press)
The finalists in young people’s literature are:
- Kathi Appelt for The True Blue Scouts of Sugar Man Swamp (Atheneum Books for Young Readers/Simon & Schuster)
- Cynthia Kadohata for The Thing About Luck (Atheneum Books for Young Readers/Simon & Schuster)
- Tom McNeal for Far Far Away (Alfred A. Knopf/Random House)
- Meg Rosoff for Picture Me Gone (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, a division of Penguin Group USA)
- Gene Luen Yang for Boxers & Saints (First Second/MacMillan)
Samples of the finalists’ work, in the free ebook series “The Contenders: Excerpts from the 2013 National Book Award Finalists” are available for download here.