Diaz and Caro Among Finalists for National Book Award

October 10, 2012, 8:48 am

By MOTOKO RICH

Junot Diaz, fresh from being awarded a “genius'' grant by the MacArthur Foundation last week, received another honor on Wednesday when he was named a finalist in the fiction category for the National Book Awards.

The foundation also posthumously nominated Anthony Shadid, the New York Times foreign correspondent who died earlier this year while on a reporting assignment in Syria. Mr Shadid was selected in the non-fiction category for his memoir, “House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East.”

Mr. Diaz, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his first novel, “”The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” was nominated for “This is How You Lose Her,” a collection of connected short stories.

The National Book Foundation, which presents the awards, appears to have taken to heart the criticism from previous years that its nominations went to obscure works that sold few copies. In addition to Mr. Diaz, two of the five nominees are well-known literary names, and three of the finalists appeared on the cover of the New York Times Sunday Book Review this year.

The other nominees for fiction were Dave Eggers for “A Hologram for the King;” Louise Erdich for “The Round House;” Ben Fountain for “Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk;” and Kevin Powers for “The Yellow Birds.”

The foundation also showed a preference for fiction that addressed the fault lines of modern American life. “A Hologram for the King” follows a business consultant who tries to fend off foreclosure, raise money to pay his daughter's college tuition and redeem his fortune after being battered by the recession. “Billy Lynn's Lo ng Halftime Walk” and “The Yellow Birds” both deal with fallout from the Iraq war.

In the nonfiction category, the foundation continued the trend of nominating prominent authors, including Robert A. Caro, for “The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson,” the fourth installment in Mr. Caro's long-running biography of the president. Katherine Boo, the New Yorker staff writer, was named for “Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity,” her profile of four years spent with the residents of Annawadi, an Indian slum. The other non-fiction nominees in addition to Mr. Shadid were Anne Applebaum, the Washington Post columnist, for “Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1945-1956” and Domingo Martinez for “The Boy Kings of Texas.”

Nominated in the category for poetry were David Ferry, for “Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations;” Cynthia Huntington, for “Heavenly Bodies;” Tim Seibles, for “F ast Animal;” Alan Shapiro, “Night of the Republic;” and Susan Wheeler, for “Meme.”

In the young people's literature category, the finalists were: William Alexander for “Goblin Secrets;” Carrie Arcos for “Out of Reach;” Patricia McCormick for “Never Fall Down;” Eliot Schrefer for “Endangered;” and Steve Sheinkin for “Bomb: The Race to Build-and Steal-the World's Most Dangerous Weapon.”

The winners, chosen by panels of authors in each category, will be announced Nov. 14 at a ceremony at Cipriani Wall Street. That night, the foundation will also present its medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters to Elmore Leonard, the novelist, and its Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community to Arthur O. Sulzberger, Jr., chairman and publisher of the New York Times.