Veterans, Newcomers Among Book Award Finalists

Finalists for the National Book Awards were announced Wednesday in Philadelphia, with winners to be named in mid-November in New York City.

Click on the highlighted titles below to see NPR stories about the books.

Fiction

Mischa Berlinski, Fieldwork (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Lydia Davis, Varieties of Disturbance (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End (Little, Brown & Co.)

Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Jim Shepard, Like You'd Understand, Anyway (Alfred A. Knopf)

Nonfiction

Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I'm Dying (Alfred A. Knopf)

Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (Twelve/Hachette Book Group USA)

Woody Holton, Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution (Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Arnold Rampersad, Ralph Ellison: A Biography (Alfred A. Knopf)

Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (Doubleday)

Poetry

Linda Gregerson, Magnetic North (Houghton Mifflin Co.)

Robert Hass, Time and Materials (Ecco/HarperCollins)

David Kirby, The House on Boulevard St. (Louisiana State University Press)

Stanley Plumly, Old Heart (W.W. Norton & Co.)

Ellen Bryant Voigt, Messenger: New and Selected Poems 1976-2006 (W.W. Norton & Co.)

Young People's Literature

Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (Little, Brown & Co.)

Kathleen Duey, Skin Hunger: A Resurrection of Magic, Book One (Atheneum Books for Young Readers)

M. Sindy Felin, Touching Snow (Atheneum Books for Young Readers)

Brian Selznick, The Invention of Hugo Cabret (Scholastic Press)

Sara Zarr, Story of a Girl (Little, Brown & Co.)