National Book Critics Circle nominees

Fiction

Edwidge Danticat, The Dew Breaker (Knopf)
Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty (Bloomsbury)
David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas (Random House)
Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Philip Roth, The Plot Against America (Houghton Mifflin)


General Nonfiction

Kevin Boyle, Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights and Murder in the Jazz Age (Holt)
Edward Conlon, Blue Blood (Riverhead)
Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation: A History (Viking)
David Shipler, The Working Poor: Invisible in America (Knopf)
Timothy B. Tyson, Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story (Crown)


Biography/Autobiography

Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton (Penguin Press)
Bob Dylan, Chronicles Vol. 1 (Simon & Schuster)
Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (Norton)
John Guy, Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart (Houghton Mifflin)

Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan, De Kooning: An American Master (Knopf)



Poetry

Brigit Pegreen Kelly, The Orchard (BOA Editions)
D.A. Powell, Cocktails (Graywolf)
Adrienne Rich, The School Among the Ruins (Norton)
James Richardson, Interglacial (Ausable Press)
Gary Snyder, Danger on Peaks (Shoemaker & Hoard)


Criticism

Richard Howard, Paper Trail: Selected Prose 1965-2003 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Patrick Neate, Where You’re At: Notes From the Frontline of a Hip-Hop Planet (Riverhead)
Graham Robb, Strangers: Homosexual Love in the 19th Century (Norton)
Craig Seligman, Sontag & Kael: Opposites Attract Me (Counterpoint)
James Wood, The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Winners will be announced March 18 (NBCC)