The eNotes Blog National Book Critics Circle FinalistsAnnounced

National Book Critics Circle FinalistsAnnounced Its award season, not just for movies, but for books as well. Yesterday, the National Book Critics Circle announced its finalists for the 2012 publishing year.   Since 1976, the   National Book Critics Circle has given the award in order to promote the  finest books and reviews published in English.   The American organization has selected thirty books eligible for a total of six prizes.   Those six categories are  autobiography, biography, criticism, fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. Two of the titles in contention have already received much critical and popular acclaim, Katherine Boos   Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity.   and Billy Lynns Long Halftime Walk  Ã‚  by Ben Fountain Other Fiction Finalists: Laurent Binet’s  HHhH, about the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich Zadie Smith’s London-set  NW Adam Johnson’s  The Orphan Master’s Son, a frightening look into  Kim Jong Il’s North Korea. (Both Fountain’s  Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk and  Ã‚  Binet’s  HHhH  are first novels.) Biographies Robert A. Caro’s  The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson   Tom Reiss’s  The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo  , about General Dumas, father of the famous novelist Lisa Cohen’s  All We Know: Three Lives   about early 20th-century trend setters Esther Murphy, Mercedes de Acosta and Madge Garland Lisa Jarnot’s  Robert Duncan,  The Ambassador from Venus: A Biography Autobiography My Poets  by  Maureen N. McLane Swimming Studies by  Leanne Shapton The Distance Between Us  by  Reyna Grande In the House of the Interpreter  by  NgÃ… ©gÄ © wa Thiong’o House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East  by  Anthony Shadid Poetry   Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations  by  David Ferry Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys  by  D. A. Powell Olives: Poems (Triquarterly)  by A.E. Stallings Non-fiction Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity  by Andrew Solomon Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic  by  David Quammen For a complete list of finalists, click here. The winners will be announced on  Thursday, February 28, 2013 at 6:00 p.m.