Robert Kirsch Award
and Category Finalists

Biography

(Rick Wartzman, Presenter)

• Debby Applegate, The Most Famous Man in America:  The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher (Doubleday)
• Rodney Bolt, The Librettist of Venice:  The Remarkable Life of Lorenzo Da Ponte, Mozart’s Poet, Casanova’s Friend, and Italian Opera’s Impresario in America (Bloomsbury USA)
• Neal Gabler, Walt Disney:  The Triumph of the American Imagination (Alfred A. Knopf)
• Jeffrey Goldberg, Prisoners:  A Muslim and a Jew across the Middle East Divide (Alfred A. Knopf)
• Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost:  A Search for Six of Six Million (HarperCollins)

Current Interest

(Reza Aslan, Presenter)

• Douglas Brinkley, The Great Deluge:  Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast (William Morrow / HarperCollins)
• Ian Buruma, Murder in Amsterdam:  The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance (Penguin Press)
• Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City:  Inside Iraq’s Green Zone (Alfred A. Knopf)
• Alicia Drake, The Beautiful Fall:  Lagerfeld, Saint Laurent, and Glorious Excess in 1970s Paris (Little, Brown)
• Terri Jentz, Strange Piece of Paradise (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Fiction

(Steve Lopez, Presenter)

• David Mitchell, Black Swan Green:  A Novel (Random House)
• Peter Orner, The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo:  A Novel (Little, Brown)
• Susan Straight, A Million Nightingales (Pantheon Books)
• Daniel Woodrell, Winter’s Bone:  A Novel (Little, Brown)
• A.B. Yehoshua, A Woman in Jerusalem [translated from the Hebrew by Hillel Halkin] (Harcourt)

Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction

(Jane Smiley, Presenter)

• Tony D’Souza, Whiteman (Harcourt)
• Lisa Fugard, Skinner’s Drift:  A Novel (Scribner)
• Jennifer Gilmore, Golden Country:  A Novel (Scribner)
• Alice Greenway, White Ghost Girls (Black Cat / Grove/Atlantic)
• Janis Cooke Newman, Mary:  A Novel (MacAdam/Cage Publishing)
  

History

(Geoffrey R. Stone, Presenter)

• Taylor Branch, At Canaan’s Edge:  America in the King Years, 1965-68 (Simon & Schuster)
• Niall Ferguson, The War of the World:  Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (Penguin Press)
• Nathaniel Philbrick, Mayflower:  A Story of Courage, Community, and War (Viking)
• John Tayman, The Colony (Lisa Drew / Scribner)
• Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower:  Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (Alfred A. Knopf)

Mystery/Thriller

(Lisa See, Presenter)

• Michael Connelly, Echo Park:  A Novel (Little, Brown)
• Patrick Neate, City of Tiny Lights (Riverhead Books)
• George Pelecanos, The Night Gardener:  A Novel (Little, Brown)
• Jess Walter, The Zero:  A Novel (HarperCollins)
• Don Winslow, The Winter of Frankie Machine (Alfred A. Knopf)

Poetry

(James Ragan, Presenter)

• Erin Belieu, Black Box (Copper Canyon Press)
• Adrian C. Louis, Logorrhea (TriQuarterly Books / Northwestern University Press)
• Thom Satterlee, Burning Wyclif (Texas Tech University Press)
• Frederick Seidel, Ooga-Booga (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Michael Waters, Darling Vulgarity (BOA Editions)

Science and Technology

(M.G. Lord, Presenter)

• Joyce E. Chaplin, The First Scientific American:  Benjamin Franklin and the Pursuit of Genius (Basic Books)
• Ann Gibbons, The First Human:  The Race to Discover Our Earliest Ancestors (Doubleday)
• Eric R. Kandel, In Search of Memory:  The Emergence of a New Science of Mind (W.W. Norton)
• Daniel J. Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music:  The Science of a Human Obsession (Dutton)
• Edward O. Wilson, The Creation:  An Appeal to Save Life on Earth (W.W. Norton)

Young Adult Fiction

(Jacqueline Woodson, Presenter)

• M.T. Anderson, The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume 1:  The Pox Party (Candlewick Press)
• Coe Booth, Tyrell (Push / Scholastic)
• John Green, An Abundance of Katherines (Dutton Books / Penguin Young Readers Group)
• Meg Rosoff, Just in Case (Wendy Lamb Books / Random House Children’s Books)
• Nancy Werlin, The Rules of Survival (Dial Books / Penguin Young Readers Group)

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