Rebels score coup with book award nominations

Rebels old and young were honored this year by the National Book Critics Circle, which announced its awards nominees Monday.

Ninety-one-year-old Studs Terkel, the oral historian and self-described champion of the “uncelebrated,” will receive a lifetime achievement prize. And competitive nominations went to two books released by McSweeney’s, an irreverent publishing house founded by bestselling author Dave Eggers.

Judges deserve a prize just for getting through one McSweeney’s nominee: “Rising Up and Rising Down,” William T. Vollman’s seven-volume, 3,300-page examination of violence in human history, on sale through the McSweeney’s website “for a special limited-time discounted price of $100.”

Meanwhile, critics bypassed some of the year’s most talked-about books, including the English translation of Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s memoir, “Living to Tell the Tale,” and Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee’s new novel, “Elizabeth Costello.” While the National Book Awards are restricted to U.S. authors, NBCC members can nominate any book published in English during the previous year.

Winners will be announced March 4 in New York.

Edward P. Jones’ “The Known World,” a National Book Award finalist, was among the fiction nominees, and Anne Applebaum’s “Gulag,” another NBA finalist, was cited in the general nonfiction category.

Monica Ali’s “Brick Lane,” Caryl Phillips’ “A Distant Shore,” Richard Powers’ “The Time of Our Singing” and Tobias Wolff’s “Old School” were the other fiction nominees.

Also nominated for nonfiction were Carolyn Alexander’s “The Bounty,” Paul Hendrickson’s “Sons of Mississippi” and Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s “Random House.”

George Marsden was a biography-autobiography finalist for “Jonathan Edwards.” Other nominees included Blake Bailey’s “A Tragic Honesty,” about the late fiction writer Richard Yates; Paul Elie’s “The Life You Save May Be Your Own”; Carol Loeb Schloss’ “Lucia Joyce”; and William Taubman’s “Khrushchev: The Man and His Era.”

The National Book Critics Circle, founded in 1974, is a not-for-profit organization of about 750 book editors and critics. Its awards are prestigious, though not profitable, offering no cash prizes.