Finalists for the 2012 National Book Awards were named this morning on MSNBC's Morning Joe program by David Steinberger, chairman of the National Book Foundation's board of directors. Winners will be announced November 14 in New York City. This year's contenders are:
Fiction
This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz (Riverhead)
A Hologram for the King by Dave Eggers (McSweeney's)
The Round House by Louise Erdrich (Harper)
Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain (Ecco)
The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers (Little, Brown)
Nonfiction
Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1945-1956 by Anne Applebaum (Doubleday)
Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo (Random House)
The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume 4 by Robert A. Caro (Knopf)
The Boy Kings of Texas by Domingo Martinez (Lyons Press)
House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East by Anthony Shadid (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Poetry
Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations by David Ferry (University of Chicago Press)
Heavenly Bodies by Cynthia Huntington (Southern Illinois University Press)
Fast Animal by Tim Seibles (Etruscan Press)
Night of the Republic by Alan Shapiro (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Meme by Susan Wheeler (University of Iowa Press)
Young People's Literature
Goblin Secrets by William Alexander (Margaret K. McElderry Books)
Out of Reach by Carrie Arcos (Simon Pulse)
Never Fall Down by Patricia McCormick (Balzer + Bray)
Endangered by Eliot Schrefer (Scholastic)
Bomb: The Race to Build--and Steal--the World's Most Dangerous Weapon by Steve Sheinkin (Flash Point/Roaring Brook)