Caro, Boo among finalists for book critics prize

NEW YORK Robert Caro, Katherine Boo and the late Anthony Shadid are among the finalists for the National Book Critics Circle prize.

Boo already won the National Book Award for her nonfiction account of a Mumbai community, "Beyond the Beautiful Forevers," while Caro was a finalist for his latest Lyndon Johnson book, "The Passage of Power," and Shadid for his memoir "House of Stone."

Zadie Smith's "NW" and National Book Award contender Ben Fountain's "Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk" were among the fiction nominees.

Thirty authors in six competitive categories were announced Monday, with stories set everywhere from Texas to London to North Korea.

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Some of last year's critical favorites were bypassed, including Junot Diaz's "This Is How You Lose Her" and David Nasaw's "The Patriarch."

Fiction
Laurent Binet, "HHhH (tr. by Sam Taylor)" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Ben Fountain, "Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk" (Ecco)
Adam Johnson, "The Orphan Master's Son" (Random House)
Lydia Millet, "Magnificence" (W. W. Norton)
Zadie Smith, "NW" (Penguin Press)

Nonfiction
Katherine Boo, "Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity" (Random House)
Steve Coll, "Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power" (Penguin Press)
Jim Holt, "Why Does the World Exist? An Existential Detective Story" (A Liveright Book: W. W. Norton)
David Quammen, "Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic" (W.W. Norton)
Andrew Solomon, "Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity" (Scribner)

Autobiography:
Reyna Grande, "The Distance Between Us" (Atria Books)
Maureen N. McLane, "My Poets: (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Anthony Shadid, "House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East" (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Leanne Shapton, "Swimming Studies" (Blue Rider Press)
Ngugi wa Thiong'o, "In the House of the Interpreter" (Pantheon)

Biography
Robert A. Caro, "The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson" (Alfred A. Knopf)
Lisa Cohen, "All We Know: Three Lives" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Michael Gorra, "Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece" (A Liveright Book: W. W. Norton)
Lisa Jarnot, "Robert Duncan, The Ambassador from Venus: A Biography" (University of California Press)
Tom Reiss, "The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo" (Crown Publishers)

Criticism
Paul Elie, "Reinventing Bach" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Daniel Mendelsohn, "Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture" (New York Review Books)
Mary Ruefle, "Madness, Rack, and Honey" (Wave Books)
Marina Warner, "Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights" (Belknap Press: Harvard University Press)
Kevin Young, "The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness" (Graywolf Press)

Poetry
David Ferry, "Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations" (University of Chicago Press)
Lucia Perillo, "On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths" (Copper Canyon Press)
Allan Peterson, "Fragile Acts" (McSweeney's Books)
D. A. Powell, "Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys" (Graywolf Press)
A. E. Stallings, "Olives" (Triquarterly: Northwestern University Press)

No cash prizes will be given to competitive winners, to be announced Feb. 27. But $1,000 will be divided between Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, winners of the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award for their "groundbreaking work in feminist criticism."

William Deresiewicz, who writes for The Nation and The New Republic among others, will receive the Nona A. Balakian Citation for "excellence in reviewing."