NATIONAL BOOK AWARD NOMINEES ANNOUNCED

The National Book Foundation has selected 20 finalists for the 2004 National Book Awards. Among the authors are a first novelist, two distinguished historians, five prolific and established poets, two previous finalists, and one government commission.

The finalists in the nonfiction category are “Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age” by Kevin Boyle (Henry Holt); “Washington’s Crossing” by David Hackett Fischer (Oxford University Press); “Life on the Outside: The Prison Odyssey of Elaine Bartlett” by Jennifer Gonnerman (Farrar, Straus & Giroux); “Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare” by Stephen Greenblatt (W.W. Norton & Company); and “The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, Authorized Edition” (W.W. Norton & Company).

Finalists in the poetry category are “Shoah Train” by William Heyen (Etruscan Press); “Collected Poems” by Donald Justice (Alfred A. Knopf); “The Rest of Love” by Carl Phillips (Farrar, Straus & Giroux); “Goest” by Cole Swensen (Alice James Books); and “Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems, 1965-2003” by Jean Valentine (Wesleyan University Press).

Finalists in the fiction category are “Madeleine is Sleeping” by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum (Harcourt); “Florida” by Christine Schutt (TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press); “Ideas of Heaven: A Ring of Stories” by Joan Silber (W.W. Norton & Company); “The News from Paraguay” by Lily Tuck (HarperCollinsPublishers); and “Our Kind: A Novel in Stories” by Kate Walbert (Scribner).

The winners in each category will be announced on November 17 at a benefit dinner and ceremony at the Marriott Marquis on 46th St. at Eighth Avenue, which will be hosted by Garrison Keillor.