Adrienne Rich among book-award finalists

Adrienne Rich among book-award finalists

Associated Press

NEW YORK

Debut novelist Tea Obreht, longtime poet Adrienne Rich and Malcolm X biographer Manning Marable, who died on the eve of his book’s publication, were among the National Book Award finalists announced Wednesday. Winners will be revealed Nov. 16.

The list of 20 nominees, five each in four categories, included several published by small presses. Fiction finalist Edith Pearlman’s story collection “Binocular Vision” was released through Lookout Books in Wilmington, N.C., while Andrew Krivak’s “The Sojourn” came out from Bellevue Literary Press, based at the famous hospital in New York.

The 26-year-old Obreht was cited for “The Tiger’s Wife,” a haunting novel about displacement. Others in the fiction category were Julia Otsuka’s “The Buddha in the Attic” and Jesmyn Ward’s “Salvage the Bones.” Another widely praised first novel, Chad Harbach’s “The Art of Fielding,” was not selected. Neither was Jeffrey Eugenides’ “The Marriage Plot,” his first novel since the Pulitzer- winning “Middlesex.”

In nonfiction, Marable was nominated for his long-awaited “Malcolm X,” on which the Columbia University professor had worked for 20 years, only to die just before the book came out. Stephen Greenblatt was a finalist for “The Swerve,” his story of the Renaissance-era rediscovery of Lucretius’ “On the Nature of Things” and the Latin poem’s influence on Western thinking. The other nominees were Deborah Baker’s “The Convert” and two biographies of married couples: Mary Gabriel’s “Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution,” and Lauren Redniss’ “Marie & Pierre Curie, A Tale of Love and Fallout.”