National Book Critics Circle 2013 Nominees Announced

The list of the 2013 National Book Critics Circle nominees was announced Monday. The NBCC winners of the different categories — fiction, nonfiction, autobiography, biography, poetry and criticism — will be unveiled at an event at the New School in New York on Feb. 28.

Renowned female authors, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, will be honored with the lifetime achievement award.

Here is the complete list:

FICTION

“HHhH,” by Laurent Binet. Translated by Sam Taylor (Farrar Straus Giroux)

“Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk,” by Ben Fountain (Ecco)

“The Orphan Master’s Son,” by Adam Johnson (Random House)

“Magnificence,” by Lydia Millet (Norton)

“NW,” by Zadie Smith (The Penguin Press)

NONFICTION

“Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity,” by Katherine Boo (Random House)

“Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power,” by Steve Coll (The Penguin Press)

“Why Does the World Exist? An Existential Detective Story,” by Jim Holt (Liveright/Norton)

“Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic,” by David Quammen (Norton)

“Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity,” by Andrew Solomon (Scribner)

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

“The Distance Between Us,” by Reyna Grande (Atria)

“My Poets,” by Maureen N. McLane (FSG)

“House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East,” by Anthony Shadid (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

“Swimming Studies,” by Leanne Shapton (Blue Rider)

“In the House of the Interpreter,” by Ngugi wa Thiong’o (Pantheon)

BIOGRAPHY

“The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson,” by Robert A. Caro (Knopf)

“All We Know: Three Lives,” by Lisa Cohen (FSG)

“Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece,” by Michael Gorra (Liveright)

“Robert Duncan, The Ambassador from Venus: A Biography,” by Lisa Jarnot (Univ. of California Press)

“The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo,” by Tom Reiss (Crown)

CRITICISM

“Reinventing Bach,” by Paul Elie (FSG)

“Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture,” by Daniel Mendelsohn (New York Review Books)

“Madness, Rack, and Honey,” by Mary Ruefle (Wave)

“Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights,” by Marina Warner (Belknap /Harvard)

“The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness,” by Kevin Young (Graywolf)

POETRY

“Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations,” by David Ferry (Univ. of Chicago)

“On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths,” by Lucia Perillo (Copper Canyon)

“Fragile Acts,” by Allan Peterson (McSweeney’s)

“Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys,” by D. A. Powell (Graywolf)

“Olives,” by A. E. Stallings (TriQuarterly/Northwestern)