And the nominees are ...

… well, see for yourself: The finalists for this year’s National Book Critics Circle Awards are:
Fiction
E.L. Doctorow, The March (Random House)
Mary Gaitskill, Veronica (Pantheon)
Andrea Levy, Small Island (Picador)
Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (Alfred A. Knopf)
William Vollman, Europe Central (Viking)
General Nonfiction
Svetlana Alexievich, Voices From Chernobyl: The Oral History ofa Nuclear Disaster (Dalkey Archive Press)
Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of theMiddle East (Alfred A. Knopf)
Ellen Meloy, Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild(Pantheon)
Caroline Moorehead, Human Cargo: A Journey Among Refugees (HenryHolt/Metropolitan Books)
Anthony Shadid, Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War (Henry Holt)
Biography
Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, American Prometheus: The Triumphand Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Alfred A. Knopf)
Carolyn Burke, Lee Miller: A Life (Alfred A. Knopf)
Jonathan Coe, Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B.S. Johnson(Continuum International)
Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius ofAbraham Lincoln (Simon & Schuster)
Ron Powers, Mark Twain: A Life (Free Press)
Autobiography
Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (Alfred A. Knopf)
Francine du Plessix Gray, Them: A Memoir of Parents (PenguinPress)
Judith Moore, Fat Girl: A True Story (Gotham Books)
Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories and the City (Alfred A. Knopf)
Vikram Seth, Two Lives (HarperCollins)
Criticism
Hal Crowther, Gather at the River: Notes from the Post-millennial South (Louisiana State Univ. Press)
Arthur Danto, Unnatural Wonders (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
William Logan, The Undiscovered Country: Poetry in the Age of Tin (Columbia University Press)
John Updike, Still Looking: Essays on American Art (Alfred A.Knopf)
Eliot Weinberger, What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles (NewDirections)
Poetry
Simon Armitage, The Shout (Harcourt)
Manuel Blas de Luna, Bent to Earth (Carnegie Mellon Univ. Press)
Jack Gilbert, Refusing Heaven (Alfred A. Knopf)
Richard Siken, Crush (Yale University Press)
Ron Slate, The Incentive of the Maggot (Houghton Mifflin/MarinerBooks)

The winners will be announced on March 3 at the organization’s 32d annual awards ceremony.

At the ceremony, the NBCC will also present the Ivan SandrofLifetime Achievement Award to Bill Henderson, founder of the PushcartPress in Wainscot, NY and editor of the annual Pushcart Prize anthology.

In addition, the NBCC will award its Nona Balakian Citation forExcellence in Reviewing to Wyatt Mason, a contributor to Harper'sMagazine, The New Yorker and The New Republic. The award, named after a longtime supporter of the organization and an editor at the New YorkTimes Book Review, is presented annually to a member who has demonstrated the highest critical standards in his or her work. The other finalists were Allen Barra, Katherine A. Powers and Carlin Romano.

The awards ceremony will be held on Friday, March 3, in theTishman Auditorium at the New School, 66 West 12th Street, New York, NY,at 6:00 p.m. The event is free and open to the public. A gala receptionfollows directly at the New School and costs $40.

Nominees will participate in a reading from their works onThursday, March 2, at the Tishman Auditorium, at 6:00 p.m. This is also free and open to the public.