One-third of the finalists for the awards are small press books. Bravo, N.B.C.C.!
While I’d love to see Paul Beatty’s The Sellout win the fiction award, and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me the criticism, tonight, I’m rooting for the small presses: the following books in their respective categories:
Poetry:
Ross Gay, Catalogue of Unabashed Gratitude (University of Pittsburgh Press)
Ada Limón, Bright Dead Things (Milkweed Editions)
Frank Stanford, What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford (Copper Canyon Press)
Criticism:
Leo Damrosch, Eternity’s Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake (Yale University Press)
Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts (Graywolf)
Colm Tóibín, On Elizabeth Bishop (Princeton University Press)
Autobiography:
Helen Macdonald, H Is for Hawk (Grove Press)
Biography:
Terry Alford, Fortune’s Fool: The Life of John Wilkes Booth (Oxford University Press)
Fiction:
Valeria Luiselli, The Story of My Teeth, translated by Christina MacSweeney (Coffee House Press)