2016 NBCC Book Award Finalists
—for books published in 2015
The Light of the World by Elizabeth Alexander (Grand Central Publishing)
The Odd Woman and the City by Vivian Gornick (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Bettyville by George Hodgman (Viking)
Negroland by Margo Jefferson (Pantheon)
H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald (Grove Press)
Fortune’s Fool: The Life of John Wilkes Booth by Terry Alford (Oxford University Press)
Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley by Charlotte Gordon (Random House)
Custer’s Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America by T.J. Stiles (Alfred A. Knopf)
Stalin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva by Rosemary Sullivan (Harper)
Dietrich and Riefenstahl: Hollywood, Berlin, and a Century in Two Lives by Karin Wieland and Shelly Frisch (Liveright)
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates (Spiegel & Grau)
Eternity’s Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake by Leo Damrosch (Yale University Press)
The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson (Graywolf)
On Elizabeth Bishop by Colm Tóibín (Princeton University Press)
The Nearest Thing to Life by James Wood (Brandeis University Press)
The Sellout by Paul Beatty (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff (Riverhead)
The Story of My Teeth by Valeria Luisella (Coffee House Press)
The Tsar of Love and Techno by Anthony Marra (Hogarth)
Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh (Penguin Press)
SPQR: A History of Rome by Mary Beard (Liveright)
Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America by Ari Berman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America by Jill Leovy (Spiegel & Grau)
Dreamland: The True Story of America’s Opiate Epidemic by Sam Quinones (Bloomsbury)
What the Eye Hears: A History of Tap Dancing by Brian Seibert (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Catalogue of Unabashed Gratitude by Ross Gay (University of Pittsburgh Press)
How to Be Drawn by Terrance Hayes (Penguin)
Bright Dead Things by Ada Limón (Milkweed Editions)
Parallax and Selected Poems by Sinéad Morrissey (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford by Frank Stanford (Copper Canyon Press).
