“The March,” E.L. Doctorow’s fictional saga of Gen. William Sherman’s scorched-earth campaign against the Confederate South, was chosen Wednesday as a finalist for the National Book Award, along with Joan Didion’s memoir of grief following her husband’s death, “The Year of Magical Thinking.”
Poets W.S. Merwin and John Ashbery, also were finalists. Merwin was nominated for “Migration” and Ashbery for the collection “Where Shall I Wander.”
Christopher Sorrentino’s “Trance,” a novel based on the 1974 kidnapping of Patty Hearst, also was a fiction finalist, along with Mary Gaitskill’s “Veronica,” the story of a friendship between a young woman and an older, HIV-positive colleague.
Other nominees were William Vollmann’s “Europe Central,” set in the Soviet Union and Germany of the early 20th Century; and Rene Steinke’s “Holy Skirts,” the imagined life of the real Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven.
The non-fiction list also included Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn’s “102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers”; Adam Hochschild’s “Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves”; Alan Burdick’s “Out of Eden” and Leo Damrosch’s “Jean-Jacques Rousseau.”
The other poetry finalists were Frank Bidart’s “Star Dust,” Brendan Galvin’s “Habitat” and Vern Rutsala’s “The Moment’s Equation.”
Finalists for young people’s fiction were Walter Dean Myers’ “Autobiography of My Dead Brother,” Jeanne Birdsall’s “The Penderwicks,” Adele Griffin’s “Where I Want to Be,” Chris Lynch’s “Inexcusable” and Deborah Wiles’ “Each Little Bird That Sings.”
The winners will be announced Nov. 16 in New York.