A few of the nominees for the National Book Awards moved up Amazon’s sales rankings after yesterday’s announcement. The lesser-known, or most recently released titles made the greatest leaps.

Only two of the finalists are currently in the Amazon top ten. Junot Diaz’s This Is How You Lose Her (Penguin/Riverhead) is at #44 (up slightly from the day before). It’s moved down since a high of #16 after a string of reviews, culminating in the 9/20 NYT Book Review

The Round House, by Louise Erdrich, Harper is at #82. The nomination came shortly after its publication on 10/2 and a week of multiple reviews (Minneapolis Star Tribune, Kansas City Star, USA Today, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Miami Herald).

Third in sales rankings of the nominees is The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers, (Hachette/ Little, Brown), at #169, up slightly from the previous day and down from a high of #80 after this Sunday’s cover review in the  NYT BR.

After the jump, all the  finalists by Amazon Sales Rankings, excluding poetry, as of this morning (gathered via Publishers Marketplace‘s Book Tracker tool). Note that the NBA has far less effect on sales rankings for children’s titles than the Newbery/Caldecott/Printz Awards. Most of those winners and honorees moved into the top 100 immediately following their announcements.

National Book Award Finalists by Amazon Rankings (as of 8 a.m. 10/11/12)

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Below is the video of yesterday’s announcement of the National Book Awards finalists.

Let’s hope the Today Show takes the hint and returns to featuring the Newbery/Caldecott winners the day after they are announced.

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The Poetry Finalists, just announced on Morning Joe: (annotations from the National Book Foundation)

David Ferry
Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations
University of Chicago Press

The passionate nature and originality of Ferry’s poems modulates beautifully between plainspoken high eloquence and colloquial vigor, making his distinctive speech one of the most interesting and ravishing achievements of the past half century

Cynthia Huntington
Heavenly Bodies
Southern Illinois University Press

In this blistering collection of lyric poems, Cynthia Huntington gives an intimate view of the sexual revolution and rebellion in a time before the rise of feminism.

Tim Seibles
Fast Animal
Etruscan Press

The newest collection from one of America’s foremost African-American poets threads the journey from youthful innocence to the whittled-hard awareness of adulthood

Alan Shapiro
Night of the Republic
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

In Night of the Republic, Alan Shapiro takes us on an unsettling night tour of America’s public places―a gas station restroom, a shoe store, a convention hall, and a race track, among other locations―and in stark, Edward Hopper-like imagery reveals the surreal and dreamlike features of these familiar but empty night spaces.

Susan Wheeler
Meme
University of Iowa Press

A meme is a unit of thought replicated by imitation. Occupy Wall Street is a meme, as are internet ideas and images that go viral. But what could be more potent memes than those passed down by parents to their children? Susan Wheeler reconstructs her mother’s voice—down to its cynicism and its mid-twentieth-century Midwestern vernacular—in “The Maud Poems,” a voice that takes a more aggressive, vituperative turn in “The Devil—or —The Introjects.”

The Nonfiction Finalists, just announced on Morning Joe: (annotations from the National Book Foundation)

Anne Applebaum
Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1945-1956
RH/Doubleday

Iron Curtain describes how the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe were created and what daily life was like once they were complete, how political parties, the church, the media, young people’s organizations―the institutions of civil society on every level―were eviscerated, how the secret police services were organized, how ethnic cleansing was carried out, and how some people were forced to collaborate while others managed to resist.

Katherine Boo
Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity
Random House

Annawadi is a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport. As India starts to prosper, Annawadians are electric with hope: Individual stories of courage set against the backdrop of tensions over religion, caste, sex, power and economic envy.

Robert A. Caro
The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume 4
RH/Knopf

The fourth installment in Robert Caro’s monumental work on President Lyndon Johnson, The Passage of Power follows Johnson through both the most frustrating and the most triumphant periods of his career: 1958 to 1964

Domingo Martinez
The Boy Kings of Texas
Globe Pequot Press/Lyons Press

Domingo Martinez lays bare his interior and exterior worlds as he struggles to make sense of the violent and the ugly, along with the beautiful and the loving, in a Texas border town in the 1980s. First Book

Anthony Shadid
House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

In the spring of 2011, when Anthony Shadid—one of four New York Times reporters captured in Libya as the region erupted—was freed, he went to his ancestral home, Marjayoun, Lebanon…to an ancient estate built by his great-grandfather, a place filled with memories of a lost era when the Middle East was a world of grace, grandeur, and unexpected departures, and tells the story of the house’s re-creation, revealing its mysteries and recovering the lives that have passed through it. Shadid died on February 16, 2012 from an asthma attack while on assignment on the Syrian border.

Just announced on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, the National Book Awards finalists for fiction (annotations from the National Book Foundation):

This Is How You Lose Her, Junot Diaz, Penguin/Riverhead

Diaz’s second collection of short stories featuring the alter ego “Yunior”, who as a boy and young man was the central character in his first collection “Drown”. His voice is distinctive, mixing popular and high culture, comic books and literature.

The Yellow Birds, Kevin Powers, Hachette/ Little, Brown

In Al Tafar, Iraq, twenty-one-year-old Private Bartle and eighteen-year-old Private Murphy cling to life as their platoon launches a bloody battle for the city. First Novel

The Round House, Louise Erdrich, Harper

One Sunday in the spring of 1988, a woman living on a reservation in North Dakota is attacked. The details of the crime are slow to surface as Geraldine Coutts is traumatized and reluctant to relive or reveal what happened, either to the police or to her husband, Bazil, and thirteen-year-old son, Joe.

Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, Ben Fountain, HarperCollins/Ecco

After a ferocious firefight with Iraqi insurgents at “the battle of Al-Ansakar Canal”—three minutes and forty-three seconds of intense warfare caught on tape by an embedded Fox News crew—has transformed the eight surviving men of Bravo Squad into America’s most sought-after heroes, the Bush administration has sent them on a media-intensive nationwide Victory Tour to reinvigorate public support for the war, including being featured as part of the halftime show at a Dallas Cowboys game, alongside the superstar pop group Destiny’s Child. First Novel

A Hologram for the King, Dave Eggers, McSweeney’s Books

In a rising Saudi Arabian city, far from weary, recession-scarred America, a struggling businessman pursues a last-ditch attempt to stave off foreclosure, pay his daughter’s college tuition, and finally do something great, with mixed results.

The finalists for the National Book Awards are being announced on MSNBC’s Morning Joe.

First up, the kids titles (sorry “Young People’s Literature”). Annotations from the National Book Foundation:

Goblin Secrets, William Alexander, S&S.Margaret K. McElderry

Rownie, the youngest in Graba the witchworker’s household of stray children, escapes and goes looking for his missing brother. Along the way he falls in with a troupe of theatrical goblins and learns the secret origins of masks.

Out of Reach, Carrie Arcos, S&S/Simon Pulse

Rachel has always idolized her older brother Micah. He struggles with addiction, but she tells herself that he’s in control. And she almost believes it. Until the night that Micah doesn’t come home.

Never Fall Down,  Patricia McCormick, HarperCollins/Balzer + Bray

When the Khmer Rouge arrive at his hometown in Cambodia, Arn is just a kid, dancing to rock ‘n’ roll, hustling for spare change, and selling ice cream with his brother. But after the soldiers march the entire population into the countryside, Arn is separated from his family and assigned to a labor camp. One day, the soldiers ask if any of the kids can play an instrument. In order to survive, Arn must quickly master the strange revolutionary songs the soldiers demand. This will save his life, but it will also pull him into the very center of what we know today as the Killing Fields.

Endangered, Eliot Schrefer, Scholastic

When Sophie has to visit her mother at her sanctuary for bonobos in Congo, she’s not thrilled to be there. It’s her mother’s passion, and Sophie doesn’t want to have anything to do with it. At least not until Otto, an infant bonobo, comes into her life, and for the first time she feels the bond a human can have with an animal.

Bomb: The Race to Build–and Steal–the World’s Most Dangerous Weapon, Steve Sheinkin, Macmillan/Flash Point

In December of 1938, a chemist in a German laboratory made a shocking discovery: When placed next to radioactive material, a Uranium atom split in two. That simple discovery launched a scientific race that spanned three continents. This is the story of the plotting, risk-taking, deceit, and genius that created the world’s most formidable weapon. This is the story of the atomic bomb.

Former Penn State coach Jerry Sandusky was sentenced to at least 30 years in prison today for child molestation.

A memoir, Silent No More, (RH/Ballantine), written by “Victim One” along with his mother and pyschologist, is being released on Oct. 23rd. “Victim One” testified dramatically at the Sandusky trial. His identity has been kept a secret (thus no cover is available yet), but will be revealed when he is interviewed by ABC’s Chris Cuomo on the day of the book’s release. The interview will air on World News and Nightline that night and on Good Morning America the following day.

In a recorded prison statement released yesterday, Sandusky referred to Victim #1, saying “A young man who was dramatic, a veteran accuser who always sought attention started everything. He was joined by a well-orchestrated effort of the media, investigators, the system, Penn State, psychologists, civil attorneys and other accusers.”

The National Book Awards gets some needed media attention tomorrow. Although MSNBC’s Morning Joe, isn’t known for its book coverage, it will be the venue for the announcement of the Awards finalists tomorrow, by David Steinberger, publisher of Perseus Books, and chair of the National Book Foundation’s Board of Directors. The winners will be announced on Nov. 14.

No news on time; the show airs from 6:00 to 9:00 am ET. We will post the video when it is available

GoodReads proves once again that reading stats can be fun (click on the image, or here, to find out which side is more likely to  be a fan of Atlas Shrugged).

From space to vaginas to the super-rich, Colbert shows quite a range this week.

Tonight, Oct. 8

Former astronaut Mark Kelly on his new children’s book, Mousetronaut: Based on a (Partially) True Story (Simon & Schuster/Wiseman; 10/9/12).

Wednesday, Oct. 9

Naomi Wolf, Vagina: A New Biography (Harper/Ecco; 8/24/12).

Thursday, Oct. 10

Chrystia Freeland, Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else (Penguin Press, 10/11/12).

Songwriter/guitarist for The Who, Pete Townshend talked about his memoir, Who I Am, which releases today (Harper; HarperAudio; and, how telling is this? It is also available in larger print from HarperLuxe) on the Today Show this morning.

For those who want the shorthand version, the Daily Beast offers a “speed read” of the book’s highlights.

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One of the buzz books from BEA, the debut novel, The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers (Hachette/Little, Brown; Thorndike Press; Hachette Audio) was featured on the cover of Sunday’s New York Times Book Review. The author enlisted in the Army at 17 and served in Iraq. The novel features a young American soldier’s life in the Army, from basic training, through fighting in Iraq, confinement in a military prison and his difficult reentry into civilian life.

The review is not completely positive, but ends, “Kevin Powers has something to say, something deeply moving about the frailty of man and the brutality of war, and we should all lean closer and listen.”

The author also appeared on the PBS NewsHour on Friday.

The Yellow Birds rose to #101 on Amazon’s sales rankings over the weekend. Some libraries are showing heavy holds.

Watch Conversation: Kevin Powers, Author of ‘The Yellow Birds’ on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.

Powers also read from his book on the show, watch the video here.

A feature on NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday propelled Timothy Egan’s book about the 19th C photographer Edward Curtis up to #33 on Amazon’s sales rankings.

Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; Dreamscape Audio) describes how Curtis became obsessed with photographing Native Americans after stumbling upon Princess Angeline, the daughter of Chief Seattle, living not only in extreme poverty but illegally, since Seattle had banned Native Americans from living within the boundaries of the city named after her father.

Unsurprisingly, holds are heaviest in the Northwest.

Egan has written six books including the National Book Award winner The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl (HMH, 2005).

His previous book, published in 2009, is The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America.

Pitch Perfect, the movie about a college a capella group, opening today, sounds like it has the makings of a hit. People analyzes its appeal, “Though Pitch is wallpaperd with cliches and aimed at folks who worship Glee, it’s funny enough … to amuse even those of us who like our music less earnest and back by a band.” The critics, as rounded up by Rotten Tomatoes, generally agree. Just a few (including the New York Times) were not amused.

Many may be surprised to hear that the movie is based on the 2008 nonfiction book by GQ editor, Mickey Rapkin, now re-released as a tie-in. Most libraries own just a few copies of the original, with some holds.

Pitch Perfect (movie tie-in): The Quest for Collegiate A Cappella Glory Mickey Rapkin Retail Price: $16.00 Paperback: 288 pages Publisher: Penguin/Gotham – (2012-09-04) ISBN / EAN: 1592408214 / 9781592408214

The excitement in the upcoming week is in nonfiction, starting with a new collection of Beatle John Lennon‘s private letters, a new Barbra Streisand bio by William J. Mann, and a biography of photographer Edward Curtis by Timothy Egan, along with a YA adaptation of Navy Seal Eric Greitens‘s bestselling memoir. Usual suspects include James Patterson (with Marshall Karp), Robert K. Morgan and the man known as the “Stephen King of children’s literature,” R L Stein, delivers his first adult horror novel (thanks for the correction; this is actually his second book for adults, after his 1995 title, Superstitious).

Nonfiction

The John Lennon Letters by John Lennon, edited by Hunter Davies (Hachette/Little, Brown; Hachette Audio) collects the beloved Beatles private letters to family, friends, strangers, and lovers from every point in his life, with annotations by Hunter Davies, author of  the authorized biography The Beatles (1968).

Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand by William J. Mann (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; Thorndike Large Print) focuses on the singer’s breakthrough years in the Sixties, when she starred in Funny Girl on Broadway and recorded three platinum albums. PW says, “Combining extensive interviews (some anonymous) and exhaustive archival research, Mann balances intimate personal details with audience reactions and critical acclaim to etch an indelible portrait of the artist as a young woman.”

Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis by Timothy Egan (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; Dreamscape Audio) is the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer’s account of 19th C portrait photographer Edward Curtis, who gave up a thriving career to chronicle more than 80 Native American tribes before their way of life disappeared. The result was Curtis’s classic 20-volume set, The North American Indian, which took 30 years to complete and left him divorced and destitute. Kirkus says, “Lucent prose illuminates a man obscured for years in history’s shadows.”

Jesus Today: Experience Hope Through His Prescence by Sarah Young (HarperCollins/Thomas Nelson) is the second book from the missionary and breakout author of Jesus Calling.

There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra by Chinua Achebe (Penguin Press; Penguin Audiobooks) blends political analysis, history, and personal reminiscences of the Nigerian civil war of 1967-70 in a coming of age memoir. The author best known for the novel Things Fall Apart, which has sold ten million copies worldwide since 1958. Kirkus says, “a powerful memoir/document of a terrible conflict and its toll on the people who endured it.”

Nonfiction – Young Adult

The Warrior’s Heart by Eric Greitens (HMH Young Readers) adapts the author’s bestseller The Heart and the Fist for teen readers, focusing on the youthful adventures that led him to become a humanitarian and a Navy SEAL. Kirkus says Greitens retraces his coming of age “with well-deserved pride but not self-aggrandizement,” and says it’s “as thought provoking as it is entertaining.”

Usual Suspects

NYPD Red by James Patterson and Marshall Karp (Hachette/Little, Brown; Little Brown Large Print; Hachette Audio) finds the NYPD on high alert when a deranged killer strikes a series of red carpet celebrity events.

Red Rain by R L Stein (S&S/Touchstone; Simon & Schuster Audio) is the first second adult horror novel by the bestselling author of the  Goosebumps and Fear Street series, involving a hurricane and psychopath. PW says it “fails to compel.”