Below are videos of the National Book Awards, presented last night, with time notations.

Host John Lithgow said of Nikky Finney’s electrifying acceptance of the poetry award (Part Two, beginning at 17:30), “That was the best acceptance speech for anything I’ve ever heard in my life,”  He worried that the winners who followed her would be intimidated, but by the end, marveled, “You people are good at this.”

Introducing the award for Young People’s Literature, Panel Chair Marc Aronson noted, “It was a bad year for muffled phone conversations with disastrous consequences.” (Part Two, 10:00)

Part One:

Intro by host, John Lithgow

(7:50) — Walter Mosley presents the Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community to bookseller Mitchell Kaplan, Books & Books.

(24:50) — Ann Lauterbach presents the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters to poet John Ashberry.

Part Two:

(1:20) — Introduction by David Steinberger, President and CEO Perseus Books Group and Chairman of the National Book Foundation Board of Directors.

(10:00) — Marc Aronson, chair of the Young People’s Literature Award Panel presents the award to Thanhha Lai, Inside Out & Back Again, (Harper, 1/21/11).

(13:40) — Elizabeth Alexander chair of the Poetry Award Panel presents the award to Nikky Finney, Head Off & Split, (TriQuarterly/Northwestern University Press).

(23:40) — Alice Kaplan, Nonfiction Award Panel Chair presents the award to Stephen Greenblatt, for The Swerve: How the World Became Modern
(Norton, 9/26/11)  – consumer review links.

(32:00) — Deirdre McNamer Fiction Panel Chair, presents the award to  Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones, (Bloomsbury USA,  8/30/11); consumer review links.

The National Book Awards will be Webcast live tomorrow evening, 8 p.m., ET. Below are the finalists, with links to consumer reviews, where available:

Fiction

Andrew Krivak, The Sojourn, (Bellevue Literary Press); review links

Téa Obreht, The Tiger’s Wife, (Random House) – reviewed the most widely of all the finalists – links and excerpts here

Julie Otsuka, The Buddha in the Attic, (Knopf/ Random House) – review links

Edith Pearlman, Binocular Vision, (Lookout Books/Department of Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington) – review links

Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones, (Bloomsbury USA) – review links

Nonfiction

Deborah Baker, The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism, (Graywolf Press) – review links

Mary Gabriel, Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution, (Little, Brown/Hachette) – review links

Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, (Norton) – review links

Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, (Viking/Penguin) – review links

Lauren Redniss, Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie, A Tale of Love and Fallout, (It Books/HarperCollins) – review links

Young People’s Literature

Franny Billingsley, Chime, (Dial/Penguin)

Debby Dahl Edwardson, My Name Is Not Easy, (Marshall Cavendish)

Thanhha Lai, Inside Out and Back Again, (Harper)

Albert Marrin, Flesh and Blood So Cheap: The Triangle Fire and Its Legacy, (Knopf/Random House Children’s Books)

Gary D. Schmidt, Okay for Now, (Clarion/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) –  NYT Book Review

Poetry 

Nikky Finney, Head Off & Split, (TriQuarterly/Northwestern University Press) – Interview

Yusef Komunyakaa, The Chameleon Couch, (FSG/Macmillan)

Carl Phillips, Double Shadow, (FSG/Macmillan) – Chicago Tribune review

Adrienne Rich, Tonight No Poetry Will Serve: Poems 2007-2010, (Norton) – San Francisco Chronicle review

Bruce Smith, Devotions, (University of Chicago Press) – review, NYT BR 

The National Book Awards debacle, as seen through the eyes of Xtranormal (via Entertainment Weekly‘s blog, “Shelf Life“).

The story of the National Book Foundation’s flip-flops on whether Lauren Myracle’s Shine (Amulet/Abrams, 9780810984172) would be included on the list of finalists for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature is being called everything from a “mix-up” to a “debacle” and has been covered in a wide range of publications, from the author’s hometown paper, The Denver Post, to the Hindustan Times.

Myracle spoke to NPR’s All Things Considered last night and, earlier, to Vanity Fair. While she says the NBA’a request that she withdraw Shine from consideration made her feel like “the rug had been pulled out” from under her feet, one good thing has come from it. The National Book Foundation agreed to her suggestion that they donate $5,000 to the Matthew Shepard Foundation, which fights against hate crimes.

Fellow YA author Libba Bray posted a self-described “rant” on her blog, saying, “a classy, kind, wonderful person and writer was subjected to a week of anguish in full view of the world in order to preserve somebody’s overweening ego.” She urged readers to “order Shine from your local bookstore or request it from your local library today. And if you’re tweeting this, please use the hashtag #ISupportShine.”

On Twitter, an additional hashtag, #BuyShine has also emerged.

The book has risen to #534 on Amazon’s sales rankings, higher than any of the titles on the official list:

• # 1,936    Gary D. Schmidt  – Okay for Now – Clarion/HMH, 9780547152608
• #2,326    Debby Dahl Edwardson  – My Name is Not Easy – Marshall Cavendish, 9780761459804
• #3,981    Franny Billingsley – Chime – Dial Books, 9780803735521
• #3,987    Thanhha Lai – Inside Out & Back Again – Harper, 9780061962783
• # 5,899    Albert Marrin –  Flesh & Blood So Cheap: The Triangle Fire and Its Legacy – Alfred A. Knopf, 9780375868894

After being short-listed four times, Julian Barnes has finally won the Booker Prize, an honor he once dismissed as “posh bingo,” for The Sense of an Ending. The news sent the book to #8 on Amazon’s sales rankings.

Originally scheduled for publication in January, the book was recently moved up to the beginning of October.

Earlier this year, the head of the judging committee, spy novelist Stella Rimington, said  she wanted people “to buy [the titles on the shortlist] and read them, not buy them and admire them,” setting off a round of controversy and launching a new, competing prize, pointedly named the Literature Prize.

Even so, The Sense of an Ending leans more towards “Literature” than towards what is commonly considered “readable.” Michiko Kakutani, reviewing it in the New York Times found it, “…dense with philosophical ideas and more clever than emotionally satisfying. Still, it manages to create genuine suspense as a sort of psychological detective story” and the San Francisco Chronicle said, “At 163 pages, Julian Barnes’ latest novel…is the longest book I have ever read,” although it invites and rewards rereading.

Other U.S reviews:

Entertainment Weekly, by Stephan Lee (Oct. 11, 2011)

Washington Post, by Jeff Turrentine (Oct. 11, 2011)

Cleveland Plain Dealer, by John Freeman (Oct. 13, 2011)

Wall Street Journal, by Sam Sacks (Oct. 17, 2011)

The Sense of an Ending Julian Barnes Retail Price: $23.95 Hardcover: 176 pages Publisher: Knopf – (2011-10-05) ISBN / EAN: 0307957128 / 9780307957122

After learning that she was a nominee for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature for her book Shine, Lauren Myracle got the disappointing news that the announcement was a mistake. The nominee was supposed to be the sound alike Chime by Franny Billingsley, but the committee decided to go ahead and include both books.

Now, according to a report by the Associated Press, the committee has changed their minds again and Myracle has complied with a request from NBA to withdraw Shine from consideration.

Finalists for the National Book Awards were announced yesterday. Winners will be announced at The National Book Awards Ceremony on Wednesday, November 16, 2011, in New York City. It will be hosted by actor, and author, John Lithgow.

In fiction, it’s no surprise that the most celebrated literary debut of the year and the Orange Prize winner, Téa Obreht ‘s The Tiger’s Wife is a finalist. Other celebrated literary novels, Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding and Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot did not make the cut, however.

The judges also included a book from a small press startup, Lookout Press. Last year, they sent libraries (as well as the book’s publisher) scrambling when Jaimy Gordon won for Lord of Misrule, from tiny press, McPherson & Co. Lookout, launched in January, is an imprint of the Creative Writing Program at University of North Carolina Wilmington.

• Andrew Krivak —  The Sojourn — Bellevue Literary Press
• Téa Obreht — The Tiger’s Wife — Random House
• Julie Otsuka — The Buddha in the Attic — Knopf
• Edith Pearlman — Binocular Vision —Lookout
• Jesmyn Ward —Salvage the Bones — Bloomsbury USA

At least you can credit the Nobel committee with consistency. Again, the committee passed on American writers (a Nobel judge said in 2008, Americans are “too insular” to be worthy of the award; Toni Morrison was the last American to win, in 1993). A late surge in betting at Ladbroke’s in the UK gave Americans brief hope that Bob Dylan might be the winner.

This year’s winner, Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer, at least has some connection to the US. The Guardian, in reviewing a new collection of his poetry earlier this year, called him, “…that rare thing: a non-English-language poet who has been fully accepted into British and US poetry in his own lifetime. In the 60s he became associated with Robert Bly and the Deep Image school of US poetry.”

For Americans not familiar with him, the AP story provides helpful information on the pronunciation of his name; TRAWN-stroh-mur.

Transtromer’s latest, New Collected Poetry hasn’t been published in the US yet, but three earlier collections are available and in many library collections.

The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems Tomas Transtromer Retail Price: $17.95 Paperback: 288 pages Publisher: New Directions – (2006-10-17) ISBN / EAN: 0811216721 / 9780811216722

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Tomas Transtromer: Selected Poems, 1954-1986 Tomas Transtromer Retail Price: $14.99 Paperback: 208 pages Publisher: Ecco – (2000-02-09) ISBN / EAN: 0880014032 / 9780880014038

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The Half-Finished Heaven: The Best Poems of Tomas Tranströmer Tomas Transtromer, Robert Bly Retail Price: $15.00 Paperback: 122 pages Publisher: Graywolf Press – (2001-10-01) ISBN / EAN: 1555973515 / 9781555973513

The Nobel Prizes are being announced this week, with the Prize for Literature coming on Thursday, so betting is on in the UK. Japanese writer Haruki Murakami is currently #3 at bookmaker Ladbroke’s, with odds of 9:1. If he wins, it would put American libraries in the unfamiliar position of already owning the books by a new Nobel laureate, since he has been widely published here. It would also be perfect timing for the Oct, 25 release of the author’s 900-page novel in the U.S, 1Q84, (Knopf; Brilliance Audio).

Murakami’s publisher has been beating the publicity drum for what they call the author’s “long-awaited magnum opus,” by giving away a chapter to those who “like” the book on Facebook and releasing an excerpt in New Yorker in September. The book has been in the top 100 on Amazon for 21 days, rising to #47 today.

The Wall Street Journal recently reported on the race to translate the book to meet “pent-up demand” (it was published two years ago in Japan in and has sold over 4 million copies there), describing it as

…a twist on George Orwell’s 1984, which Mr. Murakami frequently references. (In Japanese, the word for ‘nine’ is pronounced ‘kyu’). Rather than an Orwellian dystopian future, Mr. Murakami paints an alternate past. In his characteristically stark, unadorned prose, Mr. Murakami tells an epic love story set in Tokyo in 1984. Aomame, a young female hired assassin, and Tengo, an aspiring novelist, are separately drawn into a parallel reality where some people have two souls, two moons hang in the sky and mysterious ‘little people’ wield power.

Don’t rush to place your bets, however. The winner of the Prize is notoriously difficult to predict; last year’s winner, Herta Muller was given odds of 50:1.

Librarian favorite Patrick deWitt’s The Sisters Brothers is one of the six books on the shortlist for the Booker Prize, announced this morning in London. In reporting on the selections, The Guardian calls it, “a darkly comic wild west odyssey of two cowboy assassins,” and “the strongest wild card on the list,” but manages to insult both U.S. and Canadian authors by saying, “American novels are, controversially, excluded from the Booker – deWitt is Canadian – but juries have a weakness for their grand, sometimes lurid, horizons.” DeWitt currently lives in the grand, but hardly lurid, Oregon.

The judges celebrated the fact that four of the titles on the list are published by smaller independent U.K. houses; that is not true in the U.S., where three are from divisions of Random House, one is from HarperCollins, one from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and one does not yet have a U.S. publisher.

The winner of the £50,000 prize will be announced on Oct. 18.

The Sisters Brothers Patrick Dewitt Retail Price: $19.99 Hardcover: 336 pages Publisher: Ecco – (2011-04-26) ISBN / EAN: 9780062041265/ 0062041266

Audio, Dreamscape; Large Print released in Aug. by Thorndike.

Below are the other five titles on the list, with U.S. publication information:

The Sense of an Ending Julian Barnes Retail Price: $23.95 Hardcover: 176 pages Publisher: Knopf – (2012-01-24) ISBN / EAN: 0307957128 / 9780307957122

The Sense of an Ending is considered the favorite. It is scheduled to appear in the U.S. three months after the award is announced.

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Jamrach’s Menagerie: A Novel Carol Birch Retail Price: $25.95 Hardcover: 304 pages Publisher: Doubleday – (2011-06-14) ISBN / EAN: 9780385534406 / 038553440X

The Guardian reporter notes, “I’m still carrying my torch for Carol Birch’s Jamrach’s Menagerie; she’s an underrated author with an impressive backlist, and this tale of 19th-century naturalism and danger at sea is in some ways classic Booker material. She brings a freshness and vibrancy to the historical novel that is a pleasure to behold.” Few of Birch’s eleven novels have been published in the U.S. The  Washington Post‘s Ron Charles says that is unfortunate, since the glimpse we get from this one is of an accomplished author. He calls the book, “a moving, fantastically exciting sea tale that takes you back to those great 19th-century stories that first convinced you ‘there is no frigate like a book.’ ”

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Pigeon English Stephen Kelman Retail Price: $24.00 Hardcover: 288 pages Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt – (2011-06-27) ISBN / EAN: 9780547500607 054750060

The Guardian points out that Pigeon English is the most currently relevant of the titles; “narrated by an 11-year-old Ghanaian immigrant on a south London estate, [it] brings a comic tone (and an ill-advised talking pigeon) to its child’s-eye view of gang violence. The recent riots give it added bite.” It was reviewed warmly in most of the prepub review media, but got scant attention from the consumer press here, with a review in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, followed by another in the Cleveland Plain Dealer after the longlist announcement. It fared much better with reviewers in the U.K. Rights have been sold to Ridley Scott to develop it into a BBC TV movie.

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Snowdrops: A Novel A.D. Miller Retail Price: $24.95 Hardcover: 272 pages Publisher: Doubleday – (2011-02-22) ISBN / EAN: 9780385533447 0385533446

This debut is compared by the publisher to The Talented Mr. Ripley and Gorky Park. The Boston Globe reviewer sniffed, “If that comparison is apt, I won’t bother reading the former and the latter isn’t as good a book as I remember. Snowdrops has its strengths. But in spite of a compelling narrative voice, the book has no emotional core. In precisely the parts where it’s supposed to be most wrenching, there’s nothing.”

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Esi Edugyan, Half Blood Blues, (Serpents Tail), has not yet been published in the U.S. The Guardian ‘s reporter dismissed it, saying, “I’m surprised to see the other Canadian on the shortlist, Esi Edugyan; our reviewer thought Half Blood Blues, the story of a black jazz musician in Nazi Germany, fascinating material but a missed opportunity.” But Jonathan Ruppin from the independent book chain Foyles said it would be a particularly deserving winner.

Another librarian favorite, Alan Hollinghurst’s The Stranger’s Child, (Knopf, 10/11/11; RH Audio) was dropped from the list. Once regarded as the top runner to win the award, The Guardian says of its elimination, “We knew from the longlist that this was a Booker keen on surprises, but with the shortlist omission of Alan Hollinghurst the judges have sprung their biggest surprise yet.”

The Stranger’s Child Alan Hollinghurst Retail Price: $27.95 Hardcover: 448 pages Publisher: Knopf – (2011-10-11) ISBN / EAN: 0307272761 / 9780307272768

Also considered a notable absence from the shortlist, is Sebastian Barry’s On Canaan’s Side, (Viking,  9/8/11; Large Print, Thorndike, Dec., ISBN 9781410443465; Blackstone Audio),  is coming out here this week. The Minneapolis Star Tribune calls it “a wonderful introduction” to this important Irish writer’s work. (This is a good opportunity to bring more attention to the books on the longlist through a display; a list of all the titles, with U.S. publishing information, is available here).

On Canaan’s Side: A Novel Sebastian Barry Retail Price: $25.95 Hardcover: 272 pages Publisher: Viking Adult – (2011-09-08) ISBN / EAN: 0670022926 / 9780670022922

Author Connie Willis won her third Hugo for best novel (in total, she’s won eleven Hugo’s) for the time travel two-book title, Blackout / All Clear (Spectra/Random House; Audio, Blackout and All Clear, Brilliance; audio and ebook for both titles on OverDrive) at the awards ceremony in Reno, Nevada on Saturday. Earlier, the book also picked up both the Nebula and the Locus Award for Best Novel.

The other winners in the best writing categories are below (the full list of the 2011 Hugo Award is here):

CAMPBELL AWARD FOR BEST NEW WRITER — Lev Grossman

Surprised that Time magazine’s book critic, Grossman, who just released his second book, The Magician King, (Viking, 8/9/11) is considered a “new writer”? You’re not the only one; according to io9, Grossman acknowledged in his acceptance that he’s “not a very new person — but it took him some time to figure out what he wanted to do and who he wanted to be.”

BEST NOVELLA

The Lifecycle of Software Objects by Ted Chiang (Subterranean) — Several libraries own the hardcover edition of this book, which is now out of print. The full text is available on Subterranean’s Web Site. It was also a nominee for the Nebula in this category.

BEST NOVELETTE

The Emperor of Mars by Allen M. Steele (Asimov’s, June 2010) – Available on the author’s Web site. This is the author’s third Hugo. Steele has written several novels; the latest is Hex (Ace, 6/7/11), the eighth in the Coyote space opera series.

BEST SHORT STORY

For Want of a Nail by Mary Robinette Kowal (Asimov’s, September 2010) – Read on the author’s Web site. Author’s debut novel is Shades of Milk and Honey (Tor/Macmillan, 2010; audio, Macmillan Audio and on OverDrive).

BEST GRAPHIC STORY

Girl Genius, Volume 10: Agatha Heterodyne and the Guardian Muse, written by Phil and Kaja Foglio; art by Phil F — this is the third year for the category. Girl Genius has won it each year (EarlyWord’s Graphic Novel columnist, Robin Brenner, is also fan of the series, but warns that it’s difficult to buy any but the most recent volumes in the series from library vendors and the bindings don’t hold up to library use).

As the NYT reported last week, sales of poet Philip Levine’s books soared after his appointment as Poet Laureate was announced on Wednesday.

A Knopf spokeswoman told the NYT that they are doing a rush reprint of Levine’s books and expect to meet all of the demand by early next week.

For those who want access to Levine’s poetry immediately, his most recent collection, News of the World is available on OverDrive.

News of the World Philip Levine Retail Price: $16.00 Hardcover: 80 pages Publisher: Knopf – (2011-02-15) ISBN / EAN: 9780375711909 / 0375711902

Levine won the 1991 National Book Award for his collection What Work Is, (Knopf, 9780679740582) and the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for poetry for The Simple Truth, (Knopf, 9780679765844). He was interviewed on NPR’s All Things Considered last night.

The PEN prizes were awarded last night and we’re pleased that Susanna Daniel’s Stiltsville (Harper, 8/3/10) shares this year’s prize for a debut work of fiction. It didn’t get much national review attention (congrats to the Miami Herald, the author’s home town newspaper, and the Minneapolis Star Tribune for recognizing it), but it’s one of our favorites from last year (see our various stories about it) and one that came up on GalleyChat repeatedly. As we described it earlier,

No high drama or madness here, thank heaven; just an engrossing story of an “ordinary” woman as she meets the man she will marry, forms lasting friendships, and raises a family. It’s refreshing to read about good, caring people who struggle with many of the same issues we all do, but who bring an extra ounce of wisdom to it.

It was recently released in paperback:

Stiltsville: A Novel Susanna Daniel Retail Price: $12.99 Hardcover: 336 pages Publisher: HarperPerennial – (2011-06-28) ISBN 978-0061963087

Large Type, Wheeler/Thorndike; ebook on OverDrive

The award is shared with a book that had more review attention, Danielle Evans’ book of short stories, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self (Riverhead). The NYT called it a “whip-smart … collection [that]  charts the liminal years between childhood and the condition dubiously known as being a grown-up. Told from a close distance, these stories lack the rich patina of hindsight, their pleasures coming instead from an immediacy and an engaging voice.”

Among the other winners were Stacy Schiff for Cleopatra: A Life (Little, Brown), Siddhartha Mukherjee for The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (Scribner), which also won the Pulitzer Prize and the Award for Literary Sports Writing went to George Dohrmann for Play Their Hearts Out (Ballantine Books). The full list is here.

The RITA Awards for best romances in twelve categories were announced at the RWA Conference in New York last week. The winner in the Young Adult category is The Iron King by Julie Kagawa, from the recently launched Harlequin Teen imprint.

Also announced were ten Golden Heart winners, awarded to unpublished manuscripts.

Wendy Crutcher, Materials Evaluator for Ocean County (CA) Public Libraries, is the 2011 RWA Librarian of the Year. The award was established in 1995 to “honor librarians who go above and beyond in their support of the romance genre, its authors, and readers.” Wendy posted her acceptance speech on her blog, The Misadventures of Super Librarian.

The International Association of Culinary Professionals named Around My French Table by Dorie Greenspan  (HMH) the Cookbook of the Year earlier this month.

Winning in the American category was The Lee Bros. Simple Fresh Southern (Random House).

The full list of winners and finalists is available here.