FICTION

The Echo Maker (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

- Richard Powers

Mark Z. Danielewski, Only Revolutions (Pantheon) Ken Kalfus, A Disorder Peculiar to the Country (Ecco/HarperCollins) Dana Spiotta, Eat the Document (Scribner/Simon & Schuster) Jess Walter, The Zero (Judith Regan Books/HarperCollins) Fiction judges: Bharati Mukherjee (chair), Jonathan Lethem, Craig Nova, David Plante, Marianne Wiggins

NONFICTION

The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl (Houghton Mifflin)

- Timothy Egan

Taylor Branch, At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68 (Simon & Schuster) Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone (Alfred A. Knopf) Peter Hessler, Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China’s Past and Present (HarperCollins) Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (Alfred A. Knopf) Nonfiction judges: Jill Jonnes (Chair), Kevin Boyle, Randall Kennedy, Wendy Lesser, Luis Alberto Urrea

POETRY

Splay Anthem (New Directions)

- Nathaniel Mackey

Louise Glück, Averno (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) H.L. Hix, Chromatic (Etruscan Press) - Book That Changed My Life Essay Ben Lerner, Angle of Yaw (Copper Canyon Press) James McMichael, Capacity (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) Poetry judges: James Longenbach (chair), Jimmy Santiago Baca, Li Young Lee, Claudia Rankine, C.D. Wright

YOUNG PEOPLE'S LITERATURE

The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Vol. 1: The Pox Party (Candlewick Press)

- M.T. Anderson

Martine Leavitt, Keturah and Lord Death (Front Street Books/Boyds Mills Press) Patricia McCormick, Sold (Hyperion Books for Children) Nancy Werlin, The Rules of Survival (Dial/Penguin) Gene Luen Yang, American Born Chinese (First Second/Roaring Brook Press/Holtzbrinck) - Book That Changed My Life Essay Young People's Literature judges: Margaret Bechard (chair), Patricia McKissack, Linda Sue Park, Benjamin Alire Saenz, Jude Watson