Bookplanet: Book Critics Circle's finalists

The National Book Critics Circle, the nationwide organization of more than 500 book critics, editors and reviewers, announced finalists in six categories for its 2006 book awards this past weekend.

Fiction
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun (Knopf)
Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss (Grove/Atlantic)
Dave Eggers, What Is the What (McSweeney's).
Richard Ford, The Lay of the Land (Knopf)
Cormac McCarthy, The Road (Knopf)

Nonfiction
Patrick Cockburn, The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq (Verso)
Ann Fessler, The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade (Penguin)
Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (Penguin)
Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution (Ecco)
Sandy Tolan, The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew and the Heart of the Middle East (Bloomsbury)

Memoir/Autobiography
Donald Antrim, The Afterlife (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Alison Bechdel, Fun Home (Houghton Mifflin)
Alexander Masters, Stuart: A Life Backwards (Delacorte)
Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (HarperCollins)
Terri Jentz, Strange Piece of Paradise (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Poetry
Troy Jollimore, Tom Thomson in Purgatory (Margie/Intuit House)
Miltos Sachtouris, Poems (1945-1971) (Archipelago Books)
Frederick Seidel, Ooga-Booga: Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
W.D. Snodgrass, Not for Specialists: New and Selected Poems (BOA Editions)

Criticism
Bruce Bawer, While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West From Within (Doubleday)
Frederick Crews, Follies of the Wise: Dissenting Essays (Shoemaker & Hoard)
Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (Viking)
Lia Purpura, On Looking: Essays (Sarabande Books)
Lawrence Weschler, Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences (McSweeney's)

Biography
Debby Applegate, The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher (Doubleday)
Taylor Branch, At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-1968 (Simon & Schuster)
Frederick Brown, Flaubert: A Biography (Little, Brown)
Julie Phillips, James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon (St. Martin's Press)
Jason Roberts, A Sense of the World: How a Blind Man Became History's Greatest Traveler (HarperCollins)

Winners will be announced March 8 at NBCC's annual awards ceremony, New School University, New York.