My former boss Laurie Muchnick has a detailed report on this year’s nominees for Bloomberg. Here’s the quick list of nominees from the end of her piece, with some boldface emphasis from me, and here’s the official site of the NBCC (of which I am a voting member):

Autobiography: Joshua Clark, “Heart Like Water: Surviving Katrina and Life in Its Disaster Zone” (Free Press); Edwidge Danticat, “Brother, I’m Dying” (Knopf); Joyce Carol Oates, “The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates, 1973-1982” (Ecco); Sara Paretsky, “Writing in an Age of Silence” (Verso); Anna Politkovskaya, “A Russian Diary: A Journalist’s Final Account of Life, Corruption and Death in Putin’s Russia” (Random House).

Nonfiction: Philip F. Gura, “American Transcendentalism: A History” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux); Daniel Walker Howe, “What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America 1815-1848” (Oxford University Press); Harriet A. Washington, “Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present” (Doubleday); Tim Weiner, “Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA” (Doubleday); Alan Weisman, “The World Without Us” (Thomas Dunne Book/St. Martin’s Press).

Fiction: Vikram Chandra, “Sacred Games” (HarperCollins); Junot Diaz, “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” (Riverhead); Hisham Matar, “In the Country of Men” (Dial); Joyce Carol Oates, “The Gravedigger’s Daughter” (HarperCollins); Marianne Wiggins, “The Shadow Catcher” (Simon & Schuster).

Biography: Tim Jeal, “Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer” (Yale University Press); Hermione Lee, “Edith Wharton” (Knopf); Arnold Rampersad, “Ralph Ellison” (Knopf); John Richardson, “A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932” (Knopf); Claire Tomalin, “Thomas Hardy” (Penguin Press).

Poetry: Mary Jo Bang, “Elegy” (Graywolf); Matthea Harvey, “Modern Life” (Graywolf); Michael O’Brien, “Sleeping and Waking” (Flood); Tom Pickard, “ Ballad of Jamie Allan” (Flood); Tadeusz Rozewicz, “New Poems” (Archipelago).

Criticism: Joan Acocella, “Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints” (Pantheon); Julia Alvarez, “Once Upon a Quinceanera” (Viking); Susan Faludi, “The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America” (Metropolitan); Ben Ratliff, “Coltrane: The Story of a Sound” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux); Alex Ross, “The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

My boldfacing here is on the quick, arbitrary side; of course, others on this list have published pieces, poems, or stories in The New Yorker over the years.