Emily Gordon writes:

I’m SXSW-bound in a few hours, but I wanted to send a brief report from a stirring and satisfying National Book Critics Circle awards ceremony and reception. The 2008 finalists for NBCC awards included a good group of New Yorker-related people: the late Roberto Bolaño for 2666, Pierre Martory for The Landscapist, which was translated by John Ashbery; Richard Brody for Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life Of Jean-Luc Godard; Steve Coll for The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in an American Century; and Honor Moore for The Bishop’s Daughter (an excerpt of which ran in the magazine)—and it’s true, there are other people in the list you can certainly call New Yorker-related as well. After the ceremony, I spoke with Richard Brody, whose blog and Twitter presence we’ve noted recently with pleasure; he’s a lovely fellow, and I’m glad to have met him.

Bolaño’s book got the fiction prize, and after seeing the multiple-cover design, I want to own it. The rest of the prizes came home with Ron Charles, who won the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing; my former employer the PEN American Center, which got the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award; August Kleinzahler and Juan Felipe Herrera in a surprise poetry tie that had the brainy audience whispering in delight; Seth Lerer for criticism; Patrick French for biography (James Wood reviewed the book, The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul, in December) Ariel Sabar for autobiography; and Dexter Filkins for nonfiction. I’m sure the NBCC website will be full of details tomorrow, so look there then!