Many of the finalists are not new to the literary prize circuit. Two recipients of the MacArthur "Genius" grant made the cut, as did five Pulitzer Prize winners, one National Book Award winner, three previous finalists and a recipient of a National Book Foundation lifetime achievement award. 

And the finalists are....

Fiction

Junot Díaz, This Is How You Lose Her 

Dave Eggers, A Hologram for the King

Louise Erdrich, The Round House 

Ben Fountain, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk

Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds 

Nonfiction

Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1945-1956 

Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity

Robert A. Caro, The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume 4

Domingo Martinez, The Boy Kings of Texas 

Anthony Shadid, House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East 

Poetry

David Ferry, Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations

Cynthia Huntington, Heavenly Bodies 

Tim Seibles, Fast Animal

Alan Shapiro, Night of the Republic

Susan Wheeler, Meme 

Young People’s Literature

William Alexander, Goblin Secrets

Carrie Arcos, Out of Reach 

Patricia McCormick, Never Fall Down 

Eliot Schrefer, Endangered 

E. Jean says Charlotte Bronte had a little "Hera" in her too.

What motivates people to write in to advice columns? It's hardly the most efficient way to solve life's dilemmas. The lead time is too long for any truly pressing, agonizing situations. And by the time the magazine or column comes out, even milder complaints will have been solved or forgotten about or morphed into totally different problems.

To us, agony aunt letter writing always seemed like a faintly exhibitionist way to get a verdict on your personal life, like People's Court with the faces blurred out. Cheaper than couples therapy, writing into an advice column is private, but only in the sense that it won't wreck your Google. Ideally, those in your cohort (especially he or she who has wronged you) will read it, recognize you and—thanks to the authority and impartiality of the advice columnist—realize that you were right all along, finally understanding the full magnitude of your suffering. 

If it's not all totally made up, that is. We really, really hope the letters in ELLE's advice column, Ask E. Jean, this month are not made up because one of them amounts to a juicy literary blind item.

“My husband was a finalist for the National Book Awards,” begins the letter (not online yet). “And I’ve done all right with the literary prizes myself.”

It's hard to imagine a pair of literary prize winners having problems like the rest of us. It turns out they don't, really. Their problems include irrational admirers.

“Last year, a woman (let’s call her Hera as an homage to her mythic heights of jealousy) sent me a series of virulent messages on Facebook claiming she was sleeping with my husband, was in love with him, and that I’d get my heart broken.”

But she was not merely a psycho groupie. The National Book Award finalist had dated Hera before he married the letter writer, so he called her and confronted her about the Facebook messages. She apologized, said she had gone off her meds and promised never to contact them again. But she did, a few months later, dropping by the house and asking the NBA finalists’ daughter if the NBA Finalist was at home. The literary couples’ lawyer issued Hera a no-contact statement.

All was well until a year later, when the letter writer recently received another message from an e-mail account she didn’t recognize. She took it to the police, who said if it wasn’t Hera, the letter writer could be sued for slander. (Is this how that works?) Now the letter writer felt “upset,” “powerless” and, evidently, a little paranoid.“What if Hera continues making new e-mail accounts and harassing me until I’m old and gray?” she wrote.

In her response—thoughtful and allusive as ever—E. Jean provides two clues to the couples identity.

“One e-mail? In a year? Come on—really? You’ve won a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. Your best stuff conjures up how crazy love makes you feel (I’ve read your poems!) so it should come as no surprise to learn that pretty much everybody gets Facebook messages about ex-lovers.”

“It doesn’t take a detective to reveal your fear really is. The e-mailer is not the only jealous woman. Perhaps you don’t trust your husband as much as a confident woman should . Is he a flirt? Is he neglecting you? He’s a famous novelist. He certainly has the words to reassure you. Ask him to.”

Anyone know a National Book Award finalist novelist married to a National Endowment for the Arts grant-winning poet? Or has E. Jean changed the accolades to protect the innocent?

Ward.

Will Bois Sauvage, the fictional Mississippi town created by the novelist Jesmyn Ward, one day reach the status of William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County? Time will tell, but Ms. Ward has signed a deal with Bloomsbury for a third novel set in the Gulf Coast hamlet of her invention. Her most recent book, Salvage the Bones, won the 2011 National Book Award for fiction.

The new novel is still untitled and will be about an interracial couple living in Bois Sauvage. Ms. Ward is also working on a memoir called The Men We Reaped, described on Publishers Marketplace as "exploring race, rural poverty, and the impact both have had on the men in Ward's life." In her speech at the National Book Awards, Ms. Ward revealed that she began writing in her 20s, following the death of her brother.

NBA winner Jesmyn Ward.

With tears of joy and lots of liquor, New York publishing gathered at Cipriani Wall Street last night for the National Book Awards. This year’s host was actor John Lithgow, who recently published a memoir (Drama: An Actor’s Education) and performed his role with just the right amount of self-deprecation.

It was not as bad as 1999, when attendees of the PEN American Gala had to cross a picket line to get into Cipriani Midtown, but there were a few jokes about the celebration’s short distance from Zuccotti Park.

“My wife said we were going to Citarella for dinner,” joked a sheepish Michael Moore to The Observer. “Wait, we’re going by the stock exchange! Holy shit!” He said he would be returning to the neighborhood tomorrow for events surrounding the two-month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street.

“I thought I would point out, since nobody else has, that we are Occupying Wall Street,” said the poet Ann Lauterbach in her introduction to the poet John Ashbery, who was accepting a medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Attendees clapped for the unlikely vision of John Lithgow placing a medal around John Ashbery’s neck.

Mr. Ashbery’s acceptance speech was an uplifting survey of his literary career, starting with his discovery of Modernism as a young man and his thoughts on those who have found him a difficult poet.

“As long as I’ve been publishing poetry it has been seen as difficult and private though I never meant for it to be,” he said. “I wanted the difficulty to reflect the difficulty of reading, any kind of reading, which is both a pleasant and painful experience since we are temporarily giving ourselves to something which may change us.”

“To have been included in the same press release as John Ashbery just seems wrong,” said Mitchell Kaplan, the owner of Miami bookstore Books & Books, upon acceptance of his award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community.

After attendees ate plates of rack of lamb and mingled, the exciting part of the awards began. First up was the award for Young People’s Literature, a slight sore spot for the National Book Foundation. When finalists were named for the award last month, Lauren Myracle’s Shine was announced instead of the book judges had actually chosen, Franny Billingsley’s Chime. Ms. Myracle had to give up her reward, apologies were made, and the whole embarrassing affair was quickly glossed over.

“It was a bad year for muffled phone conversations with disastrous consequences,” said National Book Award Judge Marc Aronson, referring to the whole sordid episode as an “oral malfunction.” The award went to Thanhha Lai for her book Inside Out & Back Again.

Mr. Ashbery’s speech set the bar high, but the winner of the National Book Award for Poetry, Nikky Finney, soon matched it. Ms. Finney won for her collection Head Off & Split. Through tears she recalled in her acceptance the history of slaves who were punished for reading and writing.

“If my name is ever called out, I promised my girl poet self, so too would I call out theirs,” she read, exiting the stage to a standing ovation.

“That was the best acceptance speech I’ve ever heard from anyone in my entire life,” said Mr. Lithgow.

Stephen Greenblatt won the award for non-fiction for his book The Swerve: How We Became Modern. Also choking up, he thanked the poet Lucretius, who lived 2000 years ago, Poggio Bracciolini, a fourteenth-century Italian scholar, and W.W. Norton, for its willingness to publish a book about the “discovery of an ancient poem by a Renaissance humanist.”

The final award, for fiction, went to Jesmyn Ward, for her novel Salvage the Bones. She cried too, recalling in an emotional speech how she started to write in her 20s following the death of her brother. After the ceremony ended we found Ms. Ward and asked her if she had been optimistic about her prospects before the ceremony.

“I tried not to have any expectations,” she said. “I was planning to be overjoyed for whoever won. It was a total shock.”

But her editor, Bloomsbury USA’s Kathy Belden, had secret hopes.

“I guess publishing books that don’t have huge markets for 25 years I don’t always go in with high expectations and I go in with a love for the books,” said Ms. Belden. “And yet this time when she was nominated I thought she could win.”

After the ceremony, Cipriani opened its doors to the riff-raff—junior editors, young agents, reporters, literary party stalwart Jon-Jon Goulian—who made their way to a second floor balcony for pigs-in-a-blanket, sliders, dancing and more cocktails. Amazon Publishing head Larry Kirshbaum, whose company had a table at the awards for the first time this year, was seen shaking it on the dance floor. Later we encountered him at the coat check with a copy of non-fiction finalist Mary Gabriel’s Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution under his arm.

As The Observer left the ceremony, we were stopped by a group on the steps in formalwear smoking cigars, including fiction finalist Téa Obreht and Random House editor Noah Eaker. The stogies might have been for consolation rather than celebration, but they still wanted their photo taken.

LaValle.

After the National Book Awards finalists were named last week, Laura Miller wrote a column for Slate called "How the National Book Awards Made Themselves Irrelevant." Calling the award "the Newbery Medal for adults" she stated that "whatever policy each panel of judges embraces, over the years, the impression has arisen that already-successful titles are automatically sidelined in favor of books that the judges feel deserve an extra boost of attention." (She was talking about the fiction category, not the scandal-plagued young people's literature category).

We were wondering what exactly is wrong with the Newbery Medal, which as far as we're concerned has a sterling reputation. Is Laura Miller calling Susan Cooper's The Grey King undeserving of an award? Or Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH?  Because we might need to have some words. But Victor LaValle, a judge for this year's award, has responded with more pointed criticism. Writing for Publishers Weekly he begins by calling her column "bonkers."

Then he goes on to say:

There are many problems with Ms. Miller’s assessment of what’s wrong with this year’s picks but the first has to be that we, this year’s judges, have been put through some secret National Book Awards ceremony wherein we agree “that already-successful titles are automatically sidelined in favor of books that the judges feel deserve an extra boost of attention.” The Masonic Order of Underdogs! If such a thing ever happened then the NBA are really nefarious because they wiped my memory banks clean. I think it’s worth noting here that one of our choices, Téa Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife, was an unqualified hit this year, winning its author the Orange Prize. And a second, Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the Attic, was on the Los Angeles Times Bestseller list. How dare all those people have the gall to like books that don’t rate with Laura Miller.

Myracle.

Last week the National Book Award finalists were announced. In every category, five books were named. Then, a day after the first announcement, a sixth book was named in the Young People's Literature category. The National Book Foundation explained that a book that was supposed to be a named finalist, Chime, by Franny Billingsley, had not been included but would now be added. Although the foundation  made no public statement to clarify the origins of its mistake, it became immediately apparent to onlookers that Chime shared a vowel sound with one of the nominees, Shine, by Lauren Myracle. Speculation that the books had been confused was rampant, but the National Book Foundation did not confirm it -- that is, until today.

Today Ms. Myracle revealed what happened in a statement issued through her publisher, Amulet.

“I was over the moon last week after receiving the call telling me that Shine was a finalist for the award,” said Ms. Myracle . “I was later informed that Shine had been included in error, but would remain on the list based on its merits. However, on Friday I was asked to withdraw by the National Book Foundation to preserve the integrity of the award and the judges’ work, and I have agreed to do so.”

As compensation, the National Book Foundation will be donating $5,000 to the Matthew Shepard Foundation (Ms. Myracle's book is about a hate crime.)

"I was also deeply moved that in recognizing Shine, the NBF was giving voice to the thousands of disenfranchised youth in America—particularly gay youth—who face massive discrimination and intimidation every day. So that something positive may come of their error, I am pleased that the NBF has agreed to donate $5,000 to the Matthew Shepard Foundation,” she said in her statement.

The National Book Foundation has posted its own apology on their web site: "The National Book Foundation regrets that an error was made in the original announcement of the Finalists for the 2011 National Book Award in Young People’s Literature and apologizes for any confusion and hurt it may have caused Lauren Myracle."

So, the finalists -- finally -- are:

Franny Billingsley, Chime
(Dial Books, an imprint of Penguin Group USA, Inc. )

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

Thanhha Lai, Inside Out and Back Again
(Harper, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers)

Albert Marrin, Flesh and Blood So Cheap: The Triangle Fire and Its Legacy
(Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books)

Gary D. Schmidt, Okay for Now
(Clarion Books, an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

Unlike the Pulitzer prize, the NBA judges are practitioners of the work they judge: only fiction writers decide fiction and only poets decide poets. This year's fiction judges are Jerome Charyn, John Crowley, Victor LaValle, Yiyun Li and Dierdre McNamer. The non-fiction judges are Yunte Huang, Alice Kaplan, Jill Lepore and Barbara Savage.

Non-fiction:

Deborah Baker, The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism (Graywolf)

Mary Gabriel, Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution (Little, Brown)

Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (W.W. Norton)

Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (Viking)

Lauren Redniss, Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie A Tale of Love and Fallout (It Books)

Analysis: Well, that's a lot of biographies (only one book is not a biography) but an eclectic bunch: Ms. Baker's book used an unconventional non-fiction method of recreating letters and diary entries, and Ms. Redniss's book is the first time a graphic novel has been nominated.

Fiction:

Andrew Krivak, The Sojourn (Bellevue Literary Press)

Tea Obreht, The Tiger's Wife (Random House)

Julie Otsuka, The Buddha in the Attic (Knopf)

Edith Pearlman, Binocular Vision: New and Selected Stories (Lookout Books)

Jesmyne Ward, Salvage the Bones (Bloomsbury USA)

Analysis: Tea Obreht has already won a bunch of prizes so no surprise there. But what a showing for the smaller publishers! Bellevue usually publishes books that are "at the intersection of art and science" and Lookout is the literary imprint of the University of North Carolina, Wilmington.

Poetry:

Nicky Finny, Head Off and Split (Triquarterly)

Yusuf Komyunakaa, The Chameleon Couch (FSG)

Carl Phillips, Double Shadow (FSG)

Adrienne Rich, Tonight No Poetry Will Serve: Poems 2007 - 2011 (W.W. Norton)

Bruce Smith, Devotions (University of Chicago Press)

Until last year, the event was held annually at the Marriott Times Square, which literary agent Lynn Nesbit told the Transom was “like going to a sales convention in Omaha.” For the 2008 Awards, the Grove/Atlantic president and National Book Foundation chairman, Morgan Entrekin, was enlisted to spice things up. Mr. Entrekin had his own description of the event’s former location: “It was like having the awards at an airport terminal!” The Transom then shared Ms. Nesbit’s Omaha description with him, to which Mr. Entrekin quickly corrected himself, “Well, yes! Sure. An airport in Omaha.”

“It’s marvelous isn’t it? Just beautiful,” Barry Humphries, a.k.a Dame Edna, marveled to wife Lizzie Spencer of the new location.

“It’s much more hi-si than I thought! I thought it would just be all nebbishy literary types,” said British interior designer and newly minted memoirist Nicholas Haslam of the event, which honored Dave Eggers and Gore Vidal.

Bonnie Jo Campbell, American Salvage (Wayne State University Press)

Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin (Random House)

Daniyal Mueenuddin, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (W.W. Norton & Co.)

Jayne Anne Phillips, Lark and Termite (Alfred A. Knopf)

Marcel Theroux, Far North (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

And for nonfiction:

David M. Carroll, Following the Water: A Hydromancer's Notebook (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

Sean B. Carroll, Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origins of Species (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

Greg Grandin, Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City (Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt)

Adrienne Mayor, The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome's Deadliest Enemy (Princeton University Press)

T. J. Stiles, The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (Alfred A. Knopf)

Winners will be announced November 18th.

Publishers Weekly cheers the "international array" of authors in the fiction category--Pakistani, Irish, Ugandan--and crowns Macmillan NBA champion with five nominees. The general reaction on Twitter seems to be surprise: at the relatively-un-hyped selections ("So did they pick the #NBA09 nominees out of a hat?"), and at the inclusion of Stitches, a graphic novel, in the Young Adult category. Of course, as Publishers Weekly noted, it's only the second graphic novel nominated in the awards' history--so maybe the form has yet to find its institutional niche.

The National Book Foundation also announced lifetime achievement awards for Dave Eggers ("Literarian Award for Outstanding Contribution to the American Literary Community") and Gore Vidal ("Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters").

The New York Times reported on the finalists here in a 400-word item that ran in the Arts section. In the case of several of the authors, it was the first time in years that their names had appeared there.

Which is to say that between the two of them, Michiko Kakutani and Janet Maslin, the Times' primary daily book critics, reviewed precisely two of the 20 books—Marilynne Robinson's Home and Jim Sheeler's Final Salute, respectively—that were up for NBAs this year.

Some caveats, to be fair: 1) 10 of those 20 were poetry and children's books, which never get reviewed in the daily, 2) all but two of the fiction and non-fiction finalists were reviewed in The Sunday Book Review, 3) Jane Mayer was reviewed in the daily by Jennifer Schuessler, and 4) though there was no review, Times culture reporter Patricia Cohen did write a feature about Annette Gordon-Reed's The Hemingses of Monticello (which won the non-fiction prize) that ran in the daily Arts section.

But, you know, still!

Katherin Bouton, who became the culture desk's books editor last month, declined to comment because she is too new on the job, and her predecessor, Rick Liman, did not return calls seeking comment.