National Book Critics Circle announces award nominees

? Rebels old and young were honored this year by the National Book Critics Circle, which announced its awards nominees Monday.

Ninety-one-year-old Studs Terkel, the oral historian and self-described champion of the “uncelebrated,” will receive a lifetime achievement prize. Competitive nominations went to two books released by McSweeney’s, an irreverent publishing house founded by best-selling author Dave Eggers.

One McSweeney’s nominee: “Rising Up and Rising Down,” William T. Vollman’s seven-volume, 3,300-page examination of violence in human history.

“I told the people who recommended this book that everybody would want to know if they read it. And they said, ‘Yes, we did,”‘ said Elizabeth Taylor, president of the NBCC and Chicago Tribune book editor.

Meanwhile, critics bypassed some of the year’s most talked-about books, including the English translation of Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s memoir, “Living to Tell the Tale,” and Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee’s new novel, “Elizabeth Costello.”

Winners will be announced March 4 in New York.

Susan Sontag was nominated for criticism for “Regarding the Pain of Others,” a partial refutation of her influential “On Photography,” which won the NBCC in 1978. Edward P. Jones’ “The Known World,” a National Book Award finalist, was among the fiction nominees, and Anne Applebaum’s “Gulag,” another NBA finalist, was cited in the general nonfiction category.

Monica Ali’s “Brick Lane,” Caryl Phillips’ “A Distant Shore,” Richard Powers’ “The Time of Our Singing” and Tobias Wolff’s “Old School” were the other fiction nominees.

Also nominated for nonfiction were Carolyn Alexander’s “The Bounty,” Paul Hendrickson’s “Sons of Mississippi” and Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s “Random House.”

George Marsden, a leading religious historian, was a biography-autobiography finalist for “Jonathan Edwards.” Other nominees included Blake Bailey’s “A Tragic Honesty,” an acclaimed biography of the late fiction writer Richard Yates; Paul Elie’s “The Life You Save May Be Your Own”; Carol Loeb Schloss’ “Lucia Joyce”; and William Taubman’s “Khrushchev: The Man and His Era.”

Besides Sontag’s book, criticism nominees were Dagoberto Gilb for “Gritos,” Ross King’s “Michelangelo & the Pope’s Ceiling,” Rebecca Solnit’s “River of Shadows” and Nick Hornby for “Songbook,” a McSweeney’s publication.