National Book Award nominees: Lahiri, Pynchon, Wright already winners to me

I mean, who cares if the entire country is going into default and world crisis and all that, but the nominees for next month's National Book Awards were released this morning. In Fiction Jhumpa Lahiri and Thomas Pynchon will be duking it out with George Saunders, James McBride and relative newcomer Rachel Kushner -- really, there are no losers here. In Nonfiction, Lawrence Wright's Scientology expose GOING CLEAR faces Jill Lepore's biography of Jane Franklin (sounds fascinating based on the New Yorker excerpt), BEA darling HITLER'S FURIES (by Wendy Lower, about Nazi women), George Packer's new-economy tome THE UNWINDING and Alan Taylor's THE INTERNAL ENEMY: SLAVERY AND WAR IN VIRGINIA.

See poetry and YA categories here. Ready your library requests!