And the Winners Are...

The winners of the National Book Awards were announced last night in a ceremony in New York. Though there has already been much written about the event, it seemed to me that Sarah Weinman boiled it down most touchingly:

Like this year and last, I had a good time at the Book Awards. Why? Because even though the dress-up quotient was high and the speeches were long, I always feel a palpable love of literature in the room, even if it's not necessarily correlated to the nominated books.

Meanwhile, Edward Champion did a blow-by-blow throughout the evening.

The winners are as follows:

Fiction:

Tree of Smoke, by Denis Johnson (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Also nominated:

Fieldwork, by Mischa Berlinski (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Varieties of Disturbance, by Lydia Davis (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris (Little, Brown & Company)
Like You’d Understand, Anyway, by Jim Shepard (Alfred A. Knopf)

Non-Fiction:

Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, by Tim Weiner (Doubleday)

Also nominated:

Brother, I’m Dying, by Edwidge Danticat (Alfred A. Knopf)
God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, by Christopher Hitchens (Twelve/Hachette Book Group USA)
Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution, by Woody Holton (Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Ralph Ellison: A Biography, by Arnold Rampersad (Alfred A. Knopf)

Poetry:

Time and Materials, by Robert Hass (Ecco/HarperCollins)

Also nominated:

Magnetic North, by Linda Gregerson (Houghton Mifflin Company)
The House on Boulevard St., by David Kirby (Louisiana State University Press)
Old Heart, by Stanley Plumly (W.W. Norton & Company)
Messenger, by Ellen Bryant Voigt (W.W. Norton & Company)

Young People’s Literature:

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie (Little, Brown & Company)

Also nominated:

Skin Hunger: A Resurrection of Magic, Book One, by Kathleen Duey (Atheneum Books for Young Readers)
Touching Snow, by M. Sindy Felin (Atheneum Books for Young Readers)
The Invention of Hugo Cabret, by Brian Selznick (Scholastic Press)
Story of a Girl, by Sara Zarr (Little, Brown & Company)