Nonfiction
- Kevin Boyle, Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age (Holt)
- David Hackett Fischer, Washington’s Crossing (Oxford Univ.)
- Jennifer Gonnerman, Life on the Outside: The Prison Odyssey of Elaine Bartlett (Farrar)
- Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (Norton)
- The 9/11 Commission, The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States – Authorized Edition (Norton)
Fiction
- Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, Madeleine Is Sleeping (Harcourt)
- Christine Schutt, Florida (TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern Univ.)
- Joan Silber, Ideas of Heaven: A Ring of Stories (Norton)
- Lily Tuck, The News from Paraguay (HarperCollins)
- Kate Walbert, Our Kind: A Novel in Stories (Scribner)
The winners will be announced November 17.