Here are this year’s Pulitzer winners and finalists with bonus links:

Fiction:

• Winner: The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson – (excerpt)
• What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank by Nathan Englander (Englander’s Year in Reading, excerpt)
• The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey

• Winner: Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America by Gilbert King
• Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo (The Millions Interview)
• The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature by David George Haskell (excerpt)

• Winner: Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam by Fredrik Logevall (excerpt)
• The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675 by Bernard Bailyn (excerpt)
• Lincoln’s Code: The Laws of War in American History by John Fabian Witt (excerpt)

• Winner: The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo by Tom Reiss (excerpt)
• Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece by Michael Gorra (excerpt)
• The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy by David Nasaw (excerpt)

Winners and finalists in other categories are available at the Pulitzer Web site.

This year’s shortlist is remarkable because half of its titles are works in translation.

• City of Bohane by Kevin Barry (review)
  
• The Map and the Territory by Michel Houellebecq (review)
  
• Pure by Andrew Miller (Ellen Ullman’s Year In Reading post)
  
• 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami (Charles Baxter’s Year In Reading post, “Reading 1Q84: The Case for Fiction in a Busy Life“)
• The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka (excerpt)
  
• The Tragedy of Arthur by Arthur Phillips (excerpt)
• Swamplandia! by Karen Russell (The Millions interviews Karen Russell not once but twice.)
• From the Mouth of the Whale by Sjón (review)
  
• The Faster I Walk, The Smaller I Am by Kjersti Skomsvold (review)
  
• Caesarion by Tommy Wieringa

Fiction: Ben Fountain, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (Ben Fountain’s Year in Reading, The Millions interview)

Nonfiction: Andrew Solomon, Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity (Staff Pick, excerpt [pdf])

Autobiography: Leanne Shapton, Swimming Studies (The Millions review)

Criticism: Marina Warner, Stranger Magic

Biography: Robert Caro, The Passage of Power (The Millions review)

Poetry: D.A. Powell, Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys (Poet reading [video])

Previously: The finalists

Fiction

• Laurent Binet, HHhH (The missing pages of HHhH)
• Ben Fountain, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (Ben Fountain’s Year in Reading, The Millions interview)
• Adam Johnson, The Orphan Master’s Son (excerpt)
• Lydia Millet, Magnificence (Lydia Millet’s Year in Reading)
• Zadie Smith, NW (Zadie Smith’s Year in Reading, our review, the first lines of NW)

Nonfiction

• Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity (The Millions Interview, National Book Award winner)
• Steve Coll, Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power (excerpt)
• Jim Holt, Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story (excerpt)
• David Quammen, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic (excerpt)
• Andrew Solomon, Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity (Staff Pick, excerpt [pdf])

For more on the NBCC Awards and the finalists in the other categories, visit the NBCC.

A new addition this year: The red carpet that greeted celebrity guests.

1.
For my money, Domingo Martinez was the coolest person in the house. And that’s saying something because the house — a cavernous marble ballroom on Wall Street, site of Wednesday evening’s National Book Awards ceremony — was full of very cool people, including Elmore Leonard, Martin Amis, Terry Gross, Stephen King, Walter Mosley, and Dave Eggers.

But they’re household names to book lovers. They were supposed to be in the house. Domingo Martinez was not. This year, in an effort to blunt criticism that the awards were being watered down by a tendency to honor obscure authors of obscure books, the National Book Foundation told judges not to be shy about nominating popular books by well-known authors. The judges complied magnificently. The fiction finalists were four big names — Eggers, Junot Diaz, Louise Erdrich, and Ben Fountain — plus first-time novelist Kevin Powers.

Same for the non-fiction category. Four of the finalists — Robert Caro, Katherine Boo, Anthony Shadid, and Anne Applebaum — had won at least one Pulitzer Prize apiece, and each had worked for The New York Times, The Washington Post, or Newsday. The fifth finalist was unknown Domingo Martinez, a first-time author who wrote a blistering memoir about growing up in Brownsville, Tex., called The Boy Kings of Texas.

As the cocktail hour wound down on Wednesday evening and guests began taking their seats for the $1,000-a-plate dinner, I spotted a rotund, merry-looking guy in a corner of the ballroom, regaling a small crowd with a story. It was Domingo Martinez. His agent, Alice Martell, was standing nearby, and she told me that the manuscript to Boy Kings had come to her unsolicited and, against some seriously long odds, it jumped out of the slush pile and grabbed her by the throat and wouldn’t let her go. ”This almost never happens,” said Martell, who represented Carlos Eire, whose memoir, Waiting for Snow in Havana, won the National Book Award for non-fiction in 2003. ”I only work with authors I like,” Martell said, “and Domingo’s a doll.”

Non-fiction finalist Domingo Martinez, fueled by ginger ale, telling a story.

He finished telling his story, one hand chopping the air for emphasis, the other wrapped around a wine glass full of…

“What are you drinking?” I asked.

“Ginger ale,” Martinez replied.

“But there’s an open bar!”

“I know, but I don’t like to drink alcohol before I read.” He made a squinting face. ”You know, it can make the words run together.”

This was astonishing, and beautiful. Martinez was not one of those dewy-eyed longshots you always see on the Oscars show, those first-time nominees who gush about what an honor it was just to get nominated and get a chance to wear an ugly dress and share Meryl Streep’s oxygen, blahblahblah. Screw that. Despite the long odds against him — a rough childhood in a border town, a manuscript that got plucked from the slush pile, some ridiculously stiff competition for a major literary award — Martinez had prepared an acceptance speech. And he wanted to be silver-tongued and alert when it came time to deliver it during the awards ceremony after dinner.

Domingo Martinez didn’t come to New York just wanting and hoping to win a National Book Award. He had come here prepared to win. Like I said, the coolest guy in the house.

2.
It didn’t happen, of course. The non-fiction prize went to Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo, a former Washington Post reporter and editor, currently a staff writer at The New Yorker, winner of a Pulitzer Prize and a MacArthur “genius” grant. Not what you would call a dark horse.

The next day Martinez, the longest of the night’s longshots, wasn’t answering his telephone. Was he disappointed?

“Anybody would be disappointed,” Martell said. ”Win or lose, in the aftermath of these things there’s a certain exhaustion. You suddenly hit a wall. Domingo hit a wall.”

It’s a safe bet that the people who run the National Book Foundation were not disappointed by Boo’s victory, or by the renowned Louise Erdrich’s in the fiction category. Overall, it was a good night for boldface names. Venerable, indefatigable Elmore Leonard was handed a medal by Brooklyn’s highest profile new resident, Martin Amis. Though teen-actress-turned-author Molly Ringwald failed to show, many other literary stars came out. The known trumped the unknown, which may be just what the doctor ordered for a foundation worried about becoming irrelevant in an industry that’s facing terrifying challenges.

Stephen King talks to a fan, the German filmmaker Marianne Schaefer.

I’ve never been a big fan of prizes for artistic achievement, but seeing the Domingo Martinez story unfold this year gave me a new appreciation for the argument that anything that sells books in these dire times is a good thing. Martinez’s career got a to-die-for jump start. What’s wrong with that?

“Books, obviously, are not the same as other commodities,” Harold Augenbraum, executive director of the National Book Foundation, acknowledged in a telephone interview before the awards ceremony. “Competition between artworks is not accepted universally, and you can’t judge artworks the same way you judge consumer goods. But the National Book Award gives people the opportunity to disagree. It opens the conversation, which is a good thing.  Literature should be discussed. In talking about books, we come to understand them better.”

Fine. But please, in your effort to become more mainstream, don’t get rid of all the longshots. They’re the real stars of any awards ceremony.

Also, check out The Millions’s recap and related coverage of this year’s National Book Award winners.

The non-fiction award went to Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo (Don’t miss our illuminating interview).

The Poetry award was won by David Ferry for Bewilderment. The winner in the Young People’s Literature category was Goblin Secrets by William Alexander.

Bonus Link: The full list of 2012 nominees

Because of the award’s global reach and egalitarian process, it’s always interesting to dig deeper into the longlist. Taken as a whole, the literary tendencies of various countries become evident, and a few titles recur again and again, revealing which books have made a global impact on readers.

Overall favorites: books that were nominated by at least seven libraries.

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes (15 libraries representing Australia, Belgium, Canada, Croatia, Czech Republic, England, Germany, Greece, Ireland, the Netherlands, and the United States)

The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach (9 libraries representing Belgium and the United States)

The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt (9 libraries representing Canada, Ireland, and the United States)

The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht (9 libraries representing Austria, Ireland, Norway, and the United States)

The Cat’s Table by Michael Ondaatje (7 libraries representing Belgium, Canada, and the United States)

The Stranger’s Child by Alan Hollinghurst (7 libraries representing Belgium, the Czech Republic, England, Greece, New Zealand, Russia, and the United States)

You can also look at the list and see which books are favorites in different countries. Several books were nominated by multiple libraries in the same country. Here’s a few:

In Canada, Half-Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan

In Australia, Autumn Laing by Alex Miller

In New Zealand, The Conductor by Sarah Quigley

In the Netherlands, Julia by Otto de Kat, The Book of Doubt by Tessa de Loo, and Caesarion by Tommy Wieringa

There were also several countries with only one library nominating just one or two books. Here are a few of those:

From Iceland, The Map of Time by Félix J. Palma

From India, The Sly Company of People Who Care by Rahul Bhattacharya

From Jamaica, The Goat Woman of Largo Bay by Gillian Royes

From Mexico, My Two Worlds by Sergio Chejfec

From Sweden, The Dewey Decimal System by Nathan Larson

In our Most Anticipated Books post for the first half of 2012, Sonya Chung said of Bring Up the Bodies:

Those of us who gobbled up Hilary Mantel’s Booker Prize-winning Wolf Hall eagerly await the release of its sequel, the ominously-titled Bring Up the Bodies. In Wolf Hall, we saw the operatic parallel rise of both Thomas Cromwell and Anne Boleyn in the court of Henry VIII. In Bring Up the Bodies, Anne’s failure to produce a male heir, and Henry’s eternally wandering attentions, present Cromwell with the challenge of his career: protecting the King, eliminating Anne, and preserving his own power base. How we loved to hate Anne in Wolf Hall; will her destruction at the hands of the king and his chief minister win our sympathies? If anyone can effect such a complication of emotional investment, Mantel can.

Mantel was also recently profiled by Larissa MacFarquhar for The New Yorker, and you can read multiple excerpts from her latest work online thanks to the New York Review of Books, Parade, Macmillan, and The Telegraph. Also, you can check out reviews and excerpts from the five other titles on the Booker shortlist over here.

During our Year in Reading last year, author Alex Shakar wrote about Yan’s novel Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out.

Yan’s style here is maximalistic, headlong, sloppy to be sure, but bursting with life; or rather, lives — human and otherwise. A Chinese landowner is executed at the dawn of the Cultural Revolution, and the story follows him literally to hell and back, again and again as he’s reborn in a progression of animal incarnations. Each time, he winds up near his former family and participates in its dramas, goes on animal adventures, and witnesses the hardships, cruelties, and absurdities of life in China over the last half-century. Mo Yan himself shows up as a character from time to time.

Yan’s other books available in English include:

Red Sorghum (which was made into a feature film)
The Garlic Ballads
Big Breasts & Wide Hips
The Republic of Wine
Shifu, You’ll Do Anything for a Laugh
Change
Explosions and Other Stories
Forthcoming in January: Pow!
He also has a story in the collection of Chinese short fiction Chairman Mao Would Not Be Amused