“The City Council of New York officially declares the week of November 17, 2008 ‘National Book Awards Week in the City of New York’”

If you happen to be in the city that never sleeps this week, you can catch some incredible events, including a dinner with the various winners from the National Book Foundation (the rest of us can see updates as they happen at the website linked above).  The crown jewel of prizes, the National Book Award, will be announced on Wednesday, and tomorrow there is a (sold out, sorry) reading by the finalists.  They are as follows:

Fiction:

Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project
Rachel Kushner, Telex from Cuba
Peter Matthiessen, Shadow Country
Marilynne Robinson, Home
Salvatore Scibona, The End

Non-fiction:

Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War
Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (check out our recent podcast with her!)
Jane Mayer, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals
Jim Sheeler, Final Salute: A Story of Unfinished Lives
Joan Wickersham, The Suicide Index: Putting My Father’s Death in Order

Poetry:

Frank Bidart, Watching the Spring Festival
Mark Doty, Fire to Fire: New and Collected Poems
Reginald Gibbons, Creatures of a Day
Richard Howard, Without Saying
Patricia Smith, Blood Dazzler

Young People’s Lit (kind of a silly name, no?):

Laurie Halse Anderson, Chains
Kathi Appelt, The Underneath
Judy Blundell, What I Saw and How I Lied
E. Lockhart, The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks
Tim Tharp, The Spectacular Now

Today’s edition: Annette Gordon Reed, author of The Hemingses of Monticello and Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy as well as co-author of Vernon Can Read! A Memoir.

In addition to her work as an author Ms. Reed is a professor of law at New York Law School and a professor of history at Rutgers University.

In The Hemingses of Monticello, Ms. Reed expands on her earlier work on the controversial and often denied relationship between Thomas Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings to include the history and lives of the entire Hemings family; a family unique in their time because of their connection to the White House and to one another.