Books by Percival Everett and the late Alexei Navalny are among finalists for critics circle prizes

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NEW YORK (AP) — Percival Everett’s “James,” a posthumous memoir by Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny and Adam Higginbotham’s acclaimed work about the Challenger disaster are among the nominees for National Book Critics Circle prizes.

Along with finalists in eight competitive categories, the critics circle on Thursday announced a lifetime achievement honor for “The House On Mango Street” author Sandra Cisneros, an excellence in reviewing prize for New York contributor Lauren Michele Jackson and a public service award for author-educator Lori Lynn Turner. The Black-owned publisher Third World Press is the recipient of the Toni Morrison Achievement Award, named for the late Nobel laureate.

Winners will be announced during a March 20 ceremony in Manhattan. Maxine Hong Kingston, a former NBCC winner, will be the guest speaker as the critics circle marks its 50th anniversary.

Besides “James,” Everett’s retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” fiction nominees include Marie-Helene Bertino’s “Beautyland,” Joseph O’Neill’s “Godwin,” Hisham Matar’s “My Friends” and Nora Lange’s “Us Fools.”

Navalny’s “Patriot” is a finalist for autobiography, along with Manjula Martin’s “The Last Fire Season,” Wei Tchou’s “Little Seed,” Zito Madu’s “The Minotaur at Calle Lanza,” and Erika Morillo’s “Mother Archive.”

Higginbotham’s “Challenger” was cited for nonfiction. The other nominees are Steve Coll’s “The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq,” Edwidge Danticat’s “We’re Alone,” Tricia Romano’s “The Freaks Came Out To Write: The Definitive History of the Village Voice, the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture” and Gretchen Sisson’s “Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood.”

Poetry finalists include Anne Carson’s “Wrong Norma,” Carl Phillips’ “Scattered Snows,” Jennifer Chang’s “An Authentic Life,” Oliver Baez Bendorf’s’ “Consider the Rooster” and Dawn Lundy’s “Instructions for the Lovers.” For biography, the nominees were Jane Kamesnky’s “Candida Royalle and the Sexual Revolution”; Cynthia Carr’s “Candy Darling”; Jean Strouse’s book on painter John Singer Sargent, “Family Romance”; a biography of Harriet Tubman, Tiya Miles’ “Night Flyer”; and Amy Reading’s “The World She Edited: Katharine S. White at The New Yorker.”

Vinson Cunningham’s “Great Expectations,” a political novel based in part on Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, is a finalist for the John Leonard Prize for best first book. The other nominees are Rebecca Nagle’s “By the Fire We Carry”; Tessa Hulls’ graphic memoir, “Feeding Ghosts”; Carrie Courogen’s Elaine May biography, “Miss May Does Not Exist”; and John Ganz’s “When the Clock Broke.”

Leonard, a co-founder of the NBCC and a former New York Times critic known for promoting emerging writers, died in 2008.