The National Book Critics Circle has announced its awards finalists. The most entertaining read is Lizze Skurnick’s liveblogging. Most interesting/unsurprising news of the nominees? Joyce Carol Oates is up for two awards, for fiction and memoir. I tell you, that woman belongs on Battlestar Gallactica — she’s an infinitely cloneable cyborg.

Laila Lalami reviews Yalo by Elias Khoury for the Los Angeles Times. “It is these successive and contradictory confessions that the novel gives us, almost without preamble,” she writes, describing the novel’s fractured, circular narrative. “Los Angeles has Joan Didion and Raymond Chandler, and Istanbul, Orhan Pamuk. The beautiful, resilient city of Beirut belongs to Khoury.”

Gwenda is in Vermont, at the residency part of her low-res MFA program.

I know that sometimes I wonder, what should I read next? Now, I have shelves and stacks. But in case you’re looking, The Millions has some recommendations.

Let’s hope none of them start out like this: “Gerald began — but was interrupted by a piercing whistle which cost him ten percent of his hearing permanently, as it did everyone else in a ten-mile radius of the eruption, not that it mattered much because for them ‘permanently’ meant the next ten minutes or so until buried by searing lava or suffocated by choking ash — to pee.” That’s the winner of the 2007 Bulwer-Lytton fiction contest, which honors terrible opening sentences of imaginary novels (via Ward 6, my favorite new litblog — or should that be newly favorite?)

More to read! Mark points out that the NY Times is serializing a new piece by Benjamin Black aka John Banville.

More more to read! A short story by Etgar Keret in the LA Weekly. (via Callie) P.S. – the LA Weekly publishing fiction? Way to go!

The Happy Ending Reading Series gets a starry review from The Publishing Spot.

Congrats to Cecil Castellucci – The PLAIN Janes has been nominated for a Cybil Award.