Finalists for the National Book Award were announced this morning. No surprises, unless you're one of those people determined to believe that Dave Eggers is a hack. (Junot Diaz is going to win everything all the time always, I think is the moral of this + his recent MacArthur fellowship.)

Fiction:

This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz (Riverhead)
A Hologram for the King by Dave Eggers (McSweeney's)
The Round House by Louise Erdrich (Harper)
Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain (Ecco)
The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers (Little, Brown)

Read the nominees for nonfiction, poetry, and children's lit here.