Domingo Martinez is having a royally remarkable year…
Not only is the 40-year-old Mexican American writer a 2013 Pushcart Prize nominee, but the National Book Foundation has also just selected him as a finalist for this year’s National Book Awards.
The Brownsville, Texas native’s novel The Boy Kings of Texas appears on the short list of nominees in the non-fiction category. It’s up against books by Anne Applebaum, Katherine Boo, Robert A. Caro and Anthony Shadid.
Martinez’s lyrical and gritty memoir, published by Lyons Press, is an authentic coming-of-age story that centers on a family living on the Texas-Mexico border.
Meanwhile, Junot Díaz, who recently received a lucrative “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation, is nominated in the fiction category for his critically acclaimed collection of short stories entitled, This Is How You Lose Her.
The National Book Foundation will announce the winners of the National Book Awards on November 14 in New York.
Here’s a look at this year’s finalists:
FICTION
Junot Díaz, This Is How You Lose Her (Riverhead Books)
Dave Eggers, A Hologram for the King (McSweeney’s Books)
Louise Erdrich, The Round House (Harper)
Ben Fountain, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (Ecco)
Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds (Little, Brown and Company)
NON-FICTION:
Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1945-1956 (Doubleday)
Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity (Random House)
Robert A. Caro, The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume 4 (Knopf)
Domingo Martinez, The Boy Kings of Texas (Lyons Press)
Anthony Shadid, House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)