The National Book Critics Circle awards nominations were announced. The contenders for best fiction in 2006:

Read the nominees for the other categories here. Of note to the Atlanta crowd: Atlanta writer Taylor Branch is nominated for the third (and final) part of his biography of MLK, The Edge of Canaan. Part 1, won this award. I think that Branch recently read from the book at The Center for Southern Literature, but there is no evidence of that at their web site. So I may be making that up.