The Spec Fic Short List

The short lists are up for the Indie Lit Awards, and I am thrilled to share the list for the Speculative Fiction award:

• A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness
• The Magician King by Lev Grossman
• 11/22/1963 by Stephen King
• Among Others by Jo Walton
• Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

I am definitely geeking out over this list, especially since my super strange reading this past year means I've only gotten to one of them (A Monster Calls). But these are all books I've been seeing around the blogosphere, and the reviews have had me adding to my wish list. Now I have a brilliant excuse to indulge!

Obviously, I am most concerned with the SpecFic list as I'm the Director for that panel, but I don't want to short change the other short lists, which also have me adding to my wish list:

Biography/ Memoir

• Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua
• Bossypants by Tina Fey
• I Pray Hardest When Being Shot At by Kyle Garret 
• Little Princes by Conor Grennan
• Tolstoy and the Purple Chair by Nina Sankovitch

GLBTQ

• Well With My Soul by Gregory Allen
• Swimming to Chicago by David Matthew Barnes
• Songs for the New Depression by Kergan Edwards-Stout
• Nina Here Nor There: My Journey Beyond Gender by Nick Krieger
• Huntress by Melinda Lo

Fiction

• Dance Lessons by Aine Greaney
• Cross Currents by John Shors
• The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
• Silver Sparrow by Tayari Jones
• The Last Time I Saw Paris by Lynn Sheene

Mystery

• Missing Daughter, Shattered Family by Liz Strange
• The Cut by George Pelecanos
• A Trick of the Light by Louise Penny
• The Two Deaths of Daniel Hayes by Marcus Sakey
• Fun & Games by Duane Swierczynski

Non-Fiction

• Berlin 1961 by Frederick Kempe
• In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson
• Lost in Shangri-La by Mitchell Zuckoff
• Physics of the Future by Michio Kaku
• The Social Animal by David Brooks

Poetry

• Beyond Scent of Sorrow by Sweta Vikram
• Catalina by Laurie Soriano
• What Looks Like an Elephant by Edward Nudelman
• Three Women: A Poetic Triptych and Selected Poems by Ramos, Emma Eden
• Sonics in Warholia by Megan Volpert

All of the panels will be enthusiastically (at least I'm thinking so) reading their short listed books, so that we can announce the winners sometime in March.