The finalists for this year's National Book Criics Circle Awards were announced over the weekend, and we find ourselves in the happy position of two local publishers vying for the same prize. We can't take sides--and truly, the books are quite different from each other--so instead we just wish congratulations to them both. Geoff Dyer's "Otherwise Known as the Human Condition," published by Graywolf Press of Minneapolis, is a finalist in the criticism category, along with "Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music," by Ellen Willis, published by the University of Minnesota Press.

Their competition: "Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything," by David Bellos (Faber & Faber); "The Ecstasy of Influence," by Jonathan Lethem (Doubleday); and "Karaoke Culture," by Dubravka Ugresic (Open Letter).

And here are the other categories and the other finalists. Where we have reviewed a book, I've provided a link to the review.

Fiction

"Open City," by Teju Cole (Random House)

"The Marriage Plot," by Jeffrey Eugenides (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

"The Stranger's Child," by Alan Hollinghurst (Alfred A. Knopf)

"Binocular Vision," by Edith Pearlman (Lookout Books) (Also a finalist for the National Book Award and the Story Prize)

"Stone Arabia," by Dana Spiotta (Scribner)

Nonfiction

"A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War," by Amanda Foreman (Random House)

"The Information," by James Gleick (Pantheon)

"To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918," by Adam Hochschild (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

"Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary War," by Maya Jasanoff (Knopf)

"Pulphead: Essays," by John Jeremiah Sullivan (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Autobiography

"One Hundred Names for Love," by Diane Ackerman (W.W. Norton)

"The Memory Palace," by Mira Bartok (The Free Press)

"Harlem is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America," by Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts (Little, Brown)

"It Calls You Back: An Odyssey through Love, Addiction, Revolutions and Healing," by Luis J. Rodriguez (Touchstone)

"Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War," by Deb OlinUnferth (Henry Holt)

Biography

"Love and Capital:Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of the Revolution," by Mary Gabriel (Little, Brown)

"George F. Kennan: An American Life," by John Lewis Gaddis (Penguin Press)

"Hemingway's Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-1961," by Paul Hendrickson (Knopf)

"Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention," by Manning Marable (Viking)

"Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China," by Ezra F. Vogel (Belknap Press)

Poetry

"Core Samples from the World," by Forrest Gander (New Directions)

"Kingdom Animalia," by Aracelis Girmay (BOA Editions)

"Space, in Chains," by Laura Kasischke (Copper Canyon)

"The Chameleon Couch," by Yusef Komunyakaa (FSG)

"Devotions," by Bruce Smith (University of Chicago Press)

The winners will be announced March 8.