Winners of the National Book Awards, presented last night and covered at length in today's New York Times:

• Fiction: Shadow Country by Peter Matthiessen (Modern Library)
• Nonfiction: The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family by Annette Gordon-Reed, (Norton)
• Young people's literature: What I Saw and How I Lied by Judy Blundell (Scholastic)
• Poetry: Fire to Fire: New and Collected Poems by Mark Doty (HarperCollins)

"I can't say what a wonderful November this has been," said Gordon-Reed. "It's sort of wonderful to have the book come out at this time. People ask me if I planned it this way; I didn't. All of America--we're on a great journey now and I look forward to the years to come."

The National Book Foundation awarded its Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters to Maxine Hong Kingston, and Grove Press publisher Barney Rosset received the Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community.

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The shortlist for the 2009 PNBA Book Awards, sponsored by the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association, consists of 12 books written or illlustrated by Northwest authors and published in 2008. They were selected by a committee of independent booksellers from Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana and Alaska, who will choose the final list of no more than six titles in mid-December. PNBA will announce the winners in January. The shortlist includes:

• American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon by Steven Rinella (Spiegel & Grau)
• The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein (Harper)
• Conquistador: Hernán Cortés, King Montezuma, and the Last Stand of the Aztecs by Buddy Levy (Bantam)
• The Eleventh Man by Ivan Doig (Harcourt)
• The English Major by Jim Harrison (Grove)
• Guernica by Dave Boling (Bloomsbury)
• The Jewel of Medina by Sherry Jones (Beaufort Books)
• Little Hoot, illustrated by Jen Corace (Chronicle)
• Selected Poems: 1970-2005 by Floyd Skloot (Tupelo Press)
• Shopping for Porcupine: A Life in Arctic Alaska by Seth Kantner (Milkweed Editions)
• Wild Beauty: Photographs of the Columbia River Gorge, 1867-1957 by Terry Toedtemeier and John Laursen (The Northwest Photography Archive & Oregon State University Press)
• The Wink of the Zenith: The Shaping of a Writer's Life by Floyd Skloot (University of Nebraska Press)