Peter Hessler’s Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China’s Past and Present has just been named one of the five finalists for the National Book Award in the nonfiction category. In one section of the book Hessler talks with Zhou Youguang and others involved with China’s Pinyin movement.

The other nonfiction finalists are:

• Taylor Branch, At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68 (Simon & Schuster)
• Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone (Alfred A. Knopf)
• Timothy Egan, The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl (Houghton Mifflin)
• Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (Alfred A. Knopf)

Also of likely interest to many readers of Pinyin News is a finalist in the category of Young People’s Literature, American Born Chinese, by Gene Yang. (The National Book Award’s site gives an incorrect title: America Born Chinese.) This is a graphic novel about a Chinese-American boy who moves from San Francisco’s Chinatown to suburbia, where he is just one of two Asian children in the school.

further reading:

• excerpt from Oracle Bones
• interview with Peter Hessler
• excerpt from American Born Chinese
• Humble Comics
• National Book Foundation, presenter of the National Book Awards