This year’s finalists for The Story Prize have been announced, and the competition is, as usual, staggering:

• In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin (Norton)
• Drift by Victoria Patterson (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
• Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)

Even more remarkable, as Story Prize director Larry Dark points out, these are all books by emerging authors:

What’s particularly exciting is that all three are debuts–a first for The Story Prize. In fact, in the previous five years of the award, only 2 of 15 finalists were the authors’ first books: 2004/05 finalist The Circus in Winter by Cathy Day and 2005/06 winner The Hill Road by Patrick O’Keeffe.

The winner–who will receive $20,000–will be announced at a ceremony at the New School in New York City on March 3. For info on how to get tickets, see The Story Prize blog.

Here on FWR, read Brian Short’s review of Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned.

GalleyCat attended the recent National Book Awards and asked attendees for tips on how aspiring writers can survive the recession. The two-minute video includes advice from fiction finalists Bonnie Jo Campbell and Marcel Theroux , YA finalists Rita Williams Garcia and Laini Taylor, poetry finalist Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, and nonfiction finalist Sean B. Carroll.

• Bonnie Jo Campbell, American Salvage (Wayne State University Press)
• Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin (Random House)
• Daniyal Mueenuddin, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (W. W. Norton & Co.)
• Jayne Anne Phillips, Lark and Termite (Alfred A. Knopf)
• Marcel Theroux, Far North (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

The complete list, as well as other fun stats and figures, can be found here. Winners will be announced on November 18 at the 60th National Book Awards Benefit Dinner and Ceremony in New York.

FWR readers, what’s your pick among these titles?