New York, NY – February 1, 2007 – Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE: BKS), the world’s largest bookseller, today announced the finalists for its prestigious 2006 Discover Great New Writers Awards.  The winners in each category, fiction and nonfiction, receive a $10,000 prize and a full year of additional promotion from Barnes & Noble.  Second-place finalists receive $5,000, and third-place finalists, $2,500.  The finalists are:

Fiction
Ben Fountain, Brief Encounters with Che Guevara (Ecco)
O. Z. Livaneli, Bliss (St. Martin’s Press)
Sam Savage, Firmin (Coffee House Press)

Nonfiction
Eric Blehm, The Last Season (HarperCollins)
Marilyn Johnson, The Dead Beat (HarperCollins)
Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost (HarperCollins)

The winners will be announced on Wednesday, February 28th, at a private awards ceremony.  At 7:00 p.m. that evening, all six finalists are invited to read from their work at Barnes & Noble’s Lincoln Triangle store in New York City, located on 1972 Broadway at 66th Street.  The Discover Awards honor the best works featured the previous calendar year in the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers program.

The Finalists
Ben Fountain’s rewarding fiction debut, Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, is a fascinating and provocative collection of stories that brings global issues to a more personal level.   Turkey, a land of cultures in conflict, is brilliantly depicted through the sensitive portrayals of three characters in O.Z. Livaneli’s compassionate novel, Bliss.  An unusual protagonist in the form of a literate rat serves as the narrator for Sam Savage’s darkly comic first novel, Firmin, the adventurous story of a character who discovers the redemptive power of literature – when properly digested.

The Last Season is Eric Blehm’s beautifully crafted and inspirational tale of the disappearance of a seasoned ranger in the unforgiving backcountry of the Sierra Nevada.  A passion for the perfect obituary led Marilyn Johnson to write The Dead Beat, a humorous, often poignant book focused on this overlooked literary art.  Daniel Mendelsohn’s obsession with a family photograph served as the catalyst for his devastating family memoir The Lost, the result of an investigative quest that would take him around the globe in search of Holocaust survivors from a small Polish village.   

The Jurists
Two panels of distinguished literary jurists selected the finalists and will select the winners.  Serving as this year’s fiction jurists are Mohsin Hamid, the author of the novel Moth Smoke, and a forthcoming second novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist; Lily King, the author of The English Teacher, whose first novel, The Pleasing Hour, won the Discover Award in 1999; and Marcus Stevens, the author of the novels The Curve of the World and Useful Girl.

This year’s nonfiction judges include Da Chen, the author of Colors of the Mountain and the novel Brothers; Mary Pipher, the bestselling author of Reviving Ophelia, and most recently, Writing to Change the World, among other publications; and Mary Roach, the bestselling author of the books Stiff and Spook.  

The Discover Awards
The Discover Great New Writers program was established in 1990 to highlight works of exceptional literary quality that might otherwise be overlooked in a crowded book marketplace. This year’s selections featured the work of 66 new and previously underappreciated writers. Submissions to the program are read and discussed by a volunteer group of Barnes & Noble booksellers before selection for the program’s seasonal promotions.  Past winners of the annual Discover Great New Writers Award include Uzodinma Iweala for Beasts of No Nation (2005), Nathaniel Fick for One Bullet Away (2005), John Dalton for Heaven Lake (2004), Alison Smith for Name All the Animals (2004), Monica Ali for Brick Lane (2003), Anthony Doerr for The Shell Collector (2002), Manil Suri for The Death of Vishnu (2001), Hampton Sides for Ghost Soldiers (2001), Tracy Chevalier for Girl with a Pearl Earring (2000), and David Guterson for Snow Falling on Cedars (1994).