What everyone’s going to be talking about from this year’s National Book Awards nominations is the fact that Philip Roth and Bob Dylan didn’t make it, and the fact that the report of the 9/11 Commission did. That inclusion was “the oddest and biggest piece of news,” according to Steve Zeitchik of PW Newsline (in a report not available as a link). In fiction, Zeitchik called the fact that there were no nominations for Random House or FSG the “big surprise,” although big houses weren’t exactly ignored: fiction nominees included, in addition to Chrstine Schutt of TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press, Kate Walbert, Joan Silber, Lily Tuck and Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum of Scribner’s, Norton, HarperCollins, and Harcourt, respectively. Another way of looking at it: That’s “five New York City-based women,” the front page of today’s New York Times observed in its summation of a report by Edward Wyatt. The wires, meanwhile, including initial reports such as an Associated Press wire story by Jeff Baenen and an Agence France Press report, all focused on the inclusion of the 9/11 report.