NBCC Releases Annual Awards Nominees

Staff -- Library Journal, 1/21/1998

Once again, it's Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain vs. Don DeLillo's Underworld, heavyweight contenders for the National Book Award title in fiction, as the National Book Critics Circle announced nominees for its annual award. Both novels were nominated by the membership at large, who can vote by ballot prior to the NBCC board meeting held to determine the nominees; a vote by 20 percent of those casting ballots assures a nomination.

Other contenders in fiction include The Blue Flower by Britisher Penelope Fitzgerald and Dreams of My Russian Summers by Russian-born French resident Andreï Makine, which until this year would have been ineligible. Arguing that good books are good books, regardless of their provenance, board members voted last year to open the field to non-Americans whose books were appearing in this country in English.

Following are the nominations in five categories. The awards will be given March 24 in New York.

Fiction

• Don DeLillo, Underworld, Scribner[membership nomination]
• Penelope Fitzgerald, The Blue Flower, Mariner: Houghton
• Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain, Grove [membership nomination]
• Andreï Makine, Dreams of My Russian Summers, Arcade
• Philip Roth, American Pastoral, Houghton

General Nonfiction

• Anne Fadiman, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, Farrar
• Jon Krakauer, Into Thin Air, Villard [membership nomination]
• James L. Kugel, The Bible As It Was, Belknap: Harvard Univ. Pr.
• Pauline Maier, American Scripture, Knopf
• Stephen Pinker, How the Mind Works, Norton

Biography/Autobiography

• J.M. Coetzee, Boyhood: Scenes from Pastoral Life, Viking
• Joseph Ellis, American Sphinx, Knopf
• Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf, Knopf
• Doris Lessing, Walking in the Shade, HarperCollins
• James Tobin, Ernie Pyle's War, Free Pr.

Poetry

• Frank Bidart, Desire, Farrar
• Brenda Hillman, Loose Sugar, Wesleyan Univ. Pr.
• Mark Jarman, Questions for Ecclesiastes, Story Line
• Sonia Sanchez, Does Your House Have Lions?, Beacon
• Charles Wright, Black Zodiac, Farrar

Criticism

• John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the 18th Century, Farrar
• Vivian Gornick, The End of the Novel of Love, Beacon
• Alfred Kazin, God and the American Writer, Knopf [membership nomination]
• Mario Vargas Llosa, Making Waves, Farrar
• Helen Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets, Harvard Univ. Pr.