Knopf notched five nominations and Random House garnered another two among the 1998 titles chosen as finalists by the National Book Critics Circle for its annual awards. Albert Mobilio was awarded the Nona Balakian citation for excellence in reviewing.
Farrar, Straus &Giroux, whose authors swept the 1998 National Book Awards, earned three nominations. The winners of this year's NBCC Awards will be announced March 8 at a ceremony at the Tishman Auditorium at the New York University Law School. For more information, call Barbara Hoffert at (212) 463-6806.
The finalists for the 1998 NBCC awards are as follows:
Fiction:The Hours by Michael Cunningham (FSG); Preston Falls by David Gates (Knopf); Birds of America by Lorrie Moore (Knopf); The Love of a Good Woman by Alice Munro (Knopf) and No Lease on Life by Lynne Tillman (Harcourt).
General Nonfiction:Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America by Ira Berlin (Harvard Univ. Press); We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda by Philip Gourevitch (FSG); King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa by Adam Hochschild (Houghton); The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present by Roy Porter (Norton); and The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester (HarperCollins).
Biography/Autobiography:Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. by Ron Chernow (Random); Rocket Boys: A Memoir by Homer H. Hickam Jr. (Delacorte); A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar (S&S); King of the World: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero by David Remnick (Random); Everybody Was So Young: Gerald and Sara Murphy: A Lost Generation Love Story by Amanda Vail (Houghton).
P try:Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse by Anne Carson (Knopf); Self-Evidence: A Selection of Verse 1977-1997 by Pamela White Hadas (Triquarterly Books/Northwestern Univ. Press); Thieves of Paradise by Yusef Komunyakaa (Wesleyan Univ. Press); Last Chance for the Tarzan Holler: P ms by Thylias Moss (Persea); and The Bird Catcher by Marie Ponsot (Knopf).
Criticism:Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human by Harold Bloom (Riverhead); Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D.H. Lawrence by Geoff Dyer (North Point); Visions of Jazz: The First Century by Gary Giddins (Oxford Univ. Press); Hip Hop America by Nelson George (Viking); and The Sounds of P try by Robert Pinsky (FSG).
Selling the Finalists
Praising the NBCC selections as a showcase for literary fiction, Nancy Brown, frontlist buyer for RJ Julia Booksellers in Madison, Conn., told PW that authors Moore, Munro and Cunningham are already fine sellers at her store.
Vintage is planning to accelerate by a month or two the summer release of the trade paper edition of Gates's Preston Falls in order to capitalize on the NBCC nomination, said publicity chief Katie Barrett. Harcourt Brace executive editor Dan Farley can now slap the label "NBCC Finalist" on the planned fall paperback release of No Lease on Life, which will coincide with the publication of Tillman's Bookstore: The Life &Times of Books &Co. For Delacorte, Hickam's nomination for Rocket Boys: A Memoir comes right as the publisher prepares for the February 19 release of October Sky, Universal Pictures' fast-track film adaptation of Hickam's memoir. Although the hardcover edition of the book is still in print, a Dell mass market will go on sale February 16, with a printing of 200,000 copies.
