The nominees for the 1999 National Book Critics Circle awards for publishing include this year's Booker Prize winner (J.M. C tzee), an Oprah Book Club author (A. Manette Ansay), the 1999 National Book Award winner for nonfiction (John Dower) and the authors (Frederick Busch and Jonathan Lethem) of two novels many thought were overlooked by this year's NBA judges.
Fiction: A. Manette Ansay's Midnight Champagne (Morrow); Frederick Busch's The Night Inspector (Harmony); J.M. C tzee's Disgrace (Viking), David Gates's The Wonders of the Invisible World: Stories (Knopf) and Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn (Doubleday).
P try: Rafael Campo's Diva (Duke Univ. Press); Tory Dent's HIV, Mon Amour (Sheep Meadow); former p t laureate Rita Dove's On the Bus with Rosa Parks (Norton); Susan Kinsolving's Dailies & Rushes (Grove) and octogenarian Ruth Stone's Ordinary Words (Paris Press).
General Nonfiction: John W. Dower's Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (Norton/New Press); Jane Brox's Five Thousand Days Like This One: An American Family History (Beacon); Patricia Hampl's I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory (Norton); Jean-Paul Kauffmann's The Black Room at Longwood: Napoleon's Exile on Saint Helena (Four Walls Eight Windows) and Jonathan Weiner's Time, Love, Memory: A Great Biologist and His Quest for the Origins of Behavior (Knopf).
Biography/Autobiography: Judith Thurman's Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette (Knopf), which was also an NBA nominee, Richard Holmes' Coleridge: Vol. II: Darker Reflections (Pantheon), Jean Strouse's Morgan: American Financier (Random), Susan E. Tifft and Alex S. Jones's The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family Behind the New York Times (Little, Brown) and Henry Wiencek's The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White (St. Martin's).
Criticism: The late Jorge Luis Borges for Selected Non-Fictions (Viking), William Logan's Reputations of the Tongue: On P ts and P try (Univ. Press of Florida), Michael Schmidt's Lives of the P ts (Knopf), Stuart Klawans's Film Follies: The Cinema Out of Order (Cassell) and David Shields's Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season (Crown).
The Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing was awarded to Benjamin Schwarz, an Atlantic Monthly correspondent and a contributing editor at the Los Angeles Times Book Review. Winners will be announced March 13 at a ceremony at New York University Law School's Tishman Auditorium. For more information, call (212) 462-6806.
