Farrar, Straus &Giroux bagged six National Book Award nominations (including one, based on an early look by the judges, for Tom Wolfe's much-anticipated new novel) -- more than any other publisher -- according to the National Book Foundation's announcement of the 1998 nominations. The distinguished novelist John Updike, a previous NBA and Pulitzer Prize winner, has been awarded the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.
Fiction: Kaaterskill Falls by Allegra Goodman (The Dial Press); The Healing by Gayl Jones (Beacon Press); Charming Billy by Alice McDermott (FSG); Damascus Gate by Robert Stone (Houghton Mifflin); A Man in Full by Tom Wolfe (FSG).
Nonfiction: Slaves in the Family by Edward Ball (FSG); Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human by Harold Bloom (Riverhead/Penguin); There Once Was a World: A 900-Year Chronicle of the Shtetl of Eishyshok by Yaffa Eliach (Little, Brown); A Slant of Sun: One Child's Courage by Beth Kephart (Norton); All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of American Slavery by Henry Mayer (St. Martin's Press).
P try: The Art of the Lathe by B.H. Fairchild (Alice James Books); The Little Space: P ms Selected and New, 1968-1998 by Alicia Suskin Ostriker (Univ. of Pittsburgh); Carnival Evening: New and Selected P ms 1968-1998 by Linda Pastan (Norton); From the Devotions by Carl Phillips (Graywolf); This Time: New and Selected P ms by Gerald Stern (Norton).
Young People's Literature: The Secret Life of Amanda K. Woods by Ann Cameron (FSG/Frances Foster); J y Pigza Swallowed the Key by Jack Gantos (FSG); No Pretty Pictures: A Child of War by Anita Lobel (Greenwillow/ Morrow); A Long Way from Chicago by Richard Peck (Dial Books/Penguin); Holes by Louis Sachar (FSG/Frances Foster).
The National Book Awards ceremony and dinner will be held November 18 at the New York Marriott Marquis Hotel in New York's Times Square. The ceremony will be hosted again this year by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Wendy Wasserstein.
