Winners in the four competitive categories - fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and young people's literature - will each receive $10,000. Other finalists get $1,000. The results will be announced at a Nov. 14 ceremony in Manhattan hosted by author-humorist Fran Lebowitz and featuring honorary medals for author Joan Didion and National Public Radio host Terry Gross.
Fiction nominees Berlinski, Denis Johnson, and Lydia Davis all were published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, which has had an enviable run of National Book Awards and Pulitzer Prize winners in recent years, including Jonathan Franzen's "The Corrections" and Richard Powers's "The Echo Maker."
Johnson's 600-page "Tree of Smoke," published to near-universal acclaim after taking nine years to write, is a Vietnam War novel that has been compared to such classics as Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried" and Graham Greene's "The Quiet American."
The other fiction finalist was Jim Shepard's book of short stories, "Like You'd Understand, Anyway." No story collection has won since Andrea Barrett's "Ship Fever," in 1996. Shepard teaches at Williams College.
Besides Hitchens, nonfiction nominees include Edwidge Danticat for her memoir, "Brother, I'm Dying," Woody Holton's "Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution" and Tim Weiner's "Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA."
It was the first National Book Award nomination for the British-born Hitchens, who wasn't even eligible for the prize until April, when on his 58th birthday he became a United States citizen. He resides in Washington, D.C., and has lived up to the title of his featured column on Slate, "Fighting Words." Objects of attack have included Mother Teresa, Henry Kissinger, and, much to the unhappiness of his former liberal allies, opponents of the Iraq war.
One antiwar writer, former US poet laureate Robert Hass, is also a book award finalist. Hass, whose "Time and Materials" includes several poems critical of the Iraq invasion, was nominated by a committee presided over by the current poet laureate, Charles Simic. Other poetry finalists are Linda Gregerson's "Magnetic North," David Kirby's "The House on Boulevard St.," Stanley Plumly's "Old Heart," and "Messenger: New and Selected Poems 1976-2006" by Ellen Bryant Voigt, who lives in Cabot, Vt.
Scholastic Inc., known to many as the US publisher of the Harry Potter books, finally received a National Book Award nomination in young people's literature, for Brian Selznick's "The Invention of Hugo Cabret." The other finalists are Kathleen Duey's "Skin Hunger" and two first-time novels: M. Sindy Felin's "Touching Snow" and Sara Zarr's "Story of a Girl."
The book awards, founded in 1950, are sponsored by the nonprofit National Book Foundation.
