National Book Awards

Three previous National Book Awards winners--Don DeLillo, J. F. Powers and Peter Gay--are among the 10 writers nominated this year. DeLillo, who won in 1985 for "White Noise," was nominated Monday for "Libra," a novel based on the life of Lee Harvey Oswald and the events that led to President John F. Kennedy's assassination.

When Lawrence Ferlinghetti stood up last week at his City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco to announce the finalists for the 2006 National Book Awards, he made sure to remind those in attendance that this was a political event, noting, "It's a great tribute to democracy, that prizes like these still exist." Later, at an informal reception, the 87-year-old poet and publisher took a moment to elaborate.

Look at it as the People's Choice for book lovers. About 15 awards for books, called the Quills, will be handed out in a promised "star-studded" October ceremony in New York, to be aired on 14 NBC-owned stations, including KNBC-TV Channel 4 in Los Angeles. And readers will get to vote on the winners.

E.L. Doctorow, Stephen King and former presidential candidate Al Gore are among the nominees this year for the Quills, a book prize that aims to bring some Oscar-style glitz to publishing. With no "Harry Potter" book published in the past year, there was no clear front-runner for book of the year, which will be chosen by the public in online voting from a list of nominees in 19 categories.

On Monday, news started buzzing that Cormac McCarthy, chronicler of a blasted and violent early American West and, more recently, a dystopic frozen future, might be under consideration for the Nobel Prize in Literature, whose announcement is planned for Thursday. British wagering company Ladbrokes has tracked McCarthy's odds rising from 66-to-1 to 8-to-1. That makes him the highest-ranked American, unless you count Ngugi wa Thiong'o, who as I was typing moved from second place to first; wa Thiong'o has been a resident of the United States since his exile from Kenya in the late 1970s.

Author Lily Tuck says she would be pleased to see any of the five National Book Awards fiction finalists receive the prize, a generous statement given that Tuck herself is among the nominees. "There's a feeling of solidarity and supportiveness for each other," says Tuck, cited for "The News From Paraguay," a novel set in the 19th century. "We all feel very lucky to have gotten this far."

In a glittering ceremony at New York's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, novelist E. L. Doctorow and Barry Lopez were chosen winners of the prestigious American Book Awards on Monday night. Doctorow was selected for his novel "World's Fair" (Random House), a re-creation of a child's life during the Great Depression. Lopez was honored for "Arctic Dreams" (Charles Scribner's Sons), an account of his travels in the Arctic Circle.

The nominees for fiction in the 1990 National Book Awards include two first-time novelists and an 88-year-old author who completed his work in 1948 but could not find a publisher until last year. The nominees were announced today by the National Book Foundation, the nonprofit organization that sponsors the annual awards. The fiction nominees include Felipe Alfau, an 88-year-old Spanish native who immigrated to the United States during World War I.

Josephine Miles, a well-known West Coast poet and the first woman granted tenure in the University of California's English department, is dead at age 73. Miss Miles died Sunday of pneumonia at her Berkeley home, school officials reported. At her death she was professor emeritus of English at the Berkeley campus and one of only 12 faculty members in the nine-campus school system to hold the prestigious title of University Professor.

Bad news for American writers hoping for a Nobel Prize next week: The top member of the award jury believes the United States is too insular and ignorant to compete with Europe when it comes to great writing. As the Swedish Academy enters final deliberations for this year's award, permanent secretary Horace Engdahl said it's no coincidence that most winners are European. "Of course there is powerful literature in all big cultures, but you can't get away from the fact that Europe still is the center of the literary world . . . not the United States," he said in an interview Tuesday.