Award to honor best in American letters

National Book Awards to take pick from 'very American' shortlist

By Jamie Allen
CNN.com Senior Writer

(CNN) -- Joyce Carol Oates, Ray Bradbury and Steve Martin are walking down Broadway.

Wait, this isn't a joke. This is the 2000 National Book Awards. Oates, Bradbury and Martin are some of the diverse literary faces that will be seen at the Marriott Marquis in New York's Times Square on Wednesday night when the National Book Foundation (NBF) presents its annual ceremony honoring American writing.

Oates is up for best work of fiction, along with four other finalists, for her Marilyn Monroe reinvention "Blonde." Bradbury, the science fiction writer and creator of such novels as "Fahrenheit 451," will receive the 2000 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. And Martin, the comic actor who has received more attention recently for his forays into writing, will host the awards for the second straight year.

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The NBF bills this year's nominees in Fiction, Nonfiction, Young People's Literature and Poetry as a group of work that "spans continents and centuries." Neil Baldwin, executive director of the NBF, says that although a record 20 nations have media representation at the ceremony, the list of finalists is "very American."

"It's very much about all the different concerns of our culture right now," he says. "It seems to touch on adolescent angst and American history and disenfranchised people and intellectual life and the university and the frontier. It covers such a broad spectrum of native concerns."

Below is a list of finalists in the four categories.

Fiction

-- Oates' "Blonde" retells the life of Hollywood's tragic starlet, Marilyn Monroe, through her eyes. The quasi-fictional account of her life received mixed reviews on its release when it was released in April. Oates has already won a National Book Award, in 1970 for her novel "Them." She has been a finalist four other times.

Four-time finalist Joyce Carol Oates is nominated again this year for "Blonde," her novel about Marilyn Monroe

-- Susan Sontag's novel "In America" is based on a true story about Maryna Zalewska, Poland's greatest actress, who travels to California to found a "utopian" commune with fellow Poles. Sontag was also nominated for a National Book Award in 1967 for "Against Interpretation and Other Essays."

-- Alan Lightman's "The Diagnosis" is a satiric and tragic look at modern society's obsession with speed, information and money. It follows a junior executive with a corporation who loses his memory, except for his company motto: "The maximum information in the minimum time." Lightman is also an essayist, physicist and lecturer at MIT.

-- Charles Baxter's "The Feast of Love" is a contemporary version of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" based around a coffee shop, where men and women find small miracles of every day life. Baxter teaches at Univerity of Michigan.

-- Francine Prose's "Blue Angel," borrowing its title from the 1930 Josef von Sternberg movie, takes the familiar story of aging professor falling for a sexy undergraduate and laces it with acidic observations about contemporary academia.

Nonfiction

-- Jacques Barzun's encyclopedic survey "From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 To the Present" takes events of the past five centuries and shows how they shape the way we are today. Barzun was a National Book Award finalist in 1960 for "The House of Intellect."

-- Alice Kaplan's "The Collaborator: The Trial and Conviction of Robert Brasillach" details the execution of the French writer for dealing with the Nazis in World War II Europe. Kaplan, who teaches at Duke University, is the daughter of an American prosecutor at Nuremberg.

Nathaniel Philbrick's "In the Heart of the Sea" is one of the books nominated in the nonfiction category

-- David Levering Lewis' "W.E.B. Dubois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963" is the second half of his biography on the founder of the NAACP. Lewis already received the Pulitzer, Bancroft and Parkman Prizes in 1993 for his first half of Du Bois' biography.

-- Nathaniel Philbrick's "In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex" recollects the real event that spawned the idea for Herman Melville's "Moby Dick." Philbrick has written extensively about Nantucket, and is a championship sailboat racer.

-- Patrick Tierney's controversial "Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devasted the Amazon" caused a stir upon its release earlier this fall by claiming, among other things, that two reknowned anthropologists sparked internecine bloodshed between the Amazon's Yanomami Indian tribe. Tierney is a visiting scholar at University of Pittsburgh's Latin American Studies Center.

Young people's literature

-- Adam Bagdasarian's "Forgotten Fire," based on the experiences of the author's great uncle during the Armenian genocide by Turks in 1915, celebrates the power of the human spirit in the form of a 12-year-old genocide survivor. This is Bagdasarian's first novel.

-- Michael Cadnum's "The Book of the Lion," set in the savagery of 12th century Crusades, tells the story of a 17-year-old who learns courage and compassion. Cadnum has written 16 novels, as well as several collections of poetry.

-- Jerry Stanley's "Hurry Freedom!" follows African-American forty-niners who went west to seek fortune and freedom. Stanley is a retired professor of history at California State University.

-- Gloria Whelan's "Homeless Bird," set in modern-day India, tells the story of a 13-year-old girl who is married and immediately widowed, and then sets out to forge her own future. Whelan is also a poet and award-winning short story writer.

-- Carolyn Coman's "Many Stones" depicts the after-effects of a brutal Capetown murder on the victim's sister as she journeys to South Africa with her estranged father for a memorial service. Coman was nominated for a National Book Award in 1996 for "What Jamie Saw."

Poetry

-- Kim Addonizio's "Tell Me" recites tough verse on our tangled relationships with parents, siblings, children, friends, lovers and ex-lovers. Her awards include two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Pushcart Prize.

The National Book Foundation selected 80-year-old Ray Bradbury as the recipient of the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters

-- Lucille Clifton's "Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1998-2000" includes 19 new poems and efforts culled from her last four books. It covers subjects ranging from dreams to menstruation to cancer to "the message of thelma sayles." Clifton is a three-time Pulitzer nominee and a National Book Award finalist for 1996's "The Terrible Stories."

-- Bruce Smith's "The Other Lover" melds rhyming stanzas and free-verse rhythms to tackle lessons of American love. Smith teaches at University of Alabama.

-- Kenneth Koch's "New Addresses: Poems" focuses on issues in Koch's conscious -- World War II, orgasms, the French language, his 20s, and the unknown. Koch was a National Book Award finalist in 1963 for "Thank You and Other Poems."

-- Galway Kinnell's "A New Selected Poems" reestablishes work from the author's previous collections from 1960 to 1994. Kinnell won the 1983 National Book Award and Pulitzer for "Selected Poems."

The National Book Awards were founded in 1950. The winners are selected by a five-member independent judging panel.

Each finalist receives a bronze medallion and $1,000 from the foundation. Winners receive $10,000 and a crystal scultpure.

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