Three Former Winners Among Nominees for 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.

Powers, who won in 1963 for his novel “Morte D’Urban,” is up for the fiction honor again with “Wheat That Springeth Green,” a novel about a middle-aged priest coping with a new curate.

Gay, who won in 1967 for “The Enlightenment: An Interpretation,” was again nominated for nonfiction for his biography, “Freud: A Life for Our Time.”

Winners of the awards, which carry a $10,000 prize, will be announced Nov. 29 in New York.

The other nominees for fiction are Pete Dexter for “Paris Trout,” Mary McGarry Morris for “Vanished” and Anne Tyler for “Breathing Lessons.”

The other nominees for nonfiction are “Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877” by Eric Foner, “Nora” by Brenda Maddox, “Jefferson and Monticello” by Jack McLaughlin, and “A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam” by Neil Sheehan.