Finalists Named for Book Critics Awards

The National Book Critics Circle has announced its nominations for the most distinguished books of 1993 in five categories. The winners will be honored at a ceremony March 10 in New York City.

In fiction, the nominees are “The Jade Cabinet,” by Rikki Ducornet (Dalkey Archive Press); “A Lesson Before Dying,” Ernest J. Gaines (Alfred A. Knopf); “Feather Crowns,” Bobbie Ann Mason (HarperCollins); “The Shipping News,” E. Annie Proulx (Charles Scribner’s Sons), and “Vindication,” Frances Sherwood (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).

Nominated for general nonfiction are “The Land Where the Blues Began,” by Alan Lomax (Pantheon); “Whoredom in Kimmage: Irish Women Coming of Age,” Rosemary Mahoney (Houghton-Mifflin); “Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire,” David Remnick (Random House); “Genie: An Abused Child’s Flight From Silence,” Russ Rymer (HarperCollins), and “The Last Panda,” George B. Schaller (University of Chicago Press).

For biography and autobiography, nominees are “Genet,” by Edmund White (Alfred A. Knopf); “W.E.B. Dubois: Biography of a Race,” David Levering (Henry Holt); “French Lessons,” Alice Kaplan (University of Chicago Press); “A Different Person,” James Merrill (Alfred A. Knopf), and “The Passion of Michel Foucault,” James Miller (Simon & Schuster).

The books of poetry selected are “My Alexandria,” by Mark Doty (University of Illinois Press); “The Museum of Clear Ideas,” Donald Hall (Ticknor & Fields); “The Book of Medicines,” Linda Hogan (Coffee House Press); “The Marvelous Arithmetic of Distance,” Audre Lorde (W.W. Norton), and “Sesame,” Jack Marshall (Coffee House Press).

Nominated in criticism are “Opera in America: A Cultural History,” by John Dizikes (Yale University Press); “The Queen’s Throat,” Wayne Koestenbaum (Poseiden); “The Phantom Empire,” Geoffrey O’Brien (W.W. Norton); “The Invention of Copyright,” Mark Rose (Harvard University Press), and “United States: Essays 1952-1992,” Gore Vidal (Random House).