Doctorow, Gore are up for Quills

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.

With nominations announced Tuesday, the biggest name in the general fiction category was Doctorow, nominated for the Civil War novel “The March.” Other nominees in that category were “Black Swan Green,” by David Mitchell; “A Dirty Job,” by Christopher Moore; “Suite Francaise,” by Irene Nemirovsky; and “Water for Elephants,” by Sara Gruen.

Gore was nominated in the history/current events/politics category for his environmental book “An Inconvenient Truth,” and King garnered a nomination in the science fiction/fantasy/horror category for his thriller “Cell.”

The Quills, now in their second year, are hoping to challenge the more staid National Book Awards and the Pulitzer Prizes, which have tended toward works with strong literary merit but sometimes little public recognition.

The nominees were chosen by 6,000 booksellers and librarians from among English-language books marketed to the United States in the year to June 30, 2006.

The awards will be presented Oct. 10 and the ceremony will be broadcast by NBC stations Oct. 28.