Critics Choice Don Delillo And Charles Frazier Vying Once Again To Capture National Book Award

Will Don DeLillo have better luck the second time around?

DeLillo, author of the epic-length novel “Underworld,” was widely expected to capture the National Book Award last November, only to lose to first-time writer Charles Frazier.

Now the two will compete again, this time for the National Book Critics Circle Award, organizers announced Tuesday. The finalists for the fiction prize also include two-time NBCC winner Philip Roth and two writers, Andrei Makine and Penelope Fitzgerald, whose nominations were made possible by the critics circle’s decision to make non-U.S. citizens eligible.

“We needn’t be parochial about it,” NBCC president Art Winslow said. “We thought American literature should be able to stand up to literature everywhere.”

Frazier, virtually unknown a year ago, is the author of “Cold Mountain,” a Civil War novel that first became a surprise best seller and then a surprise winner of the National Book Award. DeLillo was cited for his 800-page “Underworld,” a broad work about American culture during the Cold War that was widely regarded as the literary event of 1997.

Roth, nominated for the novel “American Pastoral,” won in 1988 for his novel “The Counterlife.” In 1992, he won in the biography and autobiography category for “Patrimony,” a memoir about the death of his father.

Makine was nominated for “Dreams of My Russian Summers” and Fitzgerald for “The Blue Flower.” Thomas Pynchon, already snubbed by the National Book Awards, was not nominated for his acclaimed “Mason & Dixon.”

Citations for non-U.S. writers also include Britain’s Doris Lessing and South Africa’s J.M. Coetzee, both finalists in the biography and autobiography category, and Peru’s Mario Vargas Llosa, a nominee for criticism.

In the autobiography and biography category, Lessing was cited for “Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography” and Coetzee for “Boyhood: Scenes From Pastoral Life.”

The other nominees were Hermione Lee for “Virginia Woolf,” James Tobin’s “Ernie Pyle’s War: American Eyewitness to World War II” and Joseph Ellis for “American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson,” which won the National Book Award.

Llosa, nominated for “Making Waves,” will compete against two of the world’s best known literary critics: Alfred Kazin, cited for “God and the American Writer” and at age 82 one of the oldest nominees in recent memory, and Helen Vendler, cited for “The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets.”

The other nominees for criticism are Vivian Gornick for “The End of the Novel of Love” and John Brewer’s “The Pleasures of the Imagination.”

In the general nonfiction category the nominees were Jon Krakauer for “Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster,” James L. Kugel for “The Bible as it Was,” Anne Fadiman’s “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down,” Steven Pinker’s “How the Mind Works” and Pauline Maier’s “American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence.”

In poetry, the finalists are Brenda Hillman for “Loose Sugar,” Mark Jarman for “Questions for Ecclesiastes,” Charles Wright for “Black Zodiac,” Frank Bidart for “Desire” and Sonia Sanchez for “Does Your House Have Lions?”

The NBCC, an organization of some 650 book critics and editors, will announce the awards March 24.