Two-times Booker Prize winner Peter Carey is among the National Book Awards finalists announced today, but celebrated author Jonathan Franzen is a surprising omission from the list.
Australian author Carey, who missed out on a third Booker Prize award last night to Howard Jacobson, is nomiated for his historical work Parrot and Olivier in America in the top category for fiction.
Irish novelist Colum McCann won the prestigious award for fiction last year for his novel Let The Great World Spin while other past winners include Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy, Saul Bellow, Flannery O'Connor and John Updike
Other nominees in the fiction category for this year include Lionel Shriver, who is well-known for her best-selling book We Need to Talk about Kevin. Shriver is included on the 2010 shortlist for So Much for That, which examines America's health care system.
Jaimy Gordon is another nominees for Lord of Misrule, while Nicole Krauss is included for her third novel Great House as is Japanese American writer Karen Tei Yamashita for her book, I Hotel.
But Jonathan Franzen, whose Freedom received lavish attention and high praise from critics as well as being Oprah Winfrey's new pick for herinfluential book club, missed the cut. His 2001 novel, The Corrections, won the same prize.
The list for one of America's top book honors included 13 women among the 20 finalists, which the National Book Foundation said was the largest number of women ever nominated.
Winners in categories for fiction, nonfiction, poetry and young people's literature will be announced at ceremony held in New York on November 17th.
Eligibility required each book be published in the United States between December 1st, 2009, and November 30th, 2010, and written by a US citizen.
In the non-fiction category, musician Patti Smith was nominated for her memoir Just Kids that captures her struggling youth and relationship with American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.
Two Los Angeles Times reporters were also nominated for their non-fiction works -- Barbara Demick for Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea and Megan K Stack for Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War.
Rounding out the list was John W Dower for his Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor/Hiroshima/9-11/Iraq and Justin Spring's Secret Historian.
Two previous finalists for the Young People's Literature category Walter Dean Myers and Rita Williams-Garcia have been nominated again.
Poetry nominees were Kathleen Graber for The Eternal City, Terrance Hayes with Lighthead, James Richardson for By the Numbers, CD Wright for One with Others, and Monica Youn with Ignatz.