Jan. 13 (Bloomberg) -- Famously prolific author Joyce Carol Oates was named twice when nominees for the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Awards were announced at City Lights bookstore in San Francisco last night.

Her novel ``The Gravedigger's Daughter'' was nominated in the fiction category and ``The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates, 1973-1982'' was tapped for autobiography.

Other fiction nominees include Indian Vikram Chandra's 916- page ``Sacred Games'' and Junot Diaz's long-awaited first novel, ``The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.''

Also up for the autobiography prize are a book about Hurricane Katrina, a memoir by crime novelist Sara Paretsky, Edwidge Danticat's National Book Award-nominated ``Brother, I Am Dying'' and a posthumously published book by murdered Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya.

The winner of the National Book Award for Nonfiction, Tim Weiner's ``Legacy of Ashes,'' a history of the CIA, has been nominated in the general nonfiction category. Two critics for the New Yorker magazine, Joan Acocella and Alex Ross, have been nominated in the criticism category. The other categories are biography and poetry.

The National Book Critics Circle is an organization of nearly 700 book reviewers and editors. Founded in 1974, the group gave out its first awards the following year. The nominees and winners are chosen by the group's 24-member board of directors, which currently includes staffers from Entertainment Weekly, Time magazine, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Seattle Times and other newspapers, and a number of freelance critics and book bloggers. The NBCC awards don't come with a monetary prize, but they are well-respected in the literary world.

Quirky Choices

The group is known for making quirky choices, as in 1997, when it gave its fiction award to ``The Blue Flower,'' a delicate novel by British writer Penelope Fitzgerald, over Don DeLillo's ``Underworld,'' Philip Roth's ``American Pastoral'' and the mega- selling ``Cold Mountain'' by Charles Frazier.

The winners will be announced at a ceremony at New York's New School University on March 7. At the same time, Emilie Buchwald, publisher of Minneapolis's Milkweed Editions, will be given the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, and Sam Anderson, New York magazine's book critic, will receive the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing.

Here is a complete list of the nominees:

Autobiography: Joshua Clark, ``Heart Like Water: Surviving Katrina and Life in Its Disaster Zone'' (Free Press); Edwidge Danticat, ``Brother, I'm Dying'' (Knopf); Joyce Carol Oates, ``The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates, 1973-1982'' (Ecco); Sara Paretsky, ``Writing in an Age of Silence'' (Verso); Anna Politkovskaya, ``A Russian Diary: A Journalist's Final Account of Life, Corruption and Death in Putin's Russia'' (Random House).

Nonfiction: Philip F. Gura, ``American Transcendentalism: A History'' (Farrar, Straus and Giroux); Daniel Walker Howe, ``What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America 1815-1848'' (Oxford University Press); Harriet A. Washington, ``Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present'' (Doubleday); Tim Weiner, ``Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA'' (Doubleday); Alan Weisman, ``The World Without Us'' (Thomas Dunne Book/St. Martin's Press).

Fiction: Vikram Chandra, ``Sacred Games'' (HarperCollins); Junot Diaz, ``The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao'' (Riverhead); Hisham Matar, ``In the Country of Men'' (Dial); Joyce Carol Oates, ``The Gravedigger's Daughter'' (HarperCollins); Marianne Wiggins, ``The Shadow Catcher'' (Simon & Schuster).

Biography: Tim Jeal, ``Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer'' (Yale University Press); Hermione Lee, ``Edith Wharton'' (Knopf); Arnold Rampersad, ``Ralph Ellison'' (Knopf); John Richardson, ``A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932'' (Knopf); Claire Tomalin, ``Thomas Hardy'' (Penguin Press).

Poetry: Mary Jo Bang, ``Elegy'' (Graywolf); Matthea Harvey, ``Modern Life'' (Graywolf); Michael O'Brien, ``Sleeping and Waking'' (Flood); Tom Pickard, `` Ballad of Jamie Allan'' (Flood); Tadeusz Rozewicz, ``New Poems'' (Archipelago).

Criticism: Joan Acocella, ``Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints'' (Pantheon); Julia Alvarez, ``Once Upon a Quinceanera'' (Viking); Susan Faludi, ``The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America'' (Metropolitan); Ben Ratliff, ``Coltrane: The Story of a Sound'' (Farrar, Straus and Giroux); Alex Ross, ``The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century'' (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

(Laurie Muchnick is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are her own.)

To contact the reporter on this story: Laurie Muchnick in New York at lmuchnick@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: January 12, 2008 23:36 EST