Digest

Book award nominations announced

By TIMES WIRES
Published January 21, 2007

Novels set in Africa and India, modern-day New Jersey and the stark landscape of a post-apocalyptic world will vie for the best work of fiction published in 2006, in nominations announced Saturday for the National Book Critics Circle awards.

The winners will be announced in March.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun (Alfred Knopf), based on the Nigerian-Biafran civil war of the late 1960s; Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss (Grove Atlantic), a novel set against the Nepalese drive for independence, which won Britain's 2006 Booker Prize; Dave Eggers, What Is the What (McSweeney's), the story of a refugee from the Sudanese civil war; Richard Ford, Lay of the Land (Alfred Knopf), the continuing, modern-day story of New Jerseyan Frank Bascombe; and Cormac McCarthy, The Road (Alfred Knopf), the haunting vision of a world in the aftermath of an apocalyptic event.

The competition includes nominations for nonfiction, biography, poetry, memoir and criticism.

The NBCC, founded in 1974, is a nonprofit organization comprised of nearly 700 book reviewers across the nation.

Minnelli, ex move on

Liza Minnelli and David Gest have patched up the acrimony- and lawsuit-filled gap between them to the point that they can now get divorced.

Their legal disputes ended Thursday when their lawyers filed court papers saying they had settled their differences and agreed to get divorced without fault, the AP reported.

Gest's lawyer, Susan M. Moss, said the two will be divorced "within the next few weeks" in Memphis, where Gest has a home. Moss said they chose Tennessee because it has no-fault divorce.

That's a turnaround from when Gest, 53, sued Minnelli, 60, for $10-million for assault, claiming that she had beaten him so badly during alcoholic rages that he had nerve damage, and Minnelli countersued, claiming that Gest had stolen at least $2-million she earned while performing in shows he produced.

Lorraine Nadel, Gest's attorney in the lawsuits, said the settlement terms were confidential. Minnelli's lawyer, Dorothy Weber, confirmed that "an amicable resolution" had been achieved. The couple married in 2002.

[Last modified January 21, 2007, 00:52:03]