By Dinita Smith — October 11, 2001

The nominees for this year's National Book Awards, announced yesterday by the National Book Foundation, represent the panoply of the American experience: immigration, cross-culturalism, the celebration of nature, childhood. Jonathan Franzen's "Corrections" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), a traditional family chronicle with postmodern flourishes, was nominated for fiction, along with "Highwire Moon," by Susan Straight (Houghton Mifflin), the story of a poor Mexican girl's search for the mother she thinks has abandoned her.

Also nominated in fiction were "The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse," by Louise Erdrich (HarperCollins), the tale of a priest who lives on an Indian reservation and has a secret; Dan Chaon's collection of stories about loss, "Among the Missing" (Ballantine Books); and "Look at Me," by Jennifer Egan (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday), about a model whose face is destroyed in a car accident.

Five books were nominated in the nonfiction category, among them Andrew Solomon's "Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression" (Scribner), an examination of depression in all its biological and cultural ramifications. David James Duncan's celebration of rivers, "My Story as Told by Water" (Sierra Club Books), was nominated, as was "Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland" (Princeton University Press), an account of the 1941 massacre of the Jewish citizens of a Polish town by their neighbors, by Jan T. Gross, a professor at New York University.

Two journalists were nominated for nonfiction: Marie Arana, book editor of The Washington Post Book World, for "American Chica: Two Worlds, One Childhood" (Dial Press), a memoir of growing up half- American, half-Peruvian; and Nina Bernstein, a reporter for The New York Times, for "The Lost Children of Wilder" (Pantheon Books), a study of the foster care system.

These are the poetry nominations: "Rooms Are Never Finished," by Agha Shahid Ali (W. W. Norton & Company)

"Mercurochrome: New Poems" (Black Sparrow Press), by Wanda Coleman

"Poems Seven: New and Complete Poetry" (Seven Stories Press), by Alan Dugan

"Brutal Imagination" (Marian Wood Books/G. P. Putnam's Sons), by Cornelius Eady

"They Can't Take That Away From Me" (University of Chicago Press), by Gail Mazur .

The nominations for young people's literature are as follows:

"The Tiger Rising"(Candlewick Press), by Kate DiCamillo

"We Were There, Too! Young People in U.S. History" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), by Phillip Hoose

"A Step From Heaven" (Front Street), by An Na

"Carver: A Life in Poems" (Front Street), by Marilyn Nelson

"True Believer" (Atheneum Books for Young Readers)," by Virginia Euwer Wolff

The awards will be announced on Nov. 14 at a ceremony at the New York Marriott Marquis Hotel. The host for the third consecutive year will be the actor (and author) Steve Martin. The playwright Arthur Miller is to receive the Foundation's 2001 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.