2 British Novels Nominated For National Book Critics Circle Awards One American Novel And Two Sets Of Short Stories Rounded Out The List. Jacques Barzun, 92, Was Named For Criticism.

Two novels by British authors - Jim Crace's well-received Being Dead (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) and Zadie Smith's highly acclaimed White Teeth (Random House) - stood out among the fiction nominations announced yesterday by the National Book Critics Circle, an organization of more than 500 book reviewers, critics and scholars around the country.

Only one American novel - Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (Random House), a tale of two cousins in the comic-book industry of the 1940s - was nominated in fiction. The two other nominees were American short-story collections: A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You (Random House) by Amy Bloom, and Assorted Fire Events: Stories (Context Books) by David Means. The choices reflected a change in the nature of the awards since the NBCC dropped its requirement a few years ago that nominees be U.S. citizens.

In general nonfiction, Frances Fitzgerald's Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars, and the End of the Cold War (Simon & Schuster) was nominated just as the Bush administration has announced plans to push for implementation of an American missile shield. Other nominees in this category were Crucible of War by Fred Anderson (Alfred A. Knopf), Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing by Ted Conover (Random House), Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health by Laurie Garrett (Hyperion), and The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach (University of Chicago Press) by Alice Kaplan.

Victor Klemperer's highly acclaimed memoir, I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1942-1945 (Random House), was nominated in biography-autobiography, along with Herbert P. Bix's Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (HarperCollins), Robin Marantz Henig's The Monk in the Garden: The Lost and Found Genius of Gregor Mendel (Houghton Mifflin), David Nasaw's The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst (Houghton Mifflin), and French author Jean-Yves Tadie's Marcel Proust: A Life (Viking).