Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes, his history of the triumphs and tragedies of the Central Intelligence Agency, continues to garner accolades, having been named a nonfiction finalist for The National Book Critics Circle Award on Saturday in San Francisco. We last talked about Weiner, a DC-based reporter for The New York Times, when he won the National Book Award for Legacy of Ashes in November.

Other nominees for this award include the ever-prolific Joyce Carol Oates (whose output deserves comparison with Trollope’s): Oates was nominated in both the fiction category for The Gravedigger’s Daughter and in the nonfiction category for her autobiographical The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates.

Noticeably absent from the fiction nominees was Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke, which won the National Book Award for fiction but has taken a beating by a number of critics in recent weeks, notably B.R. Myers in the December issue of The Atlantic. Myers shellacked the novel, providing a shortlist of howlers, incomprehensibilities, plot occurrences and characters that, despite the novel’s pretense toward realism, in no way resembled anything approximating real life. Myers said that “once we Americans have ushered a writer into the contemporary pantheon, we will lie to ourselves to keep him there.” Apparently the National Book Critics Circle saw it differently.

Winners in these and other categories will be announced on March 6 in New York City.