All Past National Book Critics Circle Award Winners and Finalists

Every year, the National Book Critics Circle presents awards for the finest books published in English. Below are the past winners and finalists for all National Book Critics Circle annual awards, from 1975 to present.

 

Award Years:

1975 Winners 1976 Awards 1977 Awards 1978 Awards 1979 Awards 1980 Awards 1981 Awards 1982 Awards 1983 Awards 1984 Awards 1985 Awards 1986 Awards 1987 Awards 1988 Awards 1989 Awards 1990 Awards 1991 Awards 1992 Awards 1993 Awards 1994 Awards 1995 Awards 1996 Awards 1997 Awards 1998 Awards 1999 Awards 2000 Awards 2001 Awards 2002 Awards 2003 Awards 2004 Awards 2005 Awards 2006 Awards 2007 Awards 2008 Awards 2009 Awards 2010 Awards 2011 Awards 2012 Awards 2013 Awards 2014 Awards 2015 Awards 2016 Awards 2017 Awards 2018 Awards

• Fiction: E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime
• General Nonfiction: R.W.B. Lewis, Edith Wharton: A Biography (Harper & Row)
• Poetry: John Ashbery, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (Viking)
• Criticism: Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford University Press)

Fiction Winner

• John Gardner, October Light (Knopf)

Fiction Finalists

• Renata Adler, Speedboat (Random)
• Vladimir Nabokov, Details of a Sunset and Other Stories (McGraw-Hill)
• Cynthia Ozick, Bloodshed and Three Novellas (Knopf)
• Richard Yates, The Easter Parade (Delacorte)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (Knopf)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• George Dangerfield, The Damnable Question: A Study in Anglo-Irish Relations (Atlantic-Little, Brown)
• Alex Haley, Roots (Doubleday)
• Irving Howe with Kenneth Libo, World of Our Fathers (Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich)
• Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for Equality (Knopf)

Poetry Winner

• Elizabeth Bishop, Geography III (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

Poetry Finalists

• Philip Levine, The Names of the Lost (Atheneum)
• Muriel Rukeyser, The Gates (McGraw-Hill)
• Louis Simpson, Searching for the Ox (Morrow)
• Richard Wilbur, The Mind-Reader (Harcourt)

Criticism Winner

• Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (Knopf)

Criticism Finalists

• Ada Louise Huxtable, Kicked a Building Lately? (Quadrangle)
• Steven Marcus, Representations: Essays on Literature and Society (Random)
• Charles Rosen, Arnold Schoenberg (Viking)
• E.B. White, ed. by Dorothy Lobrano Guth, Letters of E.B. White (Harper & Row)

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Fiction Winner

• Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon (Knopf)

Fiction Finalists

• John Cheever, Falconer (Knopf)
• Joan Didion, A Book of Common Prayer (Simon & Schuster)
• Philip Roth, The Professor of Desire (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• John Sayles, Union Dues (Atlantic-Little, Brown)

General Nonfiction Winner

• W. Jackson Bate, Samuel Johnson (Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich).

General Nonfiction Finalists

• Michael Herr, Dispatches (Knopf)
• David McCullough, The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870-1914 (Simon & Schuster)
• John McPhee, Coming Into the Country (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Carl Sagan, The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence (Random)

Poetry Winner

• Robert Lowell, Day by Day (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Poetry Finalists

• John Ashbery, Houseboat Days (Viking)
• Stanley Plumly, Out-of-the-Body Travel (Ecco/Viking)
• W.D. Snodgrass, The Fuhrer Bunker: A Cycle of Poems in Progress (Boa)
• Gerald Stern, Lucky Life (Houghton)

Criticism Winner

• Susan Sontag, On Photography (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Criticism Finalists

• Arlene Croce, Afterimages (Knopf)
• Morris Dickstein, Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties (Basic)
• Richard Poirier, Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing (Oxford University Press)
• Gore Vidal, Matters of Fact and of Fiction: Essays, 1973-1976 (Random)

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Fiction Winner

• John Cheever, The Stories of John Cheever (Knopf)

Fiction Finalists

• John Updike, The Coup (Knopf)
• Mary Gordon, Final Payments (Random)
• John Irving, The World According to Garp (Robbins/Dutton)
• Charles Simmons, Wrinkles (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

General Nonfiction Winners

• Maureen Howard, Facts of Life (Little, Brown)
• Garry Willis, Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence (Doubleday)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century (Knopf)
• Theodore H. White, In Search of History: A Personal Adventure (Harper & Row)
• Barrington Moore, Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt (Pantheon)
• Sissela Bok, Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life (Pantheon)
• A. Scott Berg, Max Perkins: Editor of Genius (Congdon/Dutton)
• Alfred Kazin, New York Jew (Knopf)
• Anne Hollander, Seeing Through Clothes (Viking)
• Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard (Viking)

Poetry Winner

• Peter Davison, ed., Hello, Darkness: The Collected Poems of L.E. Sissman (Atlantic-Little, Brown)

Poetry Finalists

• Adrienne Rich, The Dream of a Common Language: Poems, 1974-1977 (Norton)
• Mark Strand, The Late Hour (Atheneum)
• May Swenson, New & Selected Things Taking Place (Atlantic-Little, Brown)
• John Hollander, Spectral Emanations: New and Selected Poems (Atheneum)

Criticism Winner

• Meyer Schapiro, Modern Art: 19th & 20th Centuries, Selected Papers (Braziller)

Criticism Finalists

• Malcolm Cowley, And I Worked at the Writer's Trade: Chapters of Literary History, 1918-1978 (Viking)
• Eudora Welty, The Eye of the Story: Selected Essays and Reviews (Random)
• Edward W. Said, Orientalism (Pantheon)
• William H. Gass, The World Within the Word: Essays (Knopf)

 

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Fiction Winner

• Thomas Flanagan, The Year of the French (Holt, Rinehart & Winston)

Fiction Finalists

• Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• William Styron, Sophie's Choice (Random)
• Norman Mailer, The Executioner's Song: A True Life Novel (Little, Brown)
• Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless Nights (Random)
• Leslie Epstein, King of the Jews: A Novel of the Holocaust (Coward, McCann & Geoghegan)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Telford Taylor, Munich: The Price of Peace (Doubleday)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Joan Didion, The White Album (Simon & Schuster)
• Edward Hoagland, African Calliope: A Journey to the Sudan (Random)
• Douglas Hofstadter, Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Brain (Basic)

Poetry Winner

• Philip Levine, Ashes and 7 Years from Somewhere (Atheneum)

Poetry Finalists

• Anthony Hecht, The Venetian Vespers (Atheneum)
• John Hollander, Blue Wine and Other Poems (Johns Hopkins)
• David Smith, Goshawk, Antelope (Illinois)
• Howard Moss, Notes From the Castle (Atheneum)

Criticism Winner

• Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (Random)

Criticism Finalists

• Frances FitzGerald, America Revised: History Schoolbooks in the Twentieth Century (Atlantic-Little, Brown)
• Richard Gilman, Decadence: The Strange Life of an Epithet (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Sandra M. Gilbert & Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (Yale)
• Robert Alter with Carol Cosman, A Lion for Love: A Critical Biography of Stendhal (Basic)

 

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Fiction Winner

• Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus (Viking)

Fiction Finalists

• E.L. Doctorow, Loon Lake (Random House)
• Anne Tyler, Morgan's Passing (Knopf)
• Walker Percy, The Second Coming (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow (Knopf)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Ronald Steel, Walter Lippman and the American Century (Atlantic-Little, Brown)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• Jean Strouse, Alice James: A Biography (Houghton Mifflin)
• Maxine Hong Kingston, China Men (Knopf)
• John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the 14th Century (University of Chicago Press)
• Justin D. Kaplan, Walt Whitman: A Life (Simon & Schuster)

Poetry Winner

• Frederick Seidel, Sunrise (Viking/Penguin)

Poetry Finalists

• Joseph Brodsky, A Part of Speech (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Robert Penn Warren, Being Here: Poetry, 1977-1980 (Random House)
• James Schuyler, The Morning of the Poem (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• James Merrill, Scripts for the Pageant (Atheneum)

Criticism Winner

• Helen Vendler, Part of Nature: Modern American Poets (Harvard University Press).

Criticism Finalists

• Paul Fussell, Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars (Oxford University Press)
• R.P. Blackmur, ed. by Veronica A. Makowsky, Henry Adams (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich)
• Vladimir Nabokov, ed. by Fredson Bowers, Lectures on Literature (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich)
• Barbara Novak, Nature and Culture: American Landscape Painting, 1825-1875 (Oxford University Press)

 

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Fiction Winner

• John Updike, Rabbit Is Rich (Knopf)

Fiction Finalists

• Robert Stone, A Flag for Sunrise (Knopf)
• Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker (Summit)
• Donald Barthelme, Sixty Stories (Putnam)
• Leonard Michaels, The Men's Club (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of a Man (Norton)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• James Fallows, National Defense (Random House)
• T.J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (Pantheon)
• Dumas Malone, The Sage of Monticello: Jefferson and His Time, Volume Six (Little, Brown)
• Erving Goffman, Forms of Talk (University of Pennsylvania Press)

Poetry Winner

• A.R. Ammons, A Coast of Trees (Norton)

Poetry Finalists

• Douglas Crase, The Revisionist (Little, Brown)
• Daniel Hoffman, Brotherly Love (Random House/Vintage)
• Donald Finkel, What Manner of Beast (Atheneum)
• Edward Hirsch, The Sleepwalkers (Knopf)

Criticism Winner

• Virgil Thomson, A Virgil Thomson Reader (Houghton Mifflin)

Criticism Finalists

• Guy Davenport, The Geography of the Imagination: Forty Essays (North Point Press)
• Martin Gardner, Science: Good, Bad and Bogus (Prometheus Books)
• Edward Mendelson, Early Auden (Viking)
• Thomas G. Bergin, Boccaccio (Viking)

 

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Fiction Winner

• Stanley Elkin, George Mills (Dutton)

Fiction Finalists

• Cynthia Ozick, Levitation: Five Fictions (Knopf)
• Anne Tyler, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (Knopf)
• Alice Walker, The Color Purple (HBJ)
• Bobbie Ann Mason, Shiloh and Other Stories (Harper & Row)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Robert A. Caro, The Path to Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (Knopf)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• George F. Kennan, The Nuclear Delusion: Soviet-American Relations in the Atomic Age, (Pantheon)
• Jonathan Schell, The Fate of the Earth (Knopf)
• Daniel Lawrence O'Keefe, Stolen Lightning (Continuum)
• Kate Simon, Bronx Primitive: Portraits in a Childhood (Viking)

Poetry Winner

• Katha Pollitt, Antarctic Traveller (Knopf)

Poetry Finalists

• Jack Gilbert, Monoliths: Poems, 1962 and 1982 (Knopf)
• Brad Leithauser, Hundreds of Fireflies (Knopf)
• Phyllis Janowitz, Visiting Rites (Princeton University Press)
• W.S. Merwin, Finding the Islands (North Point)

Criticism Winner

• Gore Vidal, The Second American Revolution and Other Essays, 1976-82 (Random)

Criticism Finalists

• Arlene Croce, Going to the Dance (Knopf)
• Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (Simon & Schuster)
• Harold Bloom, Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism (Oxford)
• Nina Auerbach, Woman and the Demon (Harvard University Press)

Ivan Sandrof/Board Award Winner

• Leslie A. Marchand, for his 12-volume edition of Byron's Letters and Journals

Ivan Sandrof/Board Award Finalists

• American Library Association
• George F. Kennan
• The Library of America
• Malcolm Cowley

 

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Fiction Winner

• William Kennedy, Ironweed (The Viking Press)

Fiction Finalists

• Philip Roth, The Anatomy Lesson (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Raymond Carver, Cathedral (Knopf)
• Joan Chase, During the Reign of the Queen (Harper & Row)
• Ron Loewinsohn, Magnetic Field(s) (Knopf)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Seymour M. Hersh, The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House (Summit Books)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• Roger Rosenblatt, The Price of Power (Anchor/Doubleday)
• William W. Warner, Distant Water: The Fate of the North Atlantic Fisherman (Atlantic-Little, Brown)
• Theodore Draper, Present History: On Nuclear War, Detente and Other Controversies (Random House)
• David S. Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World (Harvard University Press)

Biography/Autobiography Winner

• Joyce Johnson, Minor Characters (Houghton Mifflin)

Biography/Autobiography Finalists

• Kenneth R. Manning, Black Apollo of Science: The Life of Ernest Everett Just (Oxford University Press)
• Nicholas Gage, Eleni (Random House)
• E. Fuller Torrey, The Roots of Treason: Ezra Pound and the Secret of St. Elizabeth's (McGraw-Hill)
• Fred Kaplan, Thomas Carlyle (Cornell University Press)

Poetry Winner

• James Merrill, The Changing Light at Sandover (Atheneum)

Poetry Finalists

• Jorie Graham, Erosion (Princeton University Press)
• Amy Clampitt, The Kingfisher (Knopf)
• Cathy Song, Picture Bride (Yale University Press)
• C.K. Williams, Tar (Random House)

Criticism Winner

• John Updike, Hugging the Shore: Essays and Criticism (Knopf)

Criticism Finalists

• John Rockwell, All American Music (Knopf)
• Cynthia Ozick, Art and Ardor: Essays (Knopf)
• Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (University of Chicago Press)
• Helen Vendler, The Odes of John Keats (Harvard University Press)

 

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Fiction Winner

• Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine (Holt Rinehart & Winston)

Fiction Finalists

• David Leavitt, Family Dancing (Knopf)
• Alison Lurie, Foreign Affairs (Random House)
• Jayne Anne Phillips, Machine Dreams (Dutton)
• Harriet Doerr, Stones for Ibarra (Viking)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Freeman Dyson, Weapons and Hope (Cornelia and Michael Bessie/Harper and Row)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• David Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews (Pantheon)
• John Edgar Wideman, Brothers and Keepers (Holt, Rinehart and Winston)
• Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (Basic Books)
• Evan Connell, Son of the Morning Star (North Point Press)

Biography/Autobiography Winner

• Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Years of Ordeal, 1850-59 (Princeton University Press)

Biography/Autobiography Finalists

• Susan Cheever, Home Before Dark (Princeton)
• Elinor Langer, Josephine Herbst (Atlantic/Little, Brown)
• Eudora Welty, One Writer's Beginnings (Harvard University Press)
• Paul Zweig, Walt Whitman: The Making of a Poet (Basic Books)

Poetry Winner

• Sharon Olds, The Dead and the Living (Knopf)

Poetry Finalists

• Robert Duncan, Ground Work: Before the War (New Directions)
• Charles Wright, The Other Side of the River (Random House)
• Dick Allen, Overnight in the Guest House of the Mystic (Louisiana State University Press)
• John Ashbery, A Wave (Viking)

Criticism Winner

• Robert Hass, Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry (Ecco Press)

Criticism Finalists

• Donald Keene, Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature in the Modern Era (Holt, Rinehart and Winston)
• David Bromwich, Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic (Oxford University Press)
• Roger Shattuck, The Innocent Eye (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Leo Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion (Pantheon)

Ivan Sandrof/NBCC Award Winner

• Library of America

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Fiction Winner

• Anne Tyler, The Accidental Tourist (Knopf).

Fiction Finalists

• Don DeLillo, White Noise (Viking)
• Peter Taylor, The Old Forest and Other Stories (Dial)
• Richard Powers, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance (Beech Tree/Morrow)
• Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove (Simon and Schuster)

General Nonfiction Winner

• J. Anthony Lukas, Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families (Knopf)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• Tracy Kidder, House (Houghton Mifflin)
• Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford)
• Alan Riding, Distant Neighbors: The Portrait of the Mexicans (Knopf)
• Eva Keuls, The Reign of the Phallus: Sexual Politics in Ancient Athens (Harper and Row)

Biography/Autobiography Winner

• Leon Edel, Henry James: A Life (Harper & Row)

Biography/Autobiography Finalists

• Elizabeth Frank, Louise Bogan (Knopf)
• James Lord, Giacometti: A Biography (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Leonard Arrington, Brigham Young: American Moses (Knopf)
• Michael Lesy, Visible Light: Four Creative Biographies (Times Books)

Poetry Winner

• Louise Gluck, The Triumph of Achilles (Ecco Press)

Poetry Finalists

• Amy Clampitt, What the Light Was Like (Knopf)
• Gjertude Schnackenberg, The Lamplit Answer (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Galway Kinnell, The Past (Houghton Mifflin)
• James Merrill, Late Settings (Atheneum)

Criticism Winner

• William Gass, Habitations of the Word (Simon & Schuster)

Criticism Finalists

• Paul Robinson, Opera and Ideas: From Mozart to Strauss (Harper and Row)
• Robert Storey, Pierrots on the Stage of Desire: 19th Century French Literary Artistis and Comic Pantomine (Princeton)
• Phillip Fisher, Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel (Oxford)
• Mary McCarthy, Occasional Prose: Essays (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich)

 

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Fiction Winner

• Reynolds Price, Kate Vaiden (Atheneum)

Fiction Finalists

• Louise Erdrich, The Beet Queen (Holt)
• Peter Taylor, A Summons to Memphis (Knopf)
• Thomas Williams, The Moon Pinnacle (Doubleday)
• John Updike, Roger's Version (Knopf)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams (Scribner's)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• Bernard Bailyn, Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution (Knopf)
• Jonathan Evan Maslow, Bird of Life, Bird of Death: A Naturalist's Journey Through a Land of Political Turmoil (Simon & Schuster)
• John W. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (Pantheon)
• Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and its Disappearing Water (Viking)

Biography/Autobiography Winner

• Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes, Vol. I: 1902-1941 (Oxford)

Biography/Autobiography Finalists

• Jonathan Brown, Velazquez: Painter and Courtier (Yale)
• Theodore Rosengarten, Tombee: Portrait of a Cotton Planter (Morrow)
• Art Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor's Tale (Pantheon)
• Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation, 1860-1865 (Princeton)

Poetry Winner

• Edward Hirsch, Wild Gratitude (Oxford)

Poetry Finalists

• Irving Feldman, All of Us Here and Other Poems (Elisabeth Sifton/Viking)
• Brad Leithauser, Cats of the Temple (Knopf)
• Timothy Steele, Sapphics Against Anger (Random House)
• Anne Winters, The Key to the City (University of Chicago)

Criticism Winner

• Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One: Selected Essays (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Criticism Finalists

• Rene Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism: 1750-1950: Vols. 5 & 6 (Yale)
• Jerrold Siegel, Bohemian Paris: Culture, Politics and Boundaries of Bourgeois Life (Elisabeth Sifton/Viking)
• Leo Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History (Oxford)
• Arthur Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (Columbia University Press)

 

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Fiction Winner

• Philip Roth, The Counterlife (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Fiction Finalists

• Jane Smiley, The Age of Grief (Knopf)
• Toni Morrison, Beloved (Knopf)
• Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety (Random House)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (Simon & Schuster)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On: Politics, People and the AIDS Epidemic (St. Martin's)
• James Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets, (Simon & Schuster)
• Charles Mee, The Genius of the People (Harper & Row)
• Stephen Jay Gould, Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle (Harvard University)

Biography/Autobiography Winner

• Donald Howard, Chaucer: His Life, His Work, His World (Dutton)

Biography/Autobiography Finalists

• Annie Dillard, An American Childhood (Harper & Row)
• Prudence Crowther, ed., Don't Tread on Me: The Selected Letters of S.J. Perelman (Viking)
• Paul Taylor, Private Domain (Knopf)
• Arthur Miller, Timebends: A Life (Grove Press)

Poetry Winner

• C.K. Williams, Flesh and Blood (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Poetry Finalists

• John Ashbery, April Galleons (Viking)
• Alan Shapiro, Happy Hour (University of Chicago)
• May Swenson, In Other Words (Knopf)
• Donald Justice, The Sunset Maker (Atheneum)

Criticism Winner

• Edwin Denby, Dance Writings (Knopf)

Criticism Finalists

• Robert Lowell, Collected Prose (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Guy Davenport, Every Force Evolves a Form (North Point Press)
• Arlene Croce, Sight Lines (Knopf)
• Joseph Horowitz, Understanding Toscanini (Knopf)

Ivan Sandrof/NBCC Board Award Winner

• Robert Giroux

Reviewer's Citation Winner

• Josh Rubins

Reviewer's Citation Finalists

• Mindy Aloff
• William Logan
• Jack Miles
• Jonathan Penner
• George Scialabba

 

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Fiction Winner

• Bharati Mukherjee, The Middleman and Other Stories (Grove Press)

Fiction Finalists

• Don DeLillo, Libra (Viking)
• Pete Dexter, Paris Trout (Random House)
• J.F. Powers, Wheat That Springeth Green (Knopf)
• Raymond Carver, Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories (Atlantic Monthly Press)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63 (Simon & Schuster)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (Oxford University Press)
• Neil Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (Random House)
• Jane Kramer, Europeans (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (Harper & Row)

Biography/Autobiography Winner

• Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (Knopf)

Biography/Autobiography Finalists

• Paul Monette, Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich)
• Valerie Eliot, ed., The Letters of T.S. Eliot, 1909-1922 (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich)
• Paul Jay, ed., The Selected Correspondence of Kenneth Burke and Malcolm Cowley, 1915-1981 (Viking)
• Robert Wright, Three Scientists and Their Gods: Looking for Meaning in an Age of Information (Times Books)

Poetry Winner

• Donald Hall, The One Day (Ticknor & Fields)

Poetry Finalists

• Richard Wilbur, New and Collected Poems (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich)
• John Hollander, Harp Lake (Knopf)
• Kenneth Koch, One Thousand Avant-Garde Plays (Knopf)
• Thomas McGrath, Selected Poems, 1938-1988 (Copper Canyon Press)

Criticism Winner

• Clifford Geertz, Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (Stanford University Press)

Criticism Finalists

• Nelson George, The Death of Rhythm and Blues (Pantheon)
• Richard A. Posner, Law and Literature: A Misunderstood Relation (Harvard University Press)
• John Hollander, Melodious Guile: Fictive Pattern in Poetic Language (Yale University Press)
• Robert Pinsky, Poetry and the World (Ecco Press)

Reviewer's Citation Winner

• William Logan

Reviewer's Citation Finalists

• Bruce Bawer
• Adam Hochschild
• James Marcus
• Phyllis Rose
• George Scialabba

 

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Fiction Winner

• E.L. Doctorow, Billy Bathgate (Random House)

Fiction Finalists

• Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club (Putnam)
• Oscar Hijeulos, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Jane Smiley, Ordinary Love & Good Will (Knopf)
• John Casey, Spartina (Knopf)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Michael Dorris, The Broken Cord (Harper & Row)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• Tracy Kidder, Among Schoolchildren (Houghton Mifflin)
• Barbara Ehrenreich, Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class (Pantheon)
• David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: Creating the Modern Middle East, 1914-1922 (Henry Holt)
• Amy Wilentz, The Rainy Season: Haiti Since Duvalier (Simon & Schuster)

Biography/Autobiography Winner

• Geoffrey C. Ward, A First-Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt (Harper & Row)

Biography/Autobiography Finalists

• Bil Gilbert, And God Gave Us This Country: Tekamthi and the First American Civil War (Atheneum)
• Otto Friedrich, Glenn Gould: A Life and Variations (Random House)
• Roger Moris, Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician (Henry Holt)
• Tobias Wolff, This Boy's Life: A Memoir (Atlantic Monthly Press)

Poetry Winner

• Rodney Jones, Transparent Gestures (Houghton Mifflin)

Poetry Finalists

• August Kleinzahler, Earthquake Weather (Moyer Bell Ltd.)
• Robert Hass, Human Wishes (Ecco Press)
• Thylias Moss, Pyramid of Bone (University Press of Virginia)
• Nancy Willard, Water Walker (Knopf)

Criticism Winner

• John Clive, Not by Fact Alone: Essays on the Writing and Reading of History (Knopf)

Criticism Finalists

• William L. Vance, America's Rome (Yale University Press)
• David Bromwich, A Choice of Inheritance: Self and Community from Edmund Burke to Robert Frost (Harvard University Press)
• Charles Solomon, Enchanted Drawings: The History of Animation (Knopf)
• Cynthia Ozick, Metaphor & Memory: Essays (Knopf)

Ivan Sandrof/NBCC Board Award Winner

• James Laughlin, founder and publisher of New Directions, for his distinguished contribution to American letters

 

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Fiction Winner

• John Updike, Rabbit at Rest (Knopf)

Fiction Finalists

• Charles Johnson, Middle Passage (Atheneum)
• Sue Miller, Family Pictures (HarperCollins)
• Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried (Seymour Lawrence/Houghton Mifflin)
• Wallace Stegner, Collected Stories (Random House)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Shelby Steele, The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America (St. Martin's)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (Verso)
• Alma Guillermoprieto, Samba (Knopf)
• O.B. Hardison, Disappearing Through the Skylight: Culture and Technology in the 20th Century (Viking)
• Kevin Phillips, The Politics of Rich and Poor: Wealth and the American Electorate in the Regan Aftermath (Random House)

Biography/Autobiography Winner

• Robert Caro, Means of Ascent: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (Knopf)

Biography/Autobiography Finalists

• John Espey, Strong Drink, Strong Language (John Daniel)
• Patricia O'Toole, The Five of Hearts: An Intimate Portrait of Henry Adams and His Friends, 1880-1918 (Clarkson N. Potter)
• Richard Rhodes, A Hole in the World (Simon & Schuster)
• T.H. Watkins, Righteous Pilgrim: The Life and Times of Harold L. Ickes (Holt)

Poetry Winner

• Amy Gerstler, Bitter Angel (Nort Point)

Poetry Finalists

• Frank Bidart, In the Western Night (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• John Haines, New Poems, 1980-88 (Story Line Press)
• Anthony Hecht, The Transparent Man (Knopf)
• Charles Simic, The Book of Gods and Devils (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich)

Criticism Winner

• Arthur Danto, Encounters and Reflections: Art in the Historical Present (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Criticism Finalists

• Stanley Crouch, Notes of a Hanging Judge: Essays and Reviews, 1979-1989 (Oxford University Press)
• Irving Howe, Selected Writings, 1950-1990 (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich)
• Camille Paglia, Emily Dickinson (Yale University Press)
• Wilfrid Sheed, Essays in Disguise (Knopf)

Ivan Sandorf/NBCC Board Award Winner

• Donald Keene

 

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Fiction Winner

• Jane Smiley, A Thousand Acres (Knopf)

Fiction Finalists

• Louis Begley, Wartime Lies (Knopf)
• Gish Jen, Typical American (Houghton Mifflin)
• Richard Powers, The Gold Bug Variations (Morrow)
• Norman Rush, Mating (Knopf)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (Crown)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• Thomas Geoghegan, Which Side Are You on? Trying to Be for Labor When It's Flat on Its Back (FSG)
• Melissa Fay Greene, Praying for Sheetrock (Addison-Wesley)
• Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools (Crown)
• Dennis Overbye, Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos: The Scientific Quest for the Secret of the Universe (HarperCollins)

Biography/Autobiography Winner

• Philip Roth, Patrimony: A True Story (Simon & Schuster)

Biography/Autobiography Finalists

• John Cheever, The Journals of John Cheever (Knopf)
• Robert Kanigel, The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan (Scribner)
• Diane Middlebrook, Anne Sexton: A Biography (Houghton Mifflin)
• Art Spiegelman, Maus II (Pantheon)

Poetry Winner

• Albert Goldbarth, Heaven and Earth: A Cosmology (Georgia)

Poetry Finalists

• Diane Ackerman, Jaguar of Sweet Laughter: New & Selected Poems (Random House)
• Allen Grossman, The Ether Dome and Other Poems: New & Selected (1979-1991) (New Directions)
• Philip Levine, What Work Is (Knopf)
• Adrienne Rich, An Atlas of the Difficult World (Norton)

Criticism Winner

• Lawrence L. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (Yale)

Criticism Finalists

• Norman F. Cantor, Inventing the Middle Ages: The Lives, Works & Ideas of the Great Medievalists of the Twentieth Century (Morrow)
• J. Hoberman, Vulgar Modernism: Writing on Movies and Other Media (Temple Univ. Press)
• Louise J. Kaplan, Female Perversions: The Temptations of Emma Bovary (Talese/Doubleday)
• John Updike, Odd Jobs (Knopf)

Reviewer's Citation Winner

• George Scialabba

 

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Fiction Winner

• Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses (Knopf)

Fiction Finalists

• Randall Kenan, Let the Dead Bury Their Dead (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich)
• Joyce Carol Oates, Black Water (Dutton)
• Richard Price, Clockers (Houghton Mifflin)
• Robert Stone, Outerbridge Reach (Ticknor & Fields)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Norman Maclean, Young Men and Fire (University of Chicago Press)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• Michael D. Coe, Breaking the Maya Code (Thames & Hudson)
• Donald Katz, Home Fires: An Intimate Portrait of One Middle-Class Family in Postwar America (HarperCollins)
• Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil (University of California Press)
• Edward O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life (Harvard University Press)

Biography/Autobiography Winner

• Carol Brightman, Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy and Her World (Clarkson N. Potter)

Biography/Autobiography Finalists

• Jack Beatty, The Rascal King: The Life and Times of James Michael Curley, 1874-1958 (Addison-Wesley)
• Paul Hendrickson, Looking for the Light: The Hidden Life and Art of Marion Post Wolcott (Knopf)
• Walter Isaacson, Kissinger (Simon & Schuster)
• David McCullough, Truman (Simon & Schuster)

Poetry Winner

• Hayden Carruth, Collected Shorter Poems 1946-1991 (Copper Canyon Press)

Poetry Finalists

• David Ferry, Gilgamesh (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Maxine Kumin, Looking for Luck (W.W. Norton)
• Sharon Olds, The Father (Knopf)
• K.C. Williams, A Dream of Mine (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Criticism Winner

• Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remand America (Simon & Schuster)

Criticism Finalists

• Frederick Crews, The Critics Bear It Away: American Fiction and the Academy (Random House)
• Dana Gioia, Can Poetry Matter? Essays on Poetry and American Culture (Graywolf Press)
• Susan Griffin, A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War (Doubleday)
• Wallace Stegner, Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West (Random House)

Nona Balakian Excellence in Reviewing Award Winner

• Elizabeth Ward

Ivan Sandrof Award Winner

• Gregory Rabassa

 

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Fiction Winner

• Ernest J. Gaines, A Lesson Before Dying  (Knopf)

Fiction Finalists

• E. Annie Proulx, The Shipping News (Scribners)
• Bobbie Ann Mason, Feather Crowns (Harper)
• Frances Sherwood, Vindication (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Rikki Ducornet, The Jade Cabinet (Dalkey Archive Press)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Alan Lomax, The Land Where the Blues Began (Pantheon)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• Rosemary Mahoney, Whoredom in Kimmage: Irish Women Coming of Age (Houghton Mifflin)
• George B. Schaller, The Last Panda (Chicago)
• Russ Rymer, Genie: An Abused Child's Flight From Silence (Harper)
• David Remnick, Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire (Random House)

Biography/Autobiography Winner

• Edmund White, Genet (Knopf)

Biography/Autobiography Finalists

• James Merrill, A Different Person (Knopf)
• James Miller, The Passion of Michael Foucault (Simon & Schuster)
• Alice Kaplan, French Lessons (Chicago)
• David Levering Lewis, DuBois: Biography of a Race (Holt)

Poetry Winner

• Mark Doty, My Alexandria (University of Illinois Press)

Poetry Finalists

• Donald Hall, The Museum of Clear Ideas (Ticknor & Fields)
• Linda Hogan, The Book of Medicines (Coffee House Press)
• Audre Lorde, The Marvelous Arithmetic of Distance (W.W. Norton)
• Jack Marshall, Sesame (Coffee House Press)

Criticism Winner

• John Dizikes, Opera in America: A Cultural History (Yale)

Criticism Finalists

• Wayne Koestenbaum, The Queen's Throat (Poseidon)
• Geoffrey O'Brien, The Phantom Empire (Norton)
• Mark Rose, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Harvard)
• Gore Vidal, United States: Essays 1952-1992 (Random House)

Nona Balakian Excellence in Reviewing Award Winner

• Brigitte Frase

 

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Fiction Winner

• Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries (Viking)

Fiction Finalists

• Alan Isler, The Prince of West End Avenue (Bridge Works)
• Julius Lester, And All Our Wounds Forgiven (Arcade)
• William Gaddis, A Frolic of His Own (Poseidon/Simon & Schuster)
• Julia Alvarez, In the Time of the Butterflies (Algonquin)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Lynn Nicholas, The Rape of Europa (Knopf)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• Jane Mayer & Jill Abramson, Strange Justice (Houghton Mifflin)
• Abraham Verghese, My Own Country (Simon & Schuster)
• Sherwin Nuland, How We Die (Knopf)
• John Demos, The Unredeemed Captive (Knopf)

Biography/Autobiography Winner

• Mikal Gilmore, Shot in the Heart (Doubleday)

Biography/Autobiography Finalists

• Julia Frey, Toulouse-Lautrec (Viking)
• Brenda Maddox, D.H. Lawrence (Simon & Schuster)
• Edward O. Wilson, Naturalist (Island Press)
• Neal Gabler, Winchell (Knopf)

Poetry Winner

• Mark Rudman, Rider (Wesleyan/New England)

Poetry Finalists

• Dorianne Laux, What We Carry (BOA Editions)
• Marilyn Hacker, Winter Numbers (Norton)
• Philip Levine, The Simple Truth (Knopf)
• Mary Jo Salter, Sunday Skaters (Knopf)

Criticism Winner

• Gerald Early, The Culture of Bruising (Ecco)

Criticism Finalists

• Jahan Ramazani, Poetry of Mourning (University of Chicago)
• Harold Bloom, The Western Canon (Harcourt Brace)
• Katha Pollitt, Reasonable Creatures (Knopf)
• Anne Hollander, Sex and Suits (Knopf)

Nona Balakian Excellence in Reviewing Award Winner

• JoAnn Gutin

Ivan Sandrof Award for Lifetime Achievement in Publishing Winner

• William Maxwell

 

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Fiction Winner

• Stanley Elkin, Mrs. Ted Bliss (Hyperion)

Fiction Finalists

• Richard Ford, Independence Day (Knopf)
• Richard Powers, Galatea 2.2 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Jane Smiley, Moo (Knopf)
• Paul West, The Tent of Orange Mist (Scribner)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Jonathan Harr, A Civil Action (Random House)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• Nicholas Basbanes, A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books (Holt)
• Madeleine Blais, In These Girls, Hope Is a Muscle (Atlantic)
• Fox Butterfield, All God's Children: The Bosket Family and the American Tradition of Violence (Knopf)
• Lawrence Weschler, Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder (Pantheon)

Biography/Autobiography Winner

• Robert Polito, Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson (Knopf)

Biography/Autobiography Finalists

• John Hockenberry, Moving Violations: War Zones, Wheelchairs and Declarations of Independence (Hyperion)
• Mary Karr, The Liars' Club (Viking)
• David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman's America (Knopf)
• Robert Richardson Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire (California)

Poetry Winner

• William Matthews, Time & Money (Houghton Mifflin)

Poetry Finalists

• Lynda Hull, The Only World (Harper)
• James Merrill, A Scattering of Salts (Knopf)
• Carl Phillips, Cortege (Graywolf)
• Ellen Bryant Voigt, Kyrie (Norton)

Criticism Winner

• Robert Darnton, The Forbidden Bestsellers of Pre-Revolution France (Norton)

Criticism Finalists

• Stanley Crouch, The All-American Skin Game, or The Decoy of Race: The Long and the Short of It, 1990-1994 (Pantheon)
• Thomas M. Disch, The Castle of Indolence: On Poetry, Poets and Poetasters (Picador)
• John Felstiner, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew (Yale University Press)
• Clifford Geertz, After the Fact (Harvard University Press)

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Winner

• Laurie Stone

NBCC/Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award Winners

• Alfred Kazin
• Elizabeth Hardwick

 

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Fiction Winner

• Gina Berriault, Women in Their Beds (Counterpoint)

Fiction Finalists

• Louis Begley, About Schmidt (Knopf)
• Andre Dubus, Dancing After Hours (Knopf)
• Jamaica Kincaid, The Autobiography of My Mother (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Henry Roth, From Bondage (St. Martin's)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Jonathan Raban, Bad Land (Pantheon)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• David Denby, The Great Books (Simon & Schuster)
• Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners (Knopf)
• Richard Kluger, Ashes to Ashes (Knopf)
• Bernard Lewis, The Middle East (Scribner)

Biography/Autobiography Winner

• Frank McCourt, Angela's Ashes (Scribner)

Biography/Autobiography Finalists

• Peter Conn, Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography (Cambridge)
• David Hajdu, Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Alan Shapiro, The Last Happy Occasion (Chicago)
• Jan Swafford, Charles Ives: A Life in Music (Norton)

Poetry Winner

• Robert Hass, Sun Under Wood (Ecco)

Poetry Finalists

• Stephen Dunn, Loosestrife (Norton)
• Martín Espada, Imagine the Angels of Bread (Norton)
• Jane Shore, Music Minus One (Picador)
• C.K. Williams, The Vigil (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Criticism Winner

• William Gass, Finding a Form (Knopf)

Criticism Finalists

• Gene H. Bell-Villada, Art for Art's Sake and Literary Life (Nebraska)
• Margaret Anne Doody, The True Story of the Novel (Rutgers)
• Dan Hofstadter, The Love Affair as a Work of Art (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Cynthia Ozick, Fame and Folly (Knopf)

Nona Balakian Excellence in Reviewing Award Winner

• Dennis Drabelle

Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award Winner

• Albert Murray

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Fiction Winner

• Penelope Fitzgerald, The Blue Flower (Mariner/Houghton)

Fiction Finalists

• Don DeLillo, Underworld (Scribner)
• Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain (Grove)
• Andrei Makine, Dreams of My Russian Summers (Arcade)
• Philip Roth, American Pastoral (Houghton Mifflin)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Anne Fadiman, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• Jon Krakauer, Into Thin Air (Villard)
• James Kugel, The Bible as It Was (Belknap Press)
• Pauline Maier, American Scripture (Knopf)
• Stephen Pinker, How the Mind Works (Norton)

Biography/Autobiography Winner

• James Tobin, Ernie Pyle's War (Free Press)

Biography/Autobiography Finalists

• Joseph Ellis, American Sphinx (Knopf)
• Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (Knopf)
• Doris Lessing, Walking in the Shade (HarperCollins)

Poetry Winner

• Charles Wright, Black Zodiac (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Poetry Finalists

• Frank Bidart, Desire (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Brenda Hillman, Loose Sugar (Wesleyan)
• Mark Jarman, Questions for Ecclesiastes (Story Line)
• Sonya Sanchez, Does Your House Have Lions? (Beacon)

Criticism Winner

• Mario Vargas Llosa, Making Waves (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Criticism Finalists

• John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Vivian Gornick, The End of the Novel of Love (Beacon)
• Alfred Kazin, God and the American Writer (Knopf)
• Helen Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets (Harvard)

Nona Balakian Excellence in Reviewing Award Winner

• Thomas Mallon

Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award Winner

• Leslie Fiedler

 

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Fiction Winner

• Alice Munro, The Love of a Good Woman (Knopf)

Fiction Finalists

• Michael Cunningham, The Hours (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• David Gates, Preston Falls (Knopf)
• Lorrie Moore, Birds of America (Knopf)
• Lynne Tillman, No Lease on Life (Harcourt)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Philip Gourevich, We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost (Houghton)
• Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Belknap: Harvard)
• Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity (Norton)
• Simon Winchester, The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (HarperCollins)

Biography/Autobiography Winner

• Sylvia Nassar, A Beautiful Mind (Simon & Schuster)

Biography/Autobiography Finalists

• Ron Chernow, Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Random House)
• Homer H. Hickman Jr., Rocket Boys: A Memoir (Delacorte)
• David Remnick, King of the World: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero (Random House)
• Amanda Vaill, Everybody Was So Young: Gerald and Sara Murphy: A Lost Generation Love Story (Houghton)

Poetry Winner

• Marie Ponsot, The Bird Catcher (Knopf)

Poetry Finalists

• Pamela White Hadas, Self-Evidence (Triquarterly, Northwestern)
• Thylias Moss, Last Chance for the Tarzan Holler (Persea)
• Ann Carson, The Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse (Knopf)
• Yusef Komunyakaa, Thieves of Paradise (Wesleyan)

Criticism Winner

• Gary Giddins, Visions of Jazz: The First Century (Oxford)

Criticism Finalists

• Geoff Dyer, Out of Sheer Rage (North Point)
• Nelson George, Hip Hop America (Viking)
• Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (Riverhead: Putnam)
• Robert Pinsky, The Sounds of Poetry (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Nona Balakian Excellence in Reviewing Award Winner

• Albert Mobilio

 

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Fiction Winner

• Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn (Doubleday)

Fiction Finalists

• A. Manette Ansay, Midnight Champagne (Morrow)
• Frederick Busch, The Night Inspector (Harmony: Crown)
• J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace (Viking)
• David Gates, The Wonders of the Invisible World: Stories (Knopf)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Jonathan Weiner, Time, Love, Memory: A Great Biologist and His Quest for the Origins of Behavior (Knopf)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• Jane Brox, Five Thousand Days Like This One: An American Family History (Beacon)
• John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (Norton)
• Patricia Hampl, I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory (Norton)
• Jean-Paul Kauffmann, The Black Room at Longwood: Napoleon's Exile on Saint Helena (Four Walls Eight Windows)

Biography/Autobiography Winner

• Henry Wiencek, The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White (St. Martin's)

Biography/Autobiography Finalists

• Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Vol. II: Darker Reflections (Pantheon)
• Jean Strouse, Morgan: American Financier (Random)
• Judith Thurman, Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette (Knopf)
• Susan E. Tifft & Alex S. Jones, The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family Behind the New York Times (Little, Brown)

Poetry Winner

• Ruth Stone, Ordinary Words (Paris Press)

Poetry Finalists

• Rafael Campo, Diva (Duke Univ. Press)
• Tory Dent, HIV, Mon Amour (Sheep Meadow)
• Rita Dove, On the Bus With Rosa Parks (Norton)
• Susan Kingsolving, Dailies & Rushes (Grove)

Criticism Winner

• Jorge Louis Borges, Selected Non-Fictions (Viking)

Criticism Finalists

• Stuart Klawans, Film Follies: The Cinema Out of Order (Cassell)
• William Logan, Reputations of the Tongue: On Poets and Poetry (Univ. Pr. of Florida)
• Michael Schmidt, Lives of the Poets (Knopf)
• David Shields, Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season (Crown)

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Winner

• Benjamin Schwarz

Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award Winners

• Pauline Kael
• Lawrence Ferlinghetti

 

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Fiction Winner

• Jim Crace, Being Dead (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Fiction Finalists

• Amy Bloom, A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You (Random House)
• Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (Random House)
• David Means, Assorted Fire Events: Stories (Context Books)
• Zadie Smith, White Teeth (Random House)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Ted Conover, Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing (Random House)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• Fred Anderson, Crucible of War (Knopf)
• Frances Fitzgerald, Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War (Simon & Schuster)
• Laurie Garrett, Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health (Hyperion)
• Alice Kaplan, The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach (Univ. of Chicago)

Biography/Autobiography Winner

• Herbert P. Bix, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (HarperCollins)

Biography/Autobiography Finalists

• Robin Marantz Henig, The Monk in the Garden: The Lost and Found Genius of Gregor Mendel, the Father of Genetics (Houghton Mifflin)
• Victor Kemplerer, I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1942-1945 (Random House)
• David Nasaw, The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst (Houghton Mifflin)
• Jean-Yves Tadie, Marcel Proust: A Life (Viking)

Poetry Winner

• Judy Jordan, Carolina Ghost Woods (LSU)

Poetry Finalists

• Michael Collier, The Ledge (Houghton Mifflin)
• Anne Carson, Men in the Off Hours (Knopf)
• Yusef Komunyakaa, Talking Dirty to the Gods (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Davis McCombs, Ultima Thule (Yale)

Criticism Winner

• Cynthia Ozick, Quarrel & Quandary (Knopf)

Criticism Finalists

• Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to Present (HarperCollins)
• Claudia Roth Pierpont, Passionate Minds (Knopf)
• Charles Rosen, Critical Entertainments: Music Old and New (Harvard Univ. Press)
• Sherod Santos, A Poetry of Two Minds (University of Georgia Press)

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Winner

• Daniel Mendelsohn

Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award Winner

• Barney Rosset

 

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Fiction Winner

• W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz (Random House)

Fiction Finalists

• Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Alice Munro, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories (Knopf)
• Ann Patchett, Bel Canto (HarperCollins)
• Colson Whitehead, John Henry Days (Doubleday)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Nicholson Baker, Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper (Random House)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• Nina Bernstein, The Lost Children of Wilder: The Epic Struggle to Change Foster Care (Pantheon)
• Jan T. Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (Princeton University)
• Laura Hillenbrand, Seabiscuit: An American Legend (Random House)
• Sam Roberts, The Brother: The Untold Story of Atomic Spy David Greenglass and How He Sent His Sister, Ethel Rosenberg, to the Electric Chair (Random House)

Biography/Autobiography Winner

• Adam Sisman, Boswell's Presumptuous Task: The Making of the Life of Dr. Johnson (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Biography/Autobiography Finalists

• Paula Fox, Borrowed Finery: A Memoir (Holt)
• David Hajdu, Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina and Richard Farina (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Katherine Clark, Milking the Moon: A Southerner's Story of Life on This Planet (Crown)
• Barry Werth, The Scarlet Professor: Newton Arvin: A Literary Life Shattered by Scandal (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday)

Poetry Winner

• Albert Goldbarth, Saving Lives (Ohio Statue University)

Poetry Finalists

• Louise Gluck, The Seven Ages (Ecco/HarperCollins)
• Bob Hicok, Animal Soul (Invisible Cities)
• Jane Hirshfield, Given Sugar, Given Salt (HarperCollins)
• Czeslaw Milosz, A Treatise on Poetry (Ecco/HarperCollins)

Criticism Winner

• Martin Amis, The War Against Cliche: Essays and Reviews, 1971-2000 (Talk Miramax)

Criticism Finalists

• H.J. Jackson, Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (Yale University)
• W.D. Snodgrass, De/Compositions: 101 Good Poems Gone Wrong (Graywolf)
• Rebecca Solnit, As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender, and Art (University of Georgia)
• Joy Williams, Ill Nature: Rants and Reflections on Humanity and Other Animals (Lyons)

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Winner

• Michael Gorra

Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award Winner

• Jason Epstein

 

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Fiction Winner

• Ian McEwan, Atonement (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday)

Fiction Finalists

• Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Aleksandar Hemon, Nowhere Man (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday)
• William Kennedy, Roscoe (Viking)
• Edith Templeton, The Darts of Cupid: And Other Stories (Pantheon)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (Basic Books)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• Chris Hedges, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (PublicAffairs)
• William Langewiesche, American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center (North Point Press/FSG)
• Richard Rodriguez, Brown: The Last Discovery of America (Viking)
• Gaby Wood, Edison's Eve: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life (Knopf)

Biography/Autobiography Winner

• Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: The Power of Place (Knopf)

Biography/Autobiography Finalists

• Robert A. Caro, Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (Knopf)
• Elizabeth Gilbert, The Last American Man (Viking)
• Edmund S. Morgan, Benjamin Franklin (Yale University Press)
• Mark Zwonitzer with Charles Hirshberg, Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone? The Carter Family and Their Legacy in American Music (Simon & Schuster)

Poetry Winner

• B.H. Fairchild, Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest (Norton)

Poetry Finalists

• Major Jackson, Leaving Saturn (University of Georgia Press)
• Harryette Mullen, Sleeping With the Dictionary (University of California Press)
• Sharon Olds, The Unswept Room (Knopf)
• Adam Zagajewski, Without End: New and Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Criticism Winner

• William H. Gass, Tests of Time (Knopf)

Criticism Finalists

• Philip Ball, Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Julia Blackburn, Old Man Goya (Pantheon)
• Christopher Ricks, Reviewery (Handsel Books/Other Press)
• Charles Rosen, Piano Notes: The World of the Pianist (Free Press)

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Winner

• Maureen N. McLane

Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award Winner

• Richard Howard

 

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Fiction Winner

• Edward P. Jones, The Known World (Amistad)

Fiction Finalists

• Monica Ali, Brick Lane (Scribner)
• Richard Powers, The Time of Our Singing (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Tobias Wolff, Old School (Knopf)
• Caryl Phillips, A Distant Shore (Knopf)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Paul Hendrickson, Sons of Mississippi: A Story of Race and Its Legacy (Knopf)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• Caroline Alexander, The Bounty: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty (Viking Press)
• Anne Applebaum, Gulag (Doubleday)
• Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx (Scribner)
• William T. Vollmann, Rising Up and Rising Down (McSweeneys)

Biography Winner

• William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (Norton)

Biography Finalists

• Paul Elie, The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Blake Bailey, A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates (Picador)
• George Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (Yale University Press)
• Carol Loeb Shloss, Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Poetry Winner

• Susan Stewart, Columbarium (University of Chicago Press)

Poetry Finalists

• Carolyn Forche, Blue Hour (HarperCollins)
• Tony Hoagland, What Narcissism Means to Me (Graywolf)
• Venus Khoury-Ghata, translated by Marilyn Hacker, She Says (Graywolf)
• Mary Szybist, Granted (Alice James Books)

Criticism Winner

• Rebecca Solnit, River of Shadows (Viking Press)

Criticism Finalists

• Dagoberto Gilb, Gritos (Grove)
• Nick Hornby, Songbook (McSweeneys)
• Ross King, Michelangelo & the Popes Ceiling (Walker)
• Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Award Winner

• Scott McLemee

Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award Winner

• Studs Terkel

 

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Fiction Winner

• Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Fiction Finalists

• Edwidge Danticat, The Dew Breaker (Knopf)
• Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty (Bloomsbury)
• David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas (Random House)
• Philip Roth, The Plot Against America (Houghton Mifflin)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation: A History (Viking)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• Kevin Boyle, Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights and Murder in the Jazz Age (Henry Holt)
• Edward Conlon, Blue Blood (Riverhead Books)
• David Shipler, The Working Poor: Invisible in America (Knopf)
• Timothy Tyson, Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story (Crown)

Biography Winner

• Mark Stevens & Annalyn Swan, De Kooning: An American Master (Knopf)

Biography Finalists

• Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton (Penguin Press)
• Bob Dylan, Chronicles: Vol. 1 (Simon & Schuster)
• Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (W.W. Norton)
• John Guy, Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart (Houghton Mifflin)

Poetry Winner

• Adrienne Rich, The School Among the Ruins: Poems 2000-2004 (W.W. Norton)

Poetry Finalists

• Brigit Pegeen Kelly, The Orchard (BOA Editions)
• D.A. Powell, Cocktails (Graywolf)
• James Richardson, Interglacial (Ausable Press)
• Gary Snyder, Danger on Peaks (Shoemaker & Hoard)

Criticism Winner

• Patrick Neate, Where You’re At: Notes From the Frontline of a Hip-Hop Planet (Riverhead Books)

Criticism Finalists

• Richard Howard, Paper Trail: Selected Prose, 1965-2003 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Graham Robb, Strangers: Homosexual Love in the 19th Century (W.W. Norton)
• Craig Seligman, Sontag & Kael: Opposites Attract Me (Counterpoint)
• James Wood, The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Winner

• David Orr

Ivan R. Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award Winner

• Louis Rubin Jr.

 

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Fiction Winner

• E.L. Doctorow, The March (Random House)

Fiction Finalists

• Mary Gaitskill, Veronica (Pantheon)
• Andrea Levy, Small Island (Picador)
• Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (Knopf)
• William T. Vollmann, Europe Central (Viking)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Svetlana Alexievich, Voices From Chernobyl: The Oral History of Nuclear Disaster (Dalkey Archive Press)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East (Knopf)
• Ellen Meloy, Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild (Pantheon)
• Caroline Moorehead, Human Cargo: A Journey Among Refugees (Henry Holt/Metropolitan Books)
• Anthony Shadid, Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War (Henry Holt)

Biography Winner

• Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Knopf)

Biography Finalists

• Carolyn Burke, Lee Miller: A Life (Knopf)
• Jonathan Coe, Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B.S. Johnson (Continuum International)
• Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (Simon & Schuster)
• Ron Powers, Mark Twain: A Life (Free Press)

Autobiography/Memoir Winner

• Francine du Plessix Gray, Them: A Memoir of Parents (Penguin Press)

Autobiography/Memoir Finalists

• Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (Knopf)
• Judith Moore, Fat Girl: A True Story (Gotham Books)
• Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories and the City (Knopf)
• Vikram Seth, Two Lives (HarperCollins)

Poetry Winner

• Jack Gilbert, Refusing Heaven (Knopf)

Poetry Finalists

• Simon Armitage, The Shout (Harcourt)
• Blas Manuel de Luna, Bent to the Earth (Carnegie Mellon Univ. Press)
• Richard Siken, Crush (Yale University Press)
• Ron Slate, The Incentive of the Maggot (Houghton Mifflin/Mariner Books)

Criticism Winner

• William Logan, The Undiscovered Country: Poetry in the Age of Tin (Columbia University Press)

Criticism Finalists

• Hal Crowther, Gather at the River: Notes From the Post-Millennial South (Louisiana State Univ. Press)
• Arthur Danto, Unnatural Wonders (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• John Updike, Still Looking: Essays on American Art (Knopf)
• Eliot Weinberger, What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles (New Directions)

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Winner

• Wyatt Mason

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Finalists

• Katherine Powers
• Allen Barra
• Carlin Romano

Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award Winner

• Bill Henderson, author and director of The Pushcart Press

 

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Fiction Winner

• Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss (Grove/Atlantic)

Fiction Finalists

• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun (Knopf)
• Dave Eggers, What Is the What (McSweeney's)
• Richard Ford, The Lay of the Land (Knopf)
• Cormac McCarthy, The Road (Knopf)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution (Ecco)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• Patrick Cockburn, The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq (Verso)
• Anne Fessler, The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe V. Wade (Penguin Press)
• Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (Penguin Press)
• Sandy Tolan, The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew and the Heart of the Middle East (Bloomsbury)

Biography Winner

• Julie Phillips, James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon (St.Martin's Press)

Biography Finalists

• Debby Applegate, The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher (Doubleday)
• Taylor Branch, At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-1968 (Simon& Schuster)
• Frederick Brown, Flaubert: A Biography (Little, Brown)
• Jason Roberts, A Sense of the World: How a Blind Man Became History's Greatest Traveler (HarperCollins)

Autobiography/Memoir Winner

• Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (HarperCollins)

Autobiography/Memoir Finalists

• Donald Antrim, The Afterlife (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Alison Bechdel, Fun Home (Houghton Mifflin)
• Alexander Masters, Stuart: A Life Backwards (Delacorte)
• Teri Jentz, Strange Piece of Paradise (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Poetry Winner

• Troy Jollimore, Tom Thomson in Purgatory (Margie/Intuit House)

Poetry Finalists

• Daisy Fried, My Brother is Getting Arrested Again (University of Pittsburgh Press)
• Miltos Sachtouris, Poems (1945-1971) (Archipelego Books)
• Frederick Seidel, Ooga-Booga (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• W.D. Snodgrass, Not for Specialists: New and Selected Poems (BOA Editions)

Criticism Winner

• Lawrence Weschler, Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences (McSweeney's)

Criticism Finalists

• Bruce Bawer: While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West From Within (Doubleday)
• Frederick Crews, Follies of the Wise: Dissenting Essays (Shoemaker & Hoard)
• Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion As a Natural Phenomenon (Viking)
• Lia Purpura, On Looking: Essays (Sarabande Books)

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Winner

• Steven G. Kellman

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Finalists

• Ron Charles
• Kathryn Harrison
• Gideon Lewis-Kraus
• Donna Rifkind

Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award Winner

• John Leonard

 

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Fiction Winner

• Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverhead)

Fiction Finalists

• Vikram Chandra, Sacred Games (HarperCollins)
• Hisham Matar, In The Country of Men (Dial Press)
• Joyce Carol Oates, The Gravedigger’s Daughter (Ecco)
• Marianne Wiggins, The Shadow Catcher (Simon & Schuster)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Harriet Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present (Doubleday)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• Philip Gura, American Transcendentalism (Hill & Wang)
• Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America 1815-1848 (Oxford University Press)
• Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA (Doubleday)
• Alan Weisman, The World Without Us, Thomas Dunne (BKs/St. Martin’s)

Biography Winner

• Tim Jeal, Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer (Yale University Press)

Biography Finalists

• Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton (Knopf)
• Arnold Rampersad, Ralph Ellison (Knopf)
• John Richardson, The Life Of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932 (Knopf)
• Claire Tomalin, Thomas Hardy (Penguin Press)

Autobiography

• Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I’m Dying (Knopf)

Autobiography/Memoir Finalists

• Joshua Clark, Heart Like Water: Surviving Katrina and Life in Its Disaster Zone (Free Press)
• Joyce Carol Oates, The Journals of Joyce Carol Oates, 1973–1982 (Ecco)
• Sara Paretsky, Writing in an Age of Silence (Verso)
• Anna Politkovskaya, Russian Diary: A Journalist’s Final Account of Life, Corruption and Death in Putin’s Russia (Random House)

Poetry Winner

• Mary Jo Bang, Elegy (Graywolf)

Poetry Finalists

• Matthea Harvey, Modern Life (Graywolf)
• Michael O’Brien, Sleeping and Waking (Flood)
• Tom Pickard, The Ballad of Jamie Allan (Flood)
• Tadeusz Rozewicz, New Poems (Archipelago)

Criticism Winner

• Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)

Criticism Finalists

• Joan Acocella, Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints (Pantheon)
• Julia Alvarez, Once Upon a Quniceanera (Viking)
• Susan Faludi, The Terror Dream (Metropolitan/Holt)
• Ben Ratliff, Coltrane: The Story of a Sound (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Winner

• Sam Anderson

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Finalists

• Brooke Allen
• Ron Charles
• Walter Kirn
• Adam Kirsch

Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award Winner

• Emilie Buchwald

 

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Fiction Winner

• Roberto Bolaño, 2666 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Fiction Finalists

• Marilynne Robinson, Home (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project (Riverhead)
• M. Glenn Taylor, The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart (West Virginia University Press)
• Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kittredge (Random House)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Dexter Filkins, The Forever War (Knopf)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the Civil War (Knopf)
• Jane Mayer, The Dark Side (Doubleday)
• Allan Lichtman, White Protestant Nation (Atlantic)
• George C. Herring, From Colony to Superpower: US Foreign Relations Since 1776 (Oxford University Press)

Biography Winner

• Patrick French, The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul (Knopf)

Biography Finalists

• Paula J. Giddings, Ida, A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching (Amistad/Knopf)
• Steve Coll, The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in an American Century (Penguin Press)
• Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (Norton)
• Brenda Wineapple, White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson & Thomas Wentworth Higginson (Knopf)

Autobiography

• Ariel Sabar, My Father’s Paradise: A Son’s Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq (Algonquin)

Autobiography/Memoir Finalists

• Rick Bass, Why I Came West (Houghton Mifflin)
• Helene Cooper, The House on Sugar Beach (Simon and Schuster)
• Honor Moore, The Bishop’s Daughter (W.W. Norton)
• Andrew X. Pham, The Eaves of Heaven (Harmony Books)

Poetry Winners

• Juan Felipe Herrera, Half the World in Light (University of Arizona Press)
• August Kleinzahler, Sleeping It Off in Rapid City (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Poetry Finalists

• Devin Johnston, Sources (Turtle Point Press)
• Pierre Martory (trans. John Ashbery), The Landscapist (Sheep Meadow Press)
• Brenda Shaughnessy, Human Dark With Sugar (Copper Canyon Press)

Criticism Winner

• Seth Lerer, Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History: Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter (University of Chicago Press)

Criticism Finalists

• Richard Brody, Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life Of Jean-Luc Godard (Metropolitan Books)
• Vivian Gornick, The Men in My Life (Boston Review/MIT)
• Joel L. Kraemer, Maimonides: The Life and World of One of Civilization’s Greatest Minds (Doubleday)
• Reginald Shepherd, Orpheus in the Bronx: Essays on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry (University of Michigan Press)

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Winner

• Ron Charles

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Finalists

• Michael Antman
• Kathryn Harrison
• Laila Lalami
• Todd Shy

Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award Winner

• PEN American Center

 

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Fiction Winner

• Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall (Holt)

Fiction Finalists

• Bonnie Jo Campbell, American Salvage (Wayne State University Press)
• Marlon James, The Book of Night Women (Riverhead)
• Michelle Huneven, Blame (Sarah Crichton Books/FSG)
• Jayne Anne Phillips, Lark and Termite (Knopf)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (Pantheon)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History (Penguin Press)
• Greg Grandin, Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City (Metropolitan Books)
• Tracy Kidder, Strength in What Remains (Random House)
• William T. Vollmann, Imperial (Viking)

Biography Winner

• Blake Bailey, Cheever: A Life (Knopf)

Biography Finalists

• Brad Gooch, Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor (Little, Brown)
• Benjamin Moser, Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector (Oxford University Press)
• Stanislao G. Pugliese, Bitter Spring: A Life of Ignazio Silone (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Martha A. Sandweiss, Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line (Penguin Press)

Autobiography

• Diana Athill, Somewhere Towards the End (Norton)

Autobiography/Memoir Finalists

• Debra Gwartney, Live Through This: A Mother's Memoir of Runaway Daughters and Reclaimed Love (Houghton Mifflin)
• Mary Karr, Lit (Harper)
• Kati Marton, Enemies of the People: My Family's Journey to America (Simon & Schuster)
• Edmund White, City Boy (Bloomsbury)

Poetry Winner

• Rae Armantrout, Versed (Wesleyan)

Poetry Finalists

• Louise Glück, A Village Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• D.A. Powell, Chronic (Graywolf Press)
• Eleanor Ross Taylor, Captive Voices: New and Selected Poems, 1960–2008 (Louisiana State University Press)
• Rachel Zucker, Museum of Accidents (Wave Books)

Criticism Winner

• Eula Biss, Notes From No Man's Land: American Essays (Graywolf Press)

Criticism Finalists

• Stephen Burt, Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry (Graywolf Press)
• Morris Dickstein, Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression (Norton)
• David Hajdu, Heroes and Villains: Essays on Music, Movies, Comics, and Culture (Da Capo Press)
• Greg Milner, Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music (Faber)

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Winner

• Joan Acocella

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Finalists

• Michael Antman
• William Deresiewicz
• Donna Seaman
• Wendy Smith

Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award Winner

• Joyce Carol Oates

 

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Fiction Winner

• Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad (Knopf)

Fiction Finalists

• Jonathan Franzen, Freedom (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• David Grossman, To the End of the Land (Knopf)
• Hans Keilson, Comedy in a Minor Key, tr. by Damion Searls (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Paul Murray, Skippy Dies (Faber & Faber)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration (Random House)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• Barbara Demick, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea (Spiegel & Grau)
• S.C. Gwynne, Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History (Scribner)
• Jennifer Homans, Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet (Random House)
• Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (Scribner)

Biography Winner

• Sarah Bakewell, How To Live: Or, A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer (Other Press) 

Biography Finalists

• Selina Hastings, The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham (Random House)
• Yunte Huang, Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous With American History (W.W. Norton)
• Thomas Powers, The Killing of Crazy Horse (Knopf)
• Tom Segev, Simon Wiesenthal: The Life and Legends (Doubleday)

Autobiography

• Darin Strauss, Half a Life (McSweeney’s)

Autobiography/Memoir Finalists

• Kai Bird, Crossing Mandelbaum Gate: Coming of Age Between the Arabs and Israelis, 1956–1978 (Scribner)
• David Dow, The Autobiography of an Execution (Twelve)
• Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir (Twelve)
• Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, Hiroshima in the Morning (Feminist Press)
• Patti Smith, Just Kids (Ecco)

Poetry Winner

• C. D. Wright’s One with Others: [a little book of her days] (Copper Canyon)

Poetry Finalists

• Anne Carson, Nox (New Directions)
• Kathleen Graber, The Eternal City (Princeton University Press)
• Terrance Hayes, Lighthead (Penguin Poets)
• Kay Ryan, The Best of It: New and Selected Poems (Grove Press)

Criticism Winner

• Clare Cavanagh, Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics: Russia, Poland, and the West (Yale University Press)

Criticism Finalists

• Elif Batuman, The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Terry Castle, The Professor and Other Writings (Harper)
• Susie Linfield, The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence (University of Chicago Press)
• Ander Monson, Vanishing Point: Not a Memoir (Graywolf)

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Winner

• Parul Sehgal

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Finalists

• Sarah L. Courteau
• William Deresiewicz
• Ruth Franklin
• Kathryn Harrison

Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award Winner

• Dalkey Archive Press

 

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Fiction Winner

• Edith Pearlman, Binocular Vision (Lookout Books)

Fiction Finalists

• Teju Cole, Open City (Random House)
• Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Alan Hollinghurst, The Stranger’s Child (Knopf)
• Dana Spiotta, Stone Arabia (Scribner)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Maya Jasanoff, Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary War (Knopf)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• Amanda Foreman, A World on Fire: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War (Random)
• James Gleick, The Information (Pantheon)
• Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
• John Jeremiah Sullivan, Pulphead: Essays (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux)

Biography Winner

• John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life (Penguin Press)

Biography Finalists

• Mary Gabriel, Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of the Revolution (Little, Brown)
• Paul Hendrickson, Hemingway’s Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-1961 (Knopf)
• Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (Viking)
• Ezra F. Vogel, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (Belknap Press: Harvard University Press)

Autobiography

• Mira Bartók, The Memory Palace (Free Press)

Autobiography/Memoir Finalists

• Diane Ackerman, One Hundred Names for Love: A Stroke, A Marriage, and the Language of Healing (W.W. Norton)
• Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, Harlem Is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America (Little, Brown)
• Luis J. Rodríguez, It Calls You Back: An Odyssey Through Love, Addiction, Revolutions, and Healing (Touchstone)
• Deb Olin Unferth, Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War (Henry Holt)

Poetry Winner

• Laura Kasischke, Space, in Chains (Copper Canyon Press)

Poetry Finalists

• Forrest Gander, Core Samples from the World (New Directions)
• Aracelis Girmay, Kingdom Animalia (BOA Editions)
• Yusef Komunyakaa, The Chameleon Couch (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)
• Bruce Smith, Devotions (University of Chicago Press)

Criticism Winner

• Geoff Dyer, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition: Selected Essays and Reviews (Graywolf)

Criticism Finalists

• David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything (Faber & Faber)
• Jonathan Lethem, The Ecstasy of Influence (Doubleday)
• Dubravka Ugresic, Karaoke Culture (Open Letter)
• Ellen Willis, Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music (University of Minnesota Press)

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Winner

• Kathryn Schulz

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Finalists

• William Deresiewicz
• Ruth Franklin
• Garth Risk Hallberg
• Kathryn Harrison

Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award Winner

• Robert B. Silvers

 

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Fiction Winner

• Ben Fountain, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (Ecco)

Fiction Finalists

• Laurent Binet, HHhH. tr. by Sam Taylor (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Adam Johnson, The Orphan Master’s Son (Random House)
• Lydia Millet, Magnificence (W. W. Norton)
• Zadie Smith, NW (The Penguin Press)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Andrew Solomon, Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity (Scribner)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity (Random House)
• Steve Coll, Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power (The Penguin Press)
• Jim Holt, Why Does the World Exist? An Existential Detective Story (A Liveright Book: W. W. Norton)
• David Quammen, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic (W.W. Norton)

Biography Winner

• Robert A. Caro, The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (Alfred A. Knopf)

Biography Finalists

• Lisa Cohen, All We Know: Three Lives (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Michael Gorra, Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece (A Liveright Book: W. W. Norton)
• Lisa Jarnot, Robert Duncan, The Ambassador from Venus: A Biography (University of California Press)
• Tom Reiss, The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo (Crown Publishers)

Autobiography

• Leanne Shapton, Swimming Studies (Blue Rider Press)

Autobiography/Memoir Finalists

• Reyna Grande, The Distance Between Us (Atria Books)
• Maureen N. McLane, My Poets (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Anthony Shadid, House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
• Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, In the House of the Interpreter (Pantheon)

Poetry Winner

• D. A. Powell, Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys (Graywolf Press)

Poetry Finalists

• David Ferry, Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations (University of Chicago Press)
• Lucia Perillo, On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths (Copper Canyon Press)
• Allan Peterson, Fragile Acts (McSweeney’s Books)
• A. E. Stallings, Olives (Triquarterly: Northwestern University Press)

Criticism Winner

• Marina Warner, Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights (Belknap Press: Harvard University Press)

Criticism Finalists

• Paul Elie, Reinventing Bach (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Daniel Mendelsohn, Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture (New York Review Books)
• Mary Ruefle Madness, Rack, and Honey (Wave Books)
• Kevin Young, The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness (Graywolf Press)

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Winner

• William Deresiewicz

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Finalists

• Abigail Deutsch
• Lev Grossman
• Garth Risk Hallberg
• Kathryn Harrison

Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award Winner

• Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar

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Fiction Winner

• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah (Knopf)

Fiction Finalists

• Alice McDermott, Someone (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Javier Marias, The Infatuations (Knopf)
• Ruth Ozeki, A Tale For The Time Being (Viking)
• Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch (Little, Brown)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Sheri Fink, Five Days At Memorial: Life And Death In A Storm-Ravaged Hospital (Crown)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• Kevin Cullen And Shelley Murphy, Whitey Bulger: America’s Most Wanted Gangster And The Manhunt That Brought Him To Justice (Norton)
• David Finkel, Thank You For Your Service (Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• George Packer, The Unwinding: An Inner History Of The New America (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Lawrence Wright, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood And The Prison Of Belief (Knopf)

Biography Winner

• Leo Damrosch, Jonathan Swift: His Life And His World (Yale University Press)

Biography Finalists

• Scott Anderson, Lawrence In Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly And The Making Of The Modern Middle East (Doubleday)
• John Eliot Gardiner, Bach: Music In The Castle Of Heaven (Knopf)
• Linda Leavell, Holding On Upside Down: The Life And Work Of Marianne Moore (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Mark Thompson, Birth Certificate: The Story Of Danilo Kis (Cornell University Press)

Autobiography

• Amy Wilentz, Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter From Haiti (Simon & Schuster)

Autobiography/Memoir Finalists

• Sonali Deraniyagala, Wave (Knopf)
• Aleksandar Hemon, The Book Of My Lives (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby (Viking)
• Jesmyn Ward, Men We Reaped (Bloomsbury)

Poetry Winner

• Frank Bidart, Metaphysical Dog (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Poetry Finalists

• Lucie Brock-Broido, Stay, Illusion (Knopf)
• Denise Duhamel, Blowout (University Of Pittsburgh Press)
• Bob Hicok, Elegy Owed (Copper Canyon)
• Carmen Gimenez Smith, Milk And Filth (University Of Arizona Press)

Criticism Winner

• Franco Moretti, Distant Reading (Verso)

Criticism Finalists

• Hilton Als, White Girls (Mcsweeney’s)
• Mary Beard, Confronting The Classics: Traditions, Adventures And Innovations (Liveright)
• Jonathan Franzen, The Kraus Project: Essays By Karl Kraus, Translated And Annotated By Jonathan Franzen With Paul Reiter And Daniel Kehlmann (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Janet Malcolm, Forty-One False Starts: Essays On Artists And Writers (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

John Leonard Prize

• Anthony Marra, A Constellation Of Vital Phenomena (Hogarth)

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Winner

• Katherine A. Powers

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Finalists

• Ruth Franklin
• James Marcus
• Roxana Robinson
• Alexandra Schwartz

Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award Winner

• Rolando Hinojosa-Smith

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Fiction Winner

• Marilynne Robinson, Lila (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Fiction Finalists

• Rabih Alameddine, An Unnecessary Woman (Grove Press)
• Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings (Riverhead Books)
• Lily King, Euphoria (Atlantic Monthly Press)
• Chang-rae Lee, On Such a Full Sea (Riverhead Books)

General Nonfiction Winner

• David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (Alfred A. Knopf)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• Peter Finn and Petra Couvee, The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle over a Forbidden Book (Pantheon)
• Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (Henry Holt & Co.)
• Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, translated from the French by Arthur Goldhammer (Belknap Press/Harvard University Press)
• Hector Tobar, Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle that Set Them Free (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Biography Winner

• John Lahr, Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (W.W. Norton & Co.)

Biography Finalists

• Ezra Greenspan, William Wells Brown: An African American Life (W.W. Norton & Co.)
• S.C. Gwynne, Rebel Yell: The Violence, Passion and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson (Scribner)
• Ian S. MacNiven, “Literchoor Is My Beat”: A Life of James Laughlin, Publisher of New Directions (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Miriam Pawel, The Crusades of Cesar Chavez: A Biography (Bloomsbury)

Autobiography

• Roz Chast, Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? (Bloomsbury)

Autobiography/Memoir Finalists

• Blake Bailey, The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait (W.W. Norton & Co.)
• Lacy M. Johnson, The Other Side (Tin House)
• Gary Shteyngart, Little Failure (Random House)
• Meline Toumani, There Was and There Was Not (Metropolitan Books)

Poetry Winner

• Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric (Graywolf Press)

Poetry Finalists

• Saeed Jones, Prelude to Bruise (Coffee House Press)
• Willie Perdomo, The Essential Hits of Shorty Bon Bon (Penguin Books)
• Christian Wiman, Once in the West (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Jake Adam York, Abide (Southern Illinois University Press)

Criticism Winner

• Ellen Willis, The Essential Ellen Willis, edited by Nona Willis Aronowitz (University of Minnesota Press)

Criticism Finalists

• Eula Biss, On Immunity: An Innoculation (Graywolf Press)
• Vikram Chandra, Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty (Graywolf Press)
• Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric (Graywolf Press)
• Lynne Tillman, What Would Lynne Tillman Do? (Red Lemonade)

John Leonard Prize

• Phil Klay, Redeployment (Penguin Press)

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Winner

• Alexandra Schwartz

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Finalists

• Charles Finch
• B. K. Fischer
• Benjamin Moser
• Lisa Russ Spaar

Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award Winner

• Toni Morrison

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Fiction Winner

• Paul Beatty, The Sellout (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Fiction Finalists

• Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies (Riverhead)
• Valeria Luiselli, The Story of My Teeth, translated by Christina MacSweeney (Coffee House Press)
• Anthony Marra, The Tsar of Love and Techno (Hogarth)
• Ottessa Moshfegh, Eileen (Penguin Press)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Sam Quinones, Dreamland: The True Story of America’s Opiate Epidemic (Bloomsbury)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• Mary Beard, SPQR: A History of Rome (Liveright)
• Ari Berman, Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Jill Leovy, Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America (Spiegel & Grau)
• Brian Seibert, What the Eye Hears: A History of Tap Dancing (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Biography Winner

• Charlotte Gordon, Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley (Random House)

Biography Finalists

• Terry Alford, Fortune’s Fool: The Life of John Wilkes Booth (Oxford University Press)
• T.J. Stiles, Custer’s Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America (Alfred A. Knopf)
• Rosemary Sullivan, Stalin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva (Harper)
• Karin Wieland, translated by Shelley Frisch, Dietrich and Riefenstahl: Hollywood, Berlin, and a Century in Two Lives (Liveright)

Autobiography

• Margo Jefferson, Negroland (Pantheon)

Autobiography/Memoir Finalists

• Elizabeth Alexander, The Light of the World (Grand Central Publishing)
• Vivian Gornick, The Odd Woman and the City (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• George Hodgman, Bettyville (Viking)
• Helen Macdonald, H Is for Hawk (Grove Press)

Poetry Winner

• Ross Gay, Catalogue of Unabashed Gratitude (University of Pittsburgh Press)

Poetry Finalists

• Terrance Hayes, How to Be Drawn (Penguin)
• Ada Limón, Bright Dead Things (Milkweed Editions)
• Sinéad Morrissey, Parallax and Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Frank Stanford, What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford (Copper Canyon Press)

Criticism Winner

• Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts (Graywolf)

Criticism Finalists

• Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (Spiegel & Grau)
• Leo Damrosch, Eternity’s Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake (Yale University Press)
• Colm Tóibín, On Elizabeth Bishop (Princeton University Press)
• James Wood, The Nearest Thing to Life (Brandeis University Press)

John Leonard Prize

• Kirstin Valdez Quad, Night at the Fiestas (W.W. Norton & Company)

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Winner

• Carlos Lozada

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Finalists

• Ruth Franklin
• James Parker
• Roxana Robinson
• Leo Robson

Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award Winner

• Wendell Berry

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Fiction Winner

• Louise Erdrich, LaRose (Harper)

Fiction Finalists

• Michael Chabon, Moonglow (Harper)
• Adam Haslett, Imagine Me Gone (Little, Brown)
• Ann Patchett, Commonwealth (Harper)
• Zadie Smith, Swing Time (Penguin Press)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (Crown)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (Nation Books)
• Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (Doubleday)
• Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (Harvard University Press)
• John Edgar Wideman, Writing to Save a Life: The Louis Till File (Scribner)

Biography Winner

• Ruth Franklin, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (Liveright)

Biography Finalists

• Nigel Cliff, Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story (Harper)
• Joe Jackson, Black Elk: The Life of an American Visionary (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Michael Tisserand, Krazy: George Herriman, a Life in Black and White (Harper)
• Frances Wilson, Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Autobiography

• Hope Jahren, Lab Girl (Alfred A. Knopf)

Autobiography/Memoir Finalists

• Marion Coutts, The Iceberg (Black Cat Press)
• Jenny Diski, In Gratitude (Bloomsbury)
• Hisham Matar, The Return: Fathers, Sons, and the Land in Between (Random House)
• Kao Kalia Yang, The Song Poet: A Memoir of My Father (Metropolitan Books)

Poetry Winner

• Ishion Hutchinson, House of Lords and Commons (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Poetry Finalists

• Tyehimba Jess, Olio (Wave Books)
• Bernadette Mayer, Works and Days (New Directions)
• Robert Pinsky, At the Foundling Hospital (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Monica Youn, Blackacre (Graywolf Press)

Criticism Winner

• Carol Anderson, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide (Bloomsbury)

Criticism Finalists

• Mark Greif, Against Everything: Essays (Pantheon)
• Alice Kaplan, Looking for The Stranger: Albert Camus and the Life of a Literary Classic (University of Chicago Press)
• Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone (Picador)
• Peter Orner, Am I Alone Here?: Notes on Living to Read and Reading to Live (Catapult)

John Leonard Prize

• Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing (Alfred A. Knopf)

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Winner

• Michelle Dean

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Finalists

• Julia M. Klein
• Christian Lorentzen
• Becca Rothfeld
• Leo Robson

Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award Winner

• Margaret Atwood

The NBCC Emerging Critics Fellowships

• Taylor Brorby
• Paul W. Gleason
• Zachary Graham
• Yalie Saweeda Kamara
• Summer McDonald
• Ismail Muhamad
• Heather Scott Partington

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Fiction Winner

• Joan Silber, Improvement (Counterpoint)

Fiction Finalists

• Mohsin Hamid, Exit West (Riverhead)
• Alice McDermott, The Ninth Hour (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)
• Arundhati Roy, The Ministry of Utomst Happiness (Knopf)
• Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing (Scribner)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Frances FitzGerald, The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America (Simon & Schuster)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• Jack E. Davis, The Gulf: The Making of An American Sea (Liveright)
• Masha Gessen, The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia (Riverhead)
• Kapka Kassabova, Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe (Graywolf)
• Adam Rutherford, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes (The Experiment)

Biography Winner

• Caroline Fraser, Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder (Metropolitan Books)

Biography Finalists

• Edmund Gordon, The Invention of Angela Carter: A Biography (Oxford University Press)
• Howard Markel, The Kelloggs: The Battling Brothers of Battle Creek (Pantheon)
• William Taubman, Gorbachev: His Life and Times(W. W. Norton)
• Kenneth Whyte, Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times (Knopf)

Autobiography

• Xiaolu Guo, Nine Continents: A Memoir In and Out of China (Grove)

Autobiography/Memoir Finalists

• Thi Bui, The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir (Abrams)
• Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (Harper)
• Henry Marsh, Admissions: Life As a Brain Surgeon (Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martins)
• Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, The Girl From the Metropol Hotel: Growing Up in Communist Russia, translated by Anna Summers (Penguin)

Poetry Winner

• Layli Long Soldier, Whereas (Graywolf)

Poetry Finalists

• Nuar Alsadir, Fourth Person Singular (Oxford University Press)
• James Longenback, Earthling (W. W. Norton)
• Frank Ormsby, The Darkness of Snow (Wake Forest University Press)
• Ana Ristovic, Directions for Use, translated by Steven Teref and Maja Teref (Zephyr Press)

Criticism Winner

• Carina Chocano, You Play the Girl: On Playboy Bunnies, Stepford Wives, Trainwrecks, & Other Mixed Messages (HMH/Mariner)

Criticism Finalists

• Edwidge Danticat, The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story (Graywolf)
• Camille T. Dungy, Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood and History (W.W. Norton)
• Valeria Luiselli, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions (Coffee House)
• Kevin Young, The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts and Fake News (Graywolf)

John Leonard Prize

• Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties (Graywolf)

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Winner

• Charles Finch

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Finalists

• David Biespiel
• Maureen Corrigan
• Ruth Franklin
• James Marcus

Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award Winner

• John McPhee

The NBCC Emerging Critics Fellowships

• Taylor Brorby
• Paul W. Gleason
• Zachary Graham
• Yalie Saweeda Kamara
• Summer McDonald
• Ismail Muhamad
• Heather Scott Partington

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Fiction Winner

• Anna Burns, Milkman (Graywolf)

Fiction Finalists

• Patrick Chamoiseau, Slave Old Man, translated by Linda Coverdale (The New Press)
• Denis Johnson, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden (Random House)
• Rachel Kushner, The Mars Room (Scribner)
• Luis Alberto Urrea, The House of Broken Angels (Little, Brown)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Steve Coll, Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America’s Secret Wars in Afganistan (Penguin Press)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• Francisco Cantu, The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border (Riverhead Books)
• Greg Lukianoff and Janathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure (Penguin Press)
• Adam Winkler, We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights (Liveright)
• Lawrence Wright, God Save Texas: A Journey into the Soul of the Lone Star State (Knopf)

Biography Winner

• Christopher Bonanos, Flash: The Making of Weegee the Famous (Henry Holt & Company)

Biography Finalists

• Craig Brown, Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Yunte Huang, Inseperable: The Original Siamese Twins and Their Rendezvous with American History (Liveright)
• Mark Lamster, The Man in the Glass House: Philip Johnson, Architect of the Modern Century (Little, Brown)
• Jane Leavy, The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World he Created (Harper/Harper Collins)

Autobiography

• Nora Krug, Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home (Scribner)

Autobiography/Memoir Finalists

• Ricard Beard, The Day That Went Missing: A Family’s Story (Little, Brown)
• Nicole Chung, All You Can Ever Know: A Memoir (Catapult)
• Rigoberto Gonzalez, What Drowns the Flowers in Your Mouth (University of Wisconsin Press)
• Nell Painter, Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over (Counterpoint)
• Tara Westover, Educated: A Memoir (Random House)

Poetry Winner

• Ada Limón, The Carrying (Milweed)

Poetry Finalists

• Terrance Hayes, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (Penguin Books)
• Erika Meitner, Holy Moly Carry Me (Boa)
• Diane Seuss, Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl (Graywold Press)
• Adam Zagajewski, Asymmetry, translated by Clare Cavanagh (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Criticism Winner

• Zadie Smith, Feel Free: Essays (Penguin Press)

Criticism Finalists

• Robert Christgau, Is It Still Good to Ya? Fifty Years of Rock Criticism, 1967-2017 (Duke University Press)
• Stephen Greenblatt, Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics (W.W. Norton)
• Terrance Hayes, To Float in the Space Between: A Life and Work in Conversation with the Life and Work of Etheridge Knight (Wave)
• Lacy M. Johnson, The Reckonings: Essays (Scribner)

John Leonard Prize

• Tommy Orange, There There (Knopf)

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Winner

• Maureen Corrigan

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Finalists

• David Biespiel
• Julia Klein
• Becca Rothfield
• Wendy Smith

Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award Winner

• Arte Público Press

The NBCC Emerging Critics Fellowships

• Jennie Hann
• Natalia Holtzman
• Tanner Howard
• Noah Kulwin
• Jonathan Leal
• Chelsea Leu
• Leena Soman Navani
• Letitia Montgomery-Rodgers
• Justin Howard Rosier
• Hope Wabuke

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