The National Book Critics Circle Award

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