The National Book Critics Circle Award

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)