Each year, the National Book Critics Circle presents awards for the finest books published in English in six categories: Fiction, Nonfiction, Biography, Autobiography, Poetry, and Criticism.
The National Book Critics Circle Award
1988 Winners & Finalists
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