The National Book Critics Circle Award

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