The National Book Critics Circle Award

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