The National Book Critics Circle Award

Fiction Winner

• Jane Smiley, A Thousand Acres (Knopf)

Fiction Finalists

• Louis Begley, Wartime Lies (Knopf)
• Gish Jen, Typical American (Houghton Mifflin)
• Richard Powers, The Gold Bug Variations (Morrow)
• Norman Rush, Mating (Knopf)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (Crown)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• Thomas Geoghegan, Which Side Are You on? Trying to Be for Labor When It’s Flat on Its Back (FSG)
• Melissa Fay Greene, Praying for Sheetrock (Addison-Wesley)
• Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools (Crown)
• Dennis Overbye, Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos: The Scientific Quest for the Secret of the Universe (HarperCollins)

Biography/Autobiography Winner

• Philip Roth, Patrimony: A True Story (Simon & Schuster)

Biography/Autobiography Finalists

• John Cheever, The Journals of John Cheever (Knopf)
• Robert Kanigel, The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan (Scribner)
• Diane Middlebrook, Anne Sexton: A Biography (Houghton Mifflin)
• Art Spiegelman, Maus II (Pantheon)

Poetry Winner

• Albert Goldbarth, Heaven and Earth: A Cosmology (Georgia)

Poetry Finalists

• Diane Ackerman, Jaguar of Sweet Laughter: New & Selected Poems (Random House)
• Allen Grossman, The Ether Dome and Other Poems: New & Selected (1979-1991) (New Directions)
• Philip Levine, What Work Is (Knopf)
• Adrienne Rich, An Atlas of the Difficult World (Norton)

Criticism Winner

• Lawrence L. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (Yale)

Criticism Finalists

• Norman F. Cantor, Inventing the Middle Ages: The Lives, Works & Ideas of the Great Medievalists of the Twentieth Century (Morrow)
• J. Hoberman, Vulgar Modernism: Writing on Movies and Other Media (Temple Univ. Press)
• Louise J. Kaplan, Female Perversions: The Temptations of Emma Bovary (Talese/Doubleday)
• John Updike, Odd Jobs (Knopf)

Reviewer’s Citation Winner

• George Scialabba