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
1991 Winners & Finalists
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