The National Book Critics Circle Award

Fiction Winner

• Ernest J. Gaines, A Lesson Before Dying  (Knopf)

Fiction Finalists

• E. Annie Proulx, The Shipping News (Scribners)
• Bobbie Ann Mason, Feather Crowns (Harper)
• Frances Sherwood, Vindication (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Rikki Ducornet, The Jade Cabinet (Dalkey Archive Press)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Alan Lomax, The Land Where the Blues Began (Pantheon)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• Rosemary Mahoney, Whoredom in Kimmage: Irish Women Coming of Age (Houghton Mifflin)
• George B. Schaller, The Last Panda (Chicago)
• Russ Rymer, Genie: An Abused Child’s Flight From Silence (Harper)
• David Remnick, Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire (Random House)

Biography/Autobiography Winner

• Edmund White, Genet (Knopf)

Biography/Autobiography Finalists

• James Merrill, A Different Person (Knopf)
• James Miller, The Passion of Michael Foucault (Simon & Schuster)
• Alice Kaplan, French Lessons (Chicago)
• David Levering Lewis, DuBois: Biography of a Race (Holt)

Poetry Winner

• Mark Doty, My Alexandria (University of Illinois Press)

Poetry Finalists

• Donald Hall, The Museum of Clear Ideas (Ticknor & Fields)
• Linda Hogan, The Book of Medicines (Coffee House Press)
• Audre Lorde, The Marvelous Arithmetic of Distance (W.W. Norton)
• Jack Marshall, Sesame (Coffee House Press)

Criticism Winner

• John Dizikes, Opera in America: A Cultural History (Yale)

Criticism Finalists

• Wayne Koestenbaum, The Queen’s Throat (Poseidon)
• Geoffrey O’Brien, The Phantom Empire (Norton)
• Mark Rose, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Harvard)
• Gore Vidal, United States: Essays 1952-1992 (Random House)

Nona Balakian Excellence in Reviewing Award Winner

• Brigitte Frase