The National Book Critics Circle Award

Fiction Winner

• Penelope Fitzgerald, The Blue Flower (Mariner/Houghton)

Fiction Finalists

• Don DeLillo, Underworld (Scribner)
• Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain (Grove)
• Andrei Makine, Dreams of My Russian Summers (Arcade)
• Philip Roth, American Pastoral (Houghton Mifflin)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Anne Fadiman, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• Jon Krakauer, Into Thin Air (Villard)
• James Kugel, The Bible as It Was (Belknap Press)
• Pauline Maier, American Scripture (Knopf)
• Stephen Pinker, How the Mind Works (Norton)

Biography/Autobiography Winner

• James Tobin, Ernie Pyle’s War (Free Press)

Biography/Autobiography Finalists

• Joseph Ellis, American Sphinx (Knopf)
• Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (Knopf)
• Doris Lessing, Walking in the Shade (HarperCollins)

Poetry Winner

• Charles Wright, Black Zodiac (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Poetry Finalists

• Frank Bidart, Desire (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Brenda Hillman, Loose Sugar (Wesleyan)
• Mark Jarman, Questions for Ecclesiastes (Story Line)
• Sonya Sanchez, Does Your House Have Lions? (Beacon)

Criticism Winner

• Mario Vargas Llosa, Making Waves (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Criticism Finalists

• John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Vivian Gornick, The End of the Novel of Love (Beacon)
• Alfred Kazin, God and the American Writer (Knopf)
• Helen Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Harvard)

Nona Balakian Excellence in Reviewing Award Winner

• Thomas Mallon

Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award Winner

• Leslie Fiedler