The National Book Critics Circle Award

Fiction Winner

• Edward P. Jones, The Known World (Amistad)

Fiction Finalists

• Monica Ali, Brick Lane (Scribner)
• Richard Powers, The Time of Our Singing (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Tobias Wolff, Old School (Knopf)
• Caryl Phillips, A Distant Shore (Knopf)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Paul Hendrickson, Sons of Mississippi: A Story of Race and Its Legacy (Knopf)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• Caroline Alexander, The Bounty: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty (Viking Press)
• Anne Applebaum, Gulag (Doubleday)
• Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx (Scribner)
• William T. Vollmann, Rising Up and Rising Down (McSweeneys)

Biography Winner

• William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (Norton)

Biography Finalists

• Paul Elie, The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Blake Bailey, A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates (Picador)
• George Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (Yale University Press)
• Carol Loeb Shloss, Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Poetry Winner

• Susan Stewart, Columbarium (University of Chicago Press)

Poetry Finalists

• Carolyn Forche, Blue Hour (HarperCollins)
• Tony Hoagland, What Narcissism Means to Me (Graywolf)
• Venus Khoury-Ghata, translated by Marilyn Hacker, She Says (Graywolf)
• Mary Szybist, Granted (Alice James Books)

Criticism Winner

• Rebecca Solnit, River of Shadows (Viking Press)

Criticism Finalists

• Dagoberto Gilb, Gritos (Grove)
• Nick Hornby, Songbook (McSweeneys)
• Ross King, Michelangelo & the Popes Ceiling (Walker)
• Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Award Winner

• Scott McLemee

Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award Winner

• Studs Terkel