The National Book Critics Circle Award

Fiction Winner

• Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Fiction Finalists

• Edwidge Danticat, The Dew Breaker (Knopf)
• Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty (Bloomsbury)
• David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas (Random House)
• Philip Roth, The Plot Against America (Houghton Mifflin)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation: A History (Viking)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• Kevin Boyle, Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights and Murder in the Jazz Age (Henry Holt)
• Edward Conlon, Blue Blood (Riverhead Books)
• David Shipler, The Working Poor: Invisible in America (Knopf)
• Timothy Tyson, Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story (Crown)

Biography Winner

• Mark Stevens & Annalyn Swan, De Kooning: An American Master (Knopf)

Biography Finalists

• Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton (Penguin Press)
• Bob Dylan, Chronicles: Vol. 1 (Simon & Schuster)
• Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (W.W. Norton)
• John Guy, Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart (Houghton Mifflin)

Poetry Winner

• Adrienne Rich, The School Among the Ruins: Poems 2000-2004 (W.W. Norton)

Poetry Finalists

• Brigit Pegeen Kelly, The Orchard (BOA Editions)
• D.A. Powell, Cocktails (Graywolf)
• James Richardson, Interglacial (Ausable Press)
• Gary Snyder, Danger on Peaks (Shoemaker & Hoard)

Criticism Winner

• Patrick Neate, Where You’re At: Notes From the Frontline of a Hip-Hop Planet (Riverhead Books)

Criticism Finalists

• Richard Howard, Paper Trail: Selected Prose, 1965-2003 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Graham Robb, Strangers: Homosexual Love in the 19th Century (W.W. Norton)
• Craig Seligman, Sontag & Kael: Opposites Attract Me (Counterpoint)
• James Wood, The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Winner

• David Orr

Ivan R. Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award Winner

• Louis Rubin Jr.