The National Book Critics Circle Award

Fiction Winner

• Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverhead)

Fiction Finalists

• Vikram Chandra, Sacred Games (HarperCollins)
• Hisham Matar, In The Country of Men (Dial Press)
• Joyce Carol Oates, The Gravedigger’s Daughter (Ecco)
• Marianne Wiggins, The Shadow Catcher (Simon & Schuster)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Harriet Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present (Doubleday)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• Philip Gura, American Transcendentalism (Hill & Wang)
• Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America 1815-1848 (Oxford University Press)
• Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA (Doubleday)
• Alan Weisman, The World Without Us, Thomas Dunne (BKs/St. Martin’s)

Biography Winner

• Tim Jeal, Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer (Yale University Press)

Biography Finalists

• Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton (Knopf)
• Arnold Rampersad, Ralph Ellison (Knopf)
• John Richardson, The Life Of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932 (Knopf)
• Claire Tomalin, Thomas Hardy (Penguin Press)

Autobiography

• Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I’m Dying (Knopf)

Autobiography/Memoir Finalists

• Joshua Clark, Heart Like Water: Surviving Katrina and Life in Its Disaster Zone (Free Press)
• Joyce Carol Oates, The Journals of Joyce Carol Oates, 1973–1982 (Ecco)
• Sara Paretsky, Writing in an Age of Silence (Verso)
• Anna Politkovskaya, Russian Diary: A Journalist’s Final Account of Life, Corruption and Death in Putin’s Russia (Random House)

Poetry Winner

• Mary Jo Bang, Elegy (Graywolf)

Poetry Finalists

• Matthea Harvey, Modern Life (Graywolf)
• Michael O’Brien, Sleeping and Waking (Flood)
• Tom Pickard, The Ballad of Jamie Allan (Flood)
• Tadeusz Rozewicz, New Poems (Archipelago)

Criticism Winner

• Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)

Criticism Finalists

• Joan Acocella, Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints (Pantheon)
• Julia Alvarez, Once Upon a Quniceanera (Viking)
• Susan Faludi, The Terror Dream (Metropolitan/Holt)
• Ben Ratliff, Coltrane: The Story of a Sound (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Winner

• Sam Anderson

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Finalists

• Brooke Allen
• Ron Charles
• Walter Kirn
• Adam Kirsch

Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award Winner

• Emilie Buchwald