The National Book Critics Circle Award

Fiction Winner

• Roberto Bolaño, 2666 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Fiction Finalists

• Marilynne Robinson, Home (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project (Riverhead)
• M. Glenn Taylor, The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart (West Virginia University Press)
• Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kittredge (Random House)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Dexter Filkins, The Forever War (Knopf)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the Civil War (Knopf)
• Jane Mayer, The Dark Side (Doubleday)
• Allan Lichtman, White Protestant Nation (Atlantic)
• George C. Herring, From Colony to Superpower: US Foreign Relations Since 1776 (Oxford University Press)

Biography Winner

• Patrick French, The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul (Knopf)

Biography Finalists

• Paula J. Giddings, Ida, A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching (Amistad/Knopf)
• Steve Coll, The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in an American Century (Penguin Press)
• Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (Norton)
• Brenda Wineapple, White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson & Thomas Wentworth Higginson (Knopf)

Autobiography

• Ariel Sabar, My Father’s Paradise: A Son’s Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq (Algonquin)

Autobiography/Memoir Finalists

• Rick Bass, Why I Came West (Houghton Mifflin)
• Helene Cooper, The House on Sugar Beach (Simon and Schuster)
• Honor Moore, The Bishop’s Daughter (W.W. Norton)
• Andrew X. Pham, The Eaves of Heaven (Harmony Books)

Poetry Winners

• Juan Felipe Herrera, Half the World in Light (University of Arizona Press)
• August Kleinzahler, Sleeping It Off in Rapid City (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Poetry Finalists

• Devin Johnston, Sources (Turtle Point Press)
• Pierre Martory (trans. John Ashbery), The Landscapist (Sheep Meadow Press)
• Brenda Shaughnessy, Human Dark With Sugar (Copper Canyon Press)

Criticism Winner

• Seth Lerer, Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History: Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter (University of Chicago Press)

Criticism Finalists

• Richard Brody, Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life Of Jean-Luc Godard (Metropolitan Books)
• Vivian Gornick, The Men in My Life (Boston Review/MIT)
• Joel L. Kraemer, Maimonides: The Life and World of One of Civilization’s Greatest Minds (Doubleday)
• Reginald Shepherd, Orpheus in the Bronx: Essays on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry (University of Michigan Press)

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Winner

• Ron Charles

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Finalists

• Michael Antman
• Kathryn Harrison
• Laila Lalami
• Todd Shy

Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award Winner

• PEN American Center