The National Book Critics Circle Award

Fiction Winner

• Ben Fountain, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (Ecco)

Fiction Finalists

• Laurent Binet, HHhH. tr. by Sam Taylor (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Adam Johnson, The Orphan Master’s Son (Random House)
• Lydia Millet, Magnificence (W. W. Norton)
• Zadie Smith, NW (The Penguin Press)

General Nonfiction Winner

• Andrew Solomon, Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity (Scribner)

General Nonfiction Finalists

• Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity (Random House)
• Steve Coll, Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power (The Penguin Press)
• Jim Holt, Why Does the World Exist? An Existential Detective Story (A Liveright Book: W. W. Norton)
• David Quammen, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic (W.W. Norton)

Biography Winner

• Robert A. Caro, The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (Alfred A. Knopf)

Biography Finalists

• Lisa Cohen, All We Know: Three Lives (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Michael Gorra, Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece (A Liveright Book: W. W. Norton)
• Lisa Jarnot, Robert Duncan, The Ambassador from Venus: A Biography (University of California Press)
• Tom Reiss, The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo (Crown Publishers)

Autobiography

• Leanne Shapton, Swimming Studies (Blue Rider Press)

Autobiography/Memoir Finalists

• Reyna Grande, The Distance Between Us (Atria Books)
• Maureen N. McLane, My Poets (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Anthony Shadid, House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
• Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, In the House of the Interpreter (Pantheon)

Poetry Winner

• D. A. Powell, Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys (Graywolf Press)

Poetry Finalists

• David Ferry, Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations (University of Chicago Press)
• Lucia Perillo, On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths (Copper Canyon Press)
• Allan Peterson, Fragile Acts (McSweeney’s Books)
• A. E. Stallings, Olives (Triquarterly: Northwestern University Press)

Criticism Winner

• Marina Warner, Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights (Belknap Press: Harvard University Press)

Criticism Finalists

• Paul Elie, Reinventing Bach (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Daniel Mendelsohn, Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture (New York Review Books)
• Mary Ruefle Madness, Rack, and Honey (Wave Books)
• Kevin Young, The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness (Graywolf Press)

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Winner

• William Deresiewicz

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Finalists

• Abigail Deutsch
• Lev Grossman
• Garth Risk Hallberg
• Kathryn Harrison

Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award Winner

• Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar