National Book Critics Circle Award Winner


Key:OwnedReadAvailable
YearFictionBiographyPoetryCriticismGeneral Non-FictionMemoirTranslation
1975
Ragtime
E.L. Doctorow
Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
John Ashbery
Viking
The Great War and Modern Memory
Paul Fussell
Oxford University Press
Edith Wharton: A Biography
R.W.B. Lewis
Harper & Row
Edith Wharton: A Biography
R. W. B. Lewis
Harper & Row
1976
October Light
John Gardner
Knopf
Geography III
Elizabeth Bishop
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales
Bruno Bettelheim
Knopf
The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts
Maxine Hong Kingston
Knopf
1977
Song of Solomon
Toni Morrison
Knopf
Day By Day
Robert Lowell
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
On Photography
Susan Sontag
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Samuel Johnson
W. Jackson Bate
Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich
1978
The Stories of John Cheever
John Cheever
Knopf
Hello, Darkness: The Collected Poems of L.E. Sissman
Peter Davison, ed.
Atlantic-Little, Brown
Modern Art: 19th & 20th Centuries, Selected Papers
Meyer Schapior
Braziller
Facts of Life
Maureen Howard
Little, Brown
Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence
Garry Willis
Doubleday
1979
The Year of the French
Thomas Flanagan
Holt, Rinehart & Winston
Ashes
Philip Levine
Atheneum
The Gnostic Gospels
Elaine Pagels
Random
Munich: The Price of Peace
Telford Taylor
Doubleday
YearFictionBiographyPoetryCriticismGeneral Non-FictionMemoirTranslation
1980
The Transit of Venus
Shirley Hazzard
Viking
Sunrise
Frederick Seidel
Viking/Penguin
Part of Nature: Modern American Poets
Helen Vendler
Harvard University Press
Walter Lippmann and the American Century
Ronald Steel
Atlantic-Little, Brown
1981
Rabbit Is Rich
John Updike
Knopf
A Coast of Trees
A.R. Ammons
Norton
A Virgil Thomson Reader
Virgil Thomson
Houghton Mifflin
The Mismeasure of Man
Stephen Jay Gould
Norton
1982
George Mills
Stanley Elkin
E.P. Dutton
Antarctic Traveler
Katha Pollitt
Knopf
The Second American Revolution and Other Essays
Gore Vidal
Random House
The Path of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson
Robert A. Caro
Knopf
1983
Ironweed
William Kennedy
Viking
Minor Characters
Joyce Johnson
Houghton Mifflin
The Changing Light at Sandover
James Merrill
Antheneum
Hugging the Shore: Essays and Criticism
John Updike
Knopf
The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House
Seymour M. Hersch
Summit Books
1984
Love Medicine
Louise Erdrich
Holt, Reinhart & Winston
Dostoevsky: The Years of Ordeal, 1850-1859
Joseph Frank
Princeton University Press
The Dead and the Living
Sharon Olds
Knopf
Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry
Robert Hass
Ecco Press
Weapons and Hope
Freeman Dyson
Harper & Row
1985
The Accidental Tourist
Anne Tyler
Alfred A. Knopf
Henry James: A Life
Leon Edel
Harper & Row
The Triumph of Achilles
Louise Gluck
Ecco Press
Habitations of the Word: Essays
William H. Gass
Simon & Schuster
Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families
J. Anthony Lukas
Alfred A. Knopf
1986
A Summons to Memphis
Peter Taylor
Alfred A. Knopf
The Life of Langston Hughes, Vol. I: 1902-1941
Arnold Rampersad
Oxford
Wild Gratitude
Edward Hirsch
Knopf
Less Than One: Selected Essays
Joseph Brodsky
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Arctic Dreams
Barry Lopez
Scribner's
1987
The Counterlife
Philip Roth
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Chaucer: His Life, His Works, His World
Donald R. Howard
Abrahams/Dutton
Flesh and Blood
C.K. Williams
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Dance Writings
Edwin, edited by Robert Cornfield and William MacKay Denby
Knopf
The Making of the Atomic Bomb
Richard Rhodes
Simon and Schuster
1988
The Middleman and Other Stories
Bharati Mukherjee
Crest Press
Oscar Wilde
Richard Ellmann
Alfred A. Knopf
That One Day
Donald Hall
Ticknor & Fields/Houghton Mifflin
Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author
Clifford Geertz
Stanford University Press
Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-1963
Taylor Branch
Simon and Schuster
1989
Billy Bathgate
E.L. Doctorow
Random House
A First-Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt
Geoffrey C. Ward
Harper & Row
Transparent Gestures
Rodney Jones
Houghton Mifflin
Not by Fact Alone: Essays on the Writing and Reading of History
John Clive
Knopf
The Broken Cord
Michael Dorris
Harper & Row
YearFictionBiographyPoetryCriticismGeneral Non-FictionMemoirTranslation
1990
Rabbit At Rest
John Updike
Alfred A. Knopf
Means of Ascent: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Vol. II
Robert A. Caro
Knopf
Bitter Angel
Amy Gerstler
North Point Press
Encounters and Reflections: Art in the Historical Present
Arthur C. Danto
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America
Shelby Steele
HarperCollins
1991
A Thousand Acres
Jane Smiley
Alfred A. Knopf
Patrimony: A True Story
Philip Roth
Simon & Schuster
Heaven and Earth: A Cosmology
Albert Goldbarth
University of Georgia Press
Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory
Lawrence L. Langer
Yale University Press
Backlash: The Undeclared War Against America Women
Susan Faludi
Crown
1992
All the Pretty Horses
Cormac McCarthy
Alfred A. Knopf
Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy and Her World
Carol Brightman
Clarkson N. Potter
Collected Shorter Poems, 1946-1991
Hayden Carruth
Copper Canyon Press
Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America
Garry Wills
Simon & Schuster
Young Men and Fire
Norman Maclean
University of Chicago Press
1993
A Lesson Before Dying
Ernest J. Gaines
Knopf
Genet: A Biography
Edmund White
Alfred A. Knopf
My Alexandria
Mark Doty
University of Illinois
Opera in America: A Cultural History
John Dizikes
Yale University
The Land Where the Blues Began
Alan Lomax
Pantheon
1994
The Stone Diaries
Carol Shields
Viking
Shot in the Heart
Mikal Gilmore
Doubleday
Rider
Mark Rudman
Wesleyan University Press
The Culture of Bruising: Essays on Prizefighting, Literature and Modern American Culture
Gerald Early
Ecco Press
The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe's Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War
Lynn H. Nicholas
Knopf
1995
Mrs. Ted Bliss
Stanley Elkin
Hyperion
Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson
Robert Polito
Knopf
Time and Money
William Matthews
Houghton Mifflin
The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France
Robert Darnton
W.W. Norton
A Civil Action
Jonathan Harr
Random House
1996
Women in Their Beds
Gina Berriault
Counterpoint
Angela's Ashes: A Memoir
Frank McCourt
Scribner
Sun Under Wood
Robert Hass
Ecco Press
Finding a Form
William Gass
Knopf
Bad Land
Jonathan Raban
Pantheon
1997
The Blue Flower
Penelope Fitzgerald
Mariner/Houghton
Ernie Pyle's War: America's Eyewitness to World War II
James Tobin
Free Press
Black Zodiac
Charles Wright
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Making Waves
Mario Vargas Llosa
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down
Anne Fadiman
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
1998
The Love of a Good Woman
Alice Munro
Knopf
A Beautiful Mind
Sylvia Nasar
Simon & Schuster
The Bird Catcher
Marie Ponsot
Knopf
Visions of Jazz
Gary Giddins
Oxford
We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families
Philip Gourevitch
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
1999
Motherless Brooklyn
Jonathan Lethem
Doubleday
The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White
Henry Wiencek
St. Martin's
Ordinary Words
Ruth Stone
Paris Press
Selected Non-Fictions
Jorge Luis Borges
Viking
Time, Love, Memory: A Great Biologist and His Quest for the Origins of Behavior
Jonathan Weiner
Knopf
YearFictionBiographyPoetryCriticismGeneral Non-FictionMemoirTranslation
2000
Being Dead
Jim Crace
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan
Herbert P. Bix
HarperCollins
Carolina Ghost Woods
Judy Jordan
LSU
Quarrel & Quandary
Cynthia Ozick
Knopf
Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing
Ted Conover
Random House
2001
Austerlitz
W. G. Sebald
Random House
Boswell’s Presumptuous Task: The Making of the Life of Dr.Johnson
Adam Sisman
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Saving Lives
Albert Goldbarth
Ohio Statue University
The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews, 1971-2000
Martin Amis
Talk Miramax
Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper
Nicholson Baker
Random House
2002
Atonement
Ian McEwan
Doubleday/Nan A. Talese (US)/Jonathan Cape (UK)
Charles Darwin: The Power of Place, Vol. II
Janet Browne
Knopf
Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest
B.H. Fairchild
W.W. Norton
Tests of Time
William H. Gass
Knopf
A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide
Samantha Power
Basic Books
2003
The Known World
Edward P. Jones
Amistad/HarperCollins
Khrushchev: The Man and His Era
William Taubman
W.W. Norton
Columbarium
Susan Stewart
University of Chicago Press
River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West
Rebecca Solnit
Viking
Sons of Mississippi
Paul Hendrickson
Knopf
2004
Gilead
Marilynne Robinson
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
De Kooning: An American Master
Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan
Alfred A. Knopf
The School Among the Ruins
Adrienne Rich
Norton
Where You’re At: Notes From the Frontline of a Hip-Hop Planet
Patrick Neate
Riverhead
The Reformation: A History
Diarmaid MacCulloch
Viking
2005
The March
E.L. Doctorow
Random House
American Prometheus
Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin
Alfred A. Knopf
Refusing Heaven
Jack Gilbert
Alfred A. Knopf
The Undiscovered Country: Poetry in the Age of Tin
William Logan
Columbia University Press
Voices From Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
Svetlana Alexievich
Dalkey Archive Press
Them (2005)
Francine du Plessix Gray
Penguin Press
2006
The Inheritance of Loss
Kiran Desai
Hamish Hamilton
James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon
Julie Phillips
St. Martin's Press
Tom Thomson in Purgatory
Troy Jollimore
Margie/Intuit House
Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences
Lawrence Wechsler
McSweeney's
Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution
Simon Schama
Ecco
The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million
Daniel Mendelsohn
HarperCollins
2007
The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao
Junot Diaz
Riverhead
Stanley: The Impossible Life Of Africa’s Greatest Explorer
Tim Jeal
Yale University Press
Elegy
Mary Jo Bang
Graywolf
The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
Alex Ross
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present
Harriet Washington
Doubleday
Brother, I'm Dying
Edwidge Danticat
Alfred A. Knopf
2008
2666
Roberto Bolaño
Farrar, Straus
The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul
Patrick. French
Knopf
Sleeping It Off in Rapid City
August Kleinzahler
Farrar, Strauss
Half the World in Light
Juan Felipe Herrera
University of Arizona Press
Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History: Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter
Seth Lerer
University of Chicago Press
The Forever War
Dexter Filkins
Knopf
My Father’s Paradise: A Son’s Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq
Ariel Sabar
Algonquin
2009
Wolf Hall
Hilary Mantel
Fourth Estate
Cheever: A Life
Blake Bailey
Knopf
Versed
Rae Armantrout
Wesleyan University Press
Notes From No Man's Land: American Essays
Eula Biss
Graywolf Press
The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science
Richard Holmes
Pantheon
Somewhere Towards the End
Diana Athill
Norton
YearFictionBiographyPoetryCriticismGeneral Non-FictionMemoirTranslation
2010
A Visit From The Goon Squad
Jennifer Egan
Knopf
How To Live, Or A Life Of Montaigne
Sarah Bakewell
Other Press
One with Others
C.D. Wright
Copper Canyon Press
Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics: Russia, Poland, and the West
Clare Cavanagh
Yale University Press
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration
Isabel Wilkerson
Random
Half a Life
Darin Strauss
McSweeney’s
2011
Binocular Vision
Edith Pearlman
Lookout Books
George F. Kennan: An American Life
John Lewis Gaddis
Penguin Press
Space, in Chains
Laura Kasischke
Copper Canyon Press
Otherwise Known as the Human Condition: Selected Essays and Reviews
Geoff Dyer
Graywolf
Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary War
Maya Jasanoff
Knopf
The Memory Palace
Mira Bartók
Free Press
2012
Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
Ben Fountain
Ecco
The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume 4
Robert A. Caro
Knopf
Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys
D. A. Powell
Graywolf Press
Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights
Marina Warner
Belknap Press: Harvard University Press
Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity
Andrew Solomon
Scribner
Swimming Studies
Leanne Shapton
Blue Rider Press
2013
Americanah
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Knopf
Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World
Leo Damrosch
Yale University Press
Metaphysical Dog
Frank Bidart
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Distant Reading
Franco Moretti
Verso
Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital
Sherri Fink
Crown
Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter from Haiti
Amy Wilentz
Simon & Schuster
2014
Lila
Marilynne Robinson
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh
John Lahr
W.W. Norton & Company
Citizen: An American Lyric
Claudia Rankine
Graywolf Press
The Essential Ellen Willis
Ellen Willis, edited by Nona Willis Aronowitz
University of Minnesota Press
The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation
David Brion Davis
Alfred A. Knopf
Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?
Roz Chast
Bloomsbury
2015
The Sellout
Paul Beatty
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley
Charlotte Gordon
Random House
Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude
Ross Gay
University of Pittsburgh Press
The Argonauts
Maggie Nelson
Graywolf
Dreamland: The True Story of America’s Opiate Epidemic
Sam Quinones
Bloomsbury
Negroland
Margo Jefferson
Pantheon
2016
LaRose
Louise Erdrich
Harper
House of Lords and Commons
Ishion Hutchinson
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux
White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide
Carol Anderson
Bloomsbury
Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
Matthew Desmond
Crown
Lab Girl
Hope Jahren
Alfred A. Knopf
2017
Improvement
Joan Silber
Counterpoint
Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder
Caroline Fraser
Metropolitan Books
Whereas
Layli Long Soldier
Graywolf Press
You Play the Girl: On Playboy Bunnies, Stepford Wives, Train Wrecks, & Other Mixed Messages
Carina Chocano
Mariner
The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America
Frances FitzGerald
Simon & Schuster
Nine Continents: A Memoir In and Out of China
Xiaolu Guo
Grove
2019
Everything Inside
Edwidge Danticat
Knopf
The Queen: The Forgotten Life Behind an American Myth
Josh Levin
Little, Brown
Magical Negro
Morgan Parker
Tin House
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval
Saidiya Hartman
W.W. Norton
Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland
Patrick Radden Keefe
Doubleday / Penguin Random House
Know My Name: A Memoir
Chanel Miller
Viking
YearFictionBiographyPoetryCriticismGeneral Non-FictionMemoirTranslation
2020
Hamnet
Maggie O’Farrell
Knopf
Stranger in the Shogun’s City: A Japanese Woman and Her World
Amy Stanley
Scribner
Here Is The Sweet Hand
francine j. harris
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration
Nicole R. Fleetwood
Harvard Univ. Press
Island on Fire: The Revolt That Ended Slavery in the British Empire
Tom Zoellner
Harvard Univ. Press
Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning
Cathy Park Hong
One World
2021
The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
Harper / HarperCollins Publishers
All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler
Rebecca Donner
Little, Brown
frank: sonnets
Diane Seuss
Graywolf
Girlhood
Melissa Febos
Bloomsbury
How the Word Is Passed
Clint Smith
Little, Brown
Gay Bar: Why We Went Out
Jeremy Atherton Lin
Little, Brown
2022
Bliss Montage: Stories
Ling Ma
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century
Beverly Gage
Viking
Hotel Oblivion
Cynthia Cruz
Four Way
Free Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age
Timothy Bewes
Columbia
The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act
Isaac Butler
Bloomsbury
Stay True: A Memoir
Hua Hsu
Doubleday
Grey Bees
Andrey Kurkov trans. by Boris Dralyuk
Deep Vellum
2023
I Am Homeless if This Is Not My Home
Lorrie Moore
Knopf
Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage
Jonny Steinberg
Knopf
Phantom Pain Wings
Kim Hyesoon, translation by Don Mee Choi
New Directions
Deadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpression
Tina Post
NYU Press
We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America
Roxanna Asgarian
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
How to Say Babylon: A Memoir
Safiya Sinclair
Simon & Schuster
Cold Nights of Childhood
Tezer Özlü and translated by Maureen Freely
Transit Books