Year | Biography | Poetry | Fiction | General Non-Fiction | Criticism | Memoir | Translation |
1976 |
| Searching for the Ox
Louis Simpson
Morrow | The Gates
Muriel Rukeyser
McGraw-Hill | The Names of the Lost
Philip Levine
Atheneum | The Mind-Reader
Richard Wilbur
Harcourt |
|
Bloodshed and Three Novellas
Cynthia Ozick
Knopf | Speedboat
Renata Adler
Random | The Easter Parade
Richard Yates
Delacorte | Details of a Sunset and Other Stories
Vladimir Nabokov
McGraw-Hill |
|
World of Our Fathers
Irving Howe
Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich | Roots
Alex Haley
Doubleday | The Damnable Question: A Study in Anglo-Irish Relations
George Dangerfield
Atlantic-Little, Brown | Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for Equality
Richard Kluger
Knopf |
|
Kicked a Building Lately?
Ada Louise Huxtable
Quadrangle | Arnold Shoenberg
Charles Rosen
Viking | Letters of E.B. White
E.B. White, ed. by Dorothy Lobrano Guth
Harper & Row | Representations: Essays on Literature and Society
Steven Marcus
Random |
|
| |
1977 |
| Lucky Life
Gerald Stern
Houghton | Houseboat Days
John Ashbery
Viking | Out-of-the-Body Travel
Stanley Plumly
Ecco/Viking | The Fuhrer Bunker: A Cycle of Poems in Progress
W.D. Snodgrass
Boa |
|
A Book of Common Prayer
Joan Didion
Simon & Schuster | Falconer
John Cheever
Knopf | Union Dues
John Sayles
Atlantic-Little, Brown | The Professor of Desire
Philip Roth
Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
|
The Dragons of Eden
Carl Sagan
Random House | The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal 1870-1914
David McCullough
Simon & Schuster | Coming into the Country
John McPhee
Farrar, Straus & Giroux | Dispatches
Michael Herr
Knopf |
|
Afterimages
Arlene Croce
Knopf | Matters of Fact and of Fiction: Essays, 1973-1976
Gore Vidal
Random | Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties
Morris Dickstein
Basic | Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing
Richard Poirier
Oxford University Press |
|
| |
1978 |
| The Dream of a Common Language: Poems, 1974-1977
Adrienne Rich
Norton | Spectral Emanations: New and Selected Poems
John Hollander
Atheneum | The Late Hour
Mark Strand
Atheneum | New & Selected Things Taking Place
May Swenson
Atlantic-Little, Brown |
|
The World According to Garp
John Irving
Robbins/Dutton | Wrinkles
Charles Simmons
Farrar, Straus & Giroux | The Coup
John Updike
Knopf | Final Payments
Mary Gordon
Random |
|
Max Perkins: Editor of Genius
A. Scott Berg
Congdon/Dutton | A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century
Barbara W. Tuchman
Knopf | The Snow Leopard
Peter Matthiessen
Viking | Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life
Sissela Bok
Pantheon | In Search of History: A Personal Adventure
Theodore H. White
Harper & Row | New York Jew
Alfred Kazin
Knopf | Seeing Through Clothes
Anne Hollander
Viking | Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt
Barrington Moore
Pantheon |
|
And I Worked at the Writer's Trade: Chapters of Literary History 1918-1978
Malcolm Cowley
Viking | Orientalism
Edward W. Said
Pantheon | The Eye of the Story: Selected Essays and Reviews
Eudora Welty
Random | The World Within the Word: Essays
William H. Gass
Knopf |
|
| |
1979 |
| The Venetian Vespers
Anthony Hecht
Atheneum | Goshawk, Antelope
David Smith
Illinois | Notes from the Castle
Howard Moss
Atheneum | Blue Wine and Other Poems
John Hollander
Johns Hopkins |
|
The Executioner's Song
Norman Mailer
Little, Brown | The Ghost Writer
Philip Roth
Farrar, Straus | Sophie's Choice
William Styron
Random | Sleepless Nights
Elizabeth Hardwick
Random | King of the Jews: A Novel of the Holocaust
Leslie Epstein
Coward, McCann & Geoghegan |
|
Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid
Douglas R. Hofstadter
Basic Books | The White Album
Joan Didion
Simon & Schuster | The Right Stuff
Tom Wolfe
Farrar, Straus and Giroux | African Calliope: A Journey to the Sudan
Edward Hoagland
Random |
|
America Revised
Frances FitzGerald
Atlantic-Little, Brown | The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar
Yale | Decadence: The Strange Life of an Epithet
Richard Gilman
Farrar, Straus and Giroux | A Lion for Love: A Critical Biography of Stendhal
Robert Alter with Carol Cosman
Basic |
|
| |
Year | Biography | Poetry | Fiction | General Non-Fiction | Criticism | Memoir | Translation |
1980 |
| The Morning of the Poem
James Schuyler
Farrar, Straus | Being Here: Poetry, 1977-1980
Robert Penn Warren
Random House | Scripts for the Pageant
James Merrill
Atheneum | A Part of Speech
Joseph Brodsky
Farrar, Straus & Grioux |
|
The Second Coming
Walker Percy
Farrar, Straus & Giroux | So Long, See You Tomorrow
William Maxwell
Knopf | Morgan's Passing
Anne Tyler
Knopf | Loon Lake
E.L. Doctorow
Random House |
|
Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality
John Boswell
University of Chicago Press | Walt Whitman: A Life
Justin Kaplan
Simon & Schuster | China Men
Maxine Hong Kingston
Knopf | Alice James: A Biography
Jean Strouse
Houghton Mifflin |
|
Nature and Culture: American Landscape Painting, 1825-1875
Barbara Novak
| Abroad: British Literary Traveling between the Wars
Paul Fussell
Oxford University Press | Henry Adams
R.P. Blackmur, ed. by Veronica A. Makowsky
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich | Lectures on Literature
Vladimir Nabokov, ed. by Fredson Bowers
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich |
|
| |
1981 |
| Brotherly Love
Daniel Hoffman
Random House/Vintage | What Manner of Beast
Donald Finkel
Atheneum | The Revisionist
Douglas Crase
Little, Brown | The Sleepwalkers
Edward Hirsch
Knopf |
|
A Flag for Sunrise
Robert Stone
Knopf | Sixty Stories
Donald Barthelme
Putnam | The Men's Club
Leonard Michaels
Farrar, Straus & Giroux | Riddley Walker
Russell Hoban
Summit |
|
National Defense
James Fallows
Random House | The Sage of Monticello: Jefferson and His Time, Volume Six
Dumas Malone
Little, Brown | Forms of Talk
Erving Goffman
University of Pennsylvania Press | No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920
T.J. Jackson Lears
Pantheon |
|
Early Auden
Edward Mendelson
Viking | The Geography of the Imagination: Forty Essays
Guy Davenport
North Point Press | Science: Good, Bad and Bogus
Martin Gardner
Prometheus Books | Boccaccio
Thomas G. Bergin
Viking |
|
| |
1982 |
| Monolithos, Poems, 1962 and 1982
Jack Gilbert
Knopf | Hundreds of Fireflies
Brad Leithauser
Knopf | Visiting Rites
Phyllis Janowitz
Princeton University Press | Finding the Islands
W.S. Merwin
North Point |
|
The Color Purple
Alice Walker
Harcourt Brace | Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
Anne Tyler
Knopf | Shiloh and Other Stories
Bobbie Ann Mason
Harper & Row | Levitation: Five Fictions
Cynthia Ozick
Knopf |
|
The Fate of the Earth
Jonathan Schell
Knopf | Stolen Lightning
Daniel Lawrence O'Keefe
| The Nuclear Delusion: Soviet-American Relations in the Atomic Age
George F. Keenan
Pantheon | Bronx Primitive: Portraits in a Childhood
Kate Simon
Viking |
|
Going to the Dance
Arlene Croce
Knopf | Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism
Harold Bloom
Oxford | All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity
Marshall Berman
S. & S. | Women and the Demon
|
|
| |
1983 |
Thomas Carlyle: A Biography
Fred Kaplan
Cornell University Press | Black Apollo of Science: the Life of Ernest Everett Just
Kenneth Manning
Oxford University Press | The Roots of Treason: Ezra Pound and the Secret of St. Elizabeth's
E. Fuller Torrey
McGraw-Hill | Eleni
Nicholas Gage
Random House |
|
The Kingfisher
Amy Clampitt
Knopf | Tar
C.K. Williams
Random House | Picture Bride
Cathy Song
Yale University Press | Erosion
Jorie Graham
Princeton University Press |
|
Cathedral
Raymond Carver
Knopf | During the Reign of the Queen
Joan Chase
Harper & Row | The Anatomy of a Lesson
Philip Roth
Farrar, Straus & Giroux | Magnetic Field(s)
Ron Loewinsohn
Knopf |
|
Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World
David S. Landes
Harvard University Press | The Price of Power
Roger Rosenblatt
Anchor/Doubleday | Present History: On Nuclear War, Détente and Other Controversies
Theodore Draper
Random House | Distant Water: The Fate of the North Atlantic Fisherman
William W. Warner
Atlantic-Little, Brown |
|
Art and Ardor: Essays
Cynthia Ozick
Knopf | The Odes of John Keats
Helen Vendler
Harvard University Press | All American Music
John Rockwell
Knopf | The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century
Svetlana Alpers
University of Chicago Press |
|
| |
1984 |
Josephine Herbst
Elinor Langer
Atlantic/Little, Brown | One Writer's Beginnings
Eudora Welty
Harvard University Press | Walt Whitman: The Making of a Poet
Paul Zweig
Basic Books | Home Before Dark
Susan Cheever
Princeton |
|
The Other Side of the River
Charles Wright
Random House | Overnight in the Guest House of the Mystic
Dick Allen
Louisiana State University Press | A Wave
John Ashbery
Viking | Ground Work: Before the War
Robert Duncan
New Directions |
|
Stones for Ibarra
Harriet Doerr
Viking | Foreign Affairs
Alison Lurie
Random House | Family Dancing
David Leavitt
Knopf | Machine Dreams
Jayne Anne Phillips
Dutton |
|
The Abandonment of the Jews
David Wyman
Pantheon | Son of the Morning Star
Evan Connell
North Point Press | Brothers and Keepers
John Edgar Wideman
Holt, Rinehart and Winston | The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History
Robert Darnton
Basic Books |
|
Dawn to the West
Donald Keene
Holt, Rinehart | Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic
David Bromwich
Oxford University Press | The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion
Leo Steinberg
Pantheon | The Innocent Eye
Roger Shattuck
Farrar, Straus & Giroux |
|
| |
1985 |
Louise Bogan: A Portrait
Elizabeth Frank
Alfred A. Knopf | Giacometti: A Biography
James Lord
Farrar, Straus & Giroux | Brigham Young: American Moses
Leonard Arrington
Knopf | Visible Light: Four Creative Biographies
Michael Lesy
Times Books |
|
What the Light was Like
Amy Clampitt
Knopf | The Past
Galway Kinnell
Houghton Mifflin | The Lamplit Answer
Gjertude Schnackenberg
Farrar, Straus & Giroux | Late Settings
James Merrill
Atheneum |
|
White Noise
Don DeLillo
Viking | Lonesome Dove
Larry McMurtry
Simon & Schuster | The Old Forest and Other Stories
Peter Taylor
Dial | Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance
Richard Powers
Beech Tree/Morrow |
|
Distant Neighbors: The Portrait of the Mexicans
Alan Riding
Knopf | The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World
Elaine Scarry
Oxford | The Reign of the Phallus: Sexual Politics in Ancient Athens
Eva Keuls
Harper and Row | House
Tracy Kidder
Houghton Mifflin |
|
Occasional Prose: Essays
Mary McCarthy
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich | Opera and Ideas: From Mozart to Strauss
Paul Robinson
Harper and Row | Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel
Phillip Fisher
Oxford | Pierrots on the Stage of Desire: 19th Century French Literary Artistis and Comic Pantomine
Robert Storey
Princeton |
|
| |
1986 |
Tombee: Portrait of a Cotton Planter
Theodore Rosengarten
Morrow | Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation, 1860-1865
Joseph Frank
Princeton University Press | Maus: A Survivor's Tale
Art Spiegelman
Pantheon | Velazquez: Painter and Courtier
Jonathan Brown
Yale |
|
The Key to the City
Anne Winters
University of Chicago | Cats of the Temple
Brad Leithauser
Knopf | All of Us Here and Other Poems
Irving Feldman
Elisabeth Sifton/Viking | Sapphics Against Anger
Timothy Steele
Random House |
|
Kate Vaiden
Reynolds Price
Atheneum | Roger's Version
John Updike
Knopf | The Best Queen
Louise Erdrich
Holt | The Moon Pinnace
Thomas Williams
Doubleday |
|
War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War
John W. Dower
Pantheon | Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution
Bernard Bailyn
Alfred A. Knopf | Bird of Life, Bird of Death: A Naturalist's Journey Through a Land of Political Turmoil
Jonathan Evan Maslow
Simon & Schuster | Cadillac Desert: The American West and its Disappearing Water
Marc Reisner
|
|
The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art
Arthur Danto
Columbia University Press | Bohemian Paris: Culture, Politics and Boundaries of Bourgeois Life
Jerrold Siegel
Elisabeth Sifton/Viking | The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History
Leo Braudy
Oxford | A History of Modern Criticism: 1750-1950: Vols. 5 & 6
Rene Wellek
Yale |
|
| |
1987 |
An American Childhood
Annie Dillard
Harper & Row | Timebends: A Life
Arthur Miller
Grove Press | Private Domain
Paul Taylor
Knopf | Don't Tread on Me: The Selected Letters of S.J. Perelman
Prudence Crowther, ed.
|
|
Happy Hour
Alan Shapiro
University of Chicago | The Sunset Maker
Donald Justice
Atheneum | April Galleons
John Ashbery
Viking | In Other Words
May Swenson
Knopf |
|
Beloved
Toni Morrison
Alfred A. Knopf | The Age of Grief
Jane Smiley
Knopf | The Bonfire of the Vanities
Tom Wolfe
Farrar, Straus & Giroux | Crossing to Safety
Wallace Stegner
Random House |
|
The Genius of the People
Charles Mee
Harper & Row | Democracy Is in the Streets
James Miller
S&S | And the Band Played On: Politics, People and the AIDS Epidemic
Randy Shilts
St. Martin's | Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle
Stephen Jay Gould
Harvard University |
|
Sight Lines
Arlene Croce
Knopf | Every Force Evolves a Form
Guy Davenport
North Point Press | Understanding Toscanini
Josephn Horowitz
Knopf | Collected Prose
Robert Lowell
FS&G |
|
| |
1988 |
The Selected Correspondence of Kenneth Burke and Malcolm Cowley, 1915-1981
Paul Jay, ed.
Viking | Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir
Paul Monette
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich | Three Scientists and Their Gods: Looking for Meaning in an Age of Information
Robert Wright
Times Books | The Letters of T.S. Eliot, 1909-1922
Valerie Eliot, ed.
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich |
|
New and Collected Poems
Richard Wilbur
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich | Harp Lake
John Hollander
Knopf | One Thousand Avant-Garde Plays
Kenneth Koch
Knopf | Selected Poems, 1938-1988
Thomas McGrath
Copper Canyon Press |
|
Libra
Don DeLillo
Viking | Wheat That Springeth Green
J.F. Powers
Knopf | Paris Trout
Pete Dexter
Random House | Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories
Raymond Carver
Atlantic Monthly Press |
|
Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877
Eric Foner
Harper & Row | Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era
James M. McPherson
Oxford University Press | A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam
Neil Sheehan
Random House | Europeans
Jane Kramer
Farrar, Straus & Giroux |
|
Melodious Guile: Fictive Pattern in Poetic Language
John Hollander
Yale University Press | The Death of Rhythm and Blues
Nelson George
Pantheon | Law and Literature: A Misunderstood Relation
Richard A. Posner
Harvard University Press | Poetry and the World
Robert Pinsky
Ecco Press |
|
| |
1989 |
Richard Milhouse Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician
Roger Morris
Henry Holt | And God Gave Us This Country: Tekamthi and the First American Civil War
Bil Gilbert
Atheneum | Glenn Gould: A Life and Variations
Otto Friedrich
Random House | This Boy's Life: A Memoir
Tobias Wolff
Atlantic Monthly Press |
|
Earthquake Weather
August Kleinzahler
Moyer Bell Ltd. | Water Walker
Nancy Willard
Knopf | Human Wishes
Robert Hass
Ecco Press | Pyramid of Bone
Thylias Moss
University Press of Virginia |
|
Spartina
John Casey
Knopf | The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love
Oscar Hijuelos
Farrar, Straus & Giroux | The Joy Luck Club
Amy Tan
Putnam | Ordinary Love & Good Will
Jane Smiley
Knopf |
|
The Rainy Season: Haiti Since Duvalier
Amy Wilentz
Simon & Schuster | Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class
Barbara Ehrenreich
Pantheon | A Peace to End All Peace: Creating the Modern Middle East, 1914-1922
David Fromkin
Henry Holt | Among Schoolchildren
Tracy Kidder
Houghton Mifflin |
|
Enchanted Drawings: The History of Animation
Charles Solomon
Knopf | Metaphor & Memory: Essays
Cynthia Ozick
Knopf | A Choice of Inheritance: Self and Community from Edmund Burke to Robert Frost
David Bromwich
Harvard University Press | America's Rome
William L. Vance
Yale University Press |
|
| |
Year | Biography | Poetry | Fiction | General Non-Fiction | Criticism | Memoir | Translation |
1990 |
The Five of Hearts: An Intimate Portrait of Henry Adams and His Friends 1880-1918
Patricia O'Toole
Clarkson N. Potter | Strong Drink, Strong Language
John Espey
John Daniel | A Hole in the World
Richard Rhodes
Simon & Schuster | Righteous Pilgrim: The Life and Times of Harold L. Ickes
T.H. Watkins
Holt |
|
The Transparent Man
Anthony Hecht
Alfred A. Knopf | The Book of Gods and Devils
Charles Simic
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich | In the Western Night
Frank Bidart
Farrar, Straus & Giroux | New Poems, 1980-88
John Haines
Story Line Press |
|
Middle Passage
Charles Johnson
Atheneum | The Things They Carried
Tim O'Brien
Houghton Mifflin | Family Pictures
Sue Miller
HarperCollins | Collected Stories
Wallace Stegner
Random House |
|
Samba
Alma Guillermoprieto
Knopf | The Politics of Rich and Poor: Wealth and the American Electorate in the Regan Aftermath
Kevin Phillips
Random House | City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles
Mike Davis
Verso | Disappearing Through the Skylight: Culture and Technology in the 20th Century
O.B. Hardison
Viking |
|
Emily Dickinson
Camille Paglia
Yale University Press | Selected Writings, 1950-1990
Irving Howe
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich | Notes of a Hanging Judge: Essays and Reviews, 1979-1989
Stanley Crouch
Oxford University Press | Essays in Disguise
Wilfrid Sheed
Knopf |
|
| |
1991 |
Maus II
Art Spiegelman
Pantheon | Anne Sexton: A Biography
Diane Middlebrook
Houghton Mifflin | The Journals of John Cheever
John Cheever
Knopf | The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan
Robert Kanigel
Scribners |
|
An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems 1988-1991
Adrienne Rich
W.W. Norton & Company | What Work Is
Philip Levine
Knopf | The Ether Dome and Other Poems: New & Selected (1979-1991)
Allen Grossman
New Directions | Jaguar of Sweet Laughter: New & Selected Poems
Diane Ackerman
Random House |
|
Wartime Lies
Louis Begley
Knopf | Mating
Norman Rush
Knopf | Typical American
Gish Jen
Houghton Mifflin | The Gold Bug Variations
Richard Powers
Morrow |
|
Praying for Sheetrock
Melissa Fay Greene
Addison-Wesley | Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos: The Scientific Quest for the Secret of the Universe
Dennis Overbye
HarperCollins | Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools
Jonathan Kozol
Crown | Which Side Are You on? Trying to Be for Labor When It's Flat on Its Back
Thomas Geoghegan
FSG |
|
Vulgar Modernism: Writing on Movies and Other Media
J. Hoberman
Temple Univ. Press | Old Jobs
John Updike
Knopf | Female Perversions: The Temptations of Emma Bovary
Louise J. Kaplan
Talese/Doubleday | Inventing the Middle Ages: The Lives, Works & Ideas of the Great Medievalists of the Twentieth Century
Norman F. Cantor
Morrow |
|
| |
1992 |
Kissinger
Walter Isaacson
Simon & Schuster | The Rascal King: The Life and Times of James Michael Curley, 1874-1958
Jack Beatty
Addison-Wesley | Looking for the Light: The Hidden Life and Art of Marion Post Wolcott
Paul Hendrickson
Knopf |
|
Gilgamesh
David Ferry
Farrar, Straus & Giroux | A Dream of Mine
K.C. Williams
Farrar, Straus & Giroux | Looking for Luck
Maxine Kumin
W.W. Norton | The Father
Sharon Olds
Knopf |
|
Black Water
Joyce Carol Oates
Dutton | Outerbridge Reach
Robert Stone
Ticknor & Fields | Let the Dead Bury Their Dead
Randall Kenan
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich | Clockers
Richard Price
Houghton Mifflin |
|
Home Fires: An Intimate Portrait of One Middle-Class Family in Postwar America
Donald Katz
HarperCollins | The Diversity of Life
Edward O. Wilson
Harvard University Press | Breaking the Maya Code
Michael D. Coe
Thames & Hudson | Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil
Nancy Scheper-Hughes
University of California Press |
|
A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War
Susan Griffin
Doubleday | Can Poetry Matter? Essays on Poetry and American Culture
Dana Gioia
Graywolf Press | The Critics Bear It Away: American Fiction and the Academy
Frederick Crews
Random House | Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West
Wallace Stegner
Random House |
|
| |
1993 |
W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race 1868-1919
David Levering Lewis
Henry Holt | French Lessons
Alice Kaplan
Chicago | A Different Person
James Merrill
Knopf | The Passion of Michael Foucault
James Miller
Simon & Schuster |
|
| The Shipping News
E. Annie Proulx
Charles Scribner's Sons | Feather Crowns
Bobbi Ann Mason
Harper | Vindication
Frances Sherwood
Farrar, Straus & Giroux | The Jade Cabinet
Rikki Ducornet
Dalkey Archive Press |
|
Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days Of The Soviet Empire
David Remnick
Random House | The Last Panda
George B. Schaller
Chicago | Whoredom in Kimmage: Irish Women Coming of Age
Rosemary Mahoney
Houghton Mifflin | Genie: An Abused Child's Flight From Silence
Russ Rymer
Harper |
|
United States: Essays 1952-1992
Gore Vidal
Random House | The Phantom Empire
Geoffrey O'Brien
Norton | Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright
Mark Rose
Harvard | The Queen's Throat
Wayne Koestenbaum
Poseidon |
|
| |
1994 |
D.H. Lawrence
Brenda Maddox
Simon & Schuster | Naturalist
Edward O. Wilson
Island Press | Toulouse-Lautrec
Julia Frey
Viking | Winchell
Neal Gabler
Knopf |
|
The Simple Truth
Philip Levine
Alfred A. Knopf | What We Carry
Dorianne Laux
BOA Editions | Winter Numbers
Marilyn Hacker
Norton | Sunday Skaters
Mary Jo Salter
Knopf |
|
A Frolic of His Own
William Gaddis
Poseidon/Simon & Schuster | The Prince of West End Avenue
Alan Isler
Bridge Works | In the Time of the Butterflies
Julia Alvarez
Algonquin | And All Our Wounds Forgiven
Julius Lester
Arcade |
|
Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas
Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson (Sort as Jane Mayer)
Houghton Mifflin | The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America
John Demos
Knopf | How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter
Sherwin B. Nuland
Alfred A. Knopf | My Own Country
Abraham Verghese
Simon & Schuster |
|
Sex and Suits
Anne Hollander
Knopf | The Western Canon
Harold Bloom
Harcourt Brace | Poetry of Mourning
Jahan Ramazani
University of Chicago | Reasonable Creatures
Katha Pollitt
Knopf |
|
| |
1995 |
Walt Whitman's America
David S. Reynolds
Knopf | Moving Violations: War Zones, Wheelchairs and Declarations of Independence
John Hockenberry
Hyperion | The Liars' Club
Mary Karr
Viking | Emerson: The Mind on Fire
Robert Richardson Jr.
California |
|
Cortege
Carl Phillips
Graywolf | Kyrie
Ellen Bryant Voigt
Norton | A Scattering of Salts
James Merrill
Knopf | The Only World
Lynda Hull
Harper |
|
Independence Day
Richard Ford
Alfred A. Knopf | Moo
Jane Smiley
Knopf | The Tent of Orange Mist
Paul West
Scribner | Galatea 2.2
Richard Powers
Farrar, Straus & Giroux |
|
Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder
Lawrence Weschler
Pantheon | All God's Children: The Bosket Family and the American Tradition of Violence
Fox Butterfield
Knopf | In These Girls, Hope Is a Muscle
Madeleine Blais
Atlantic | A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books
Nicholas Basbanes
Holt |
|
After the Fact
Clifford Geertz
Harvard University Press | Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew
John Felstiner
Yale University Press | The All-American Skin Game, or The Decoy of Race: The Long and the Short of It, 1990-1994
Stanley Crouch
Pantheon | The Castle of Indolence: On Poetry, Poest and Poetasters
Thomas M. Disch
Picador |
|
| |
1996 |
The Last Happy Occasion
Alan Shapiro
Chicago | Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn
David Hajdu
Farrar, Straus & Giroux | Charles Ives: A Life in Music
Jan Swafford
Norton | Pear S. Buck: A Cultural Biography
Peter Conn
Cambridge |
|
The Vigil
C.K. Williams
Farrar, Straus & Giroux | Music Minus One
Jane Shore
Picador | Imagine the Angels of Bread
Martin Espada
Norton | Loosestrife
Stephen Dunn
Norton |
|
Dancing After Hours
Andre Dubus
Knopf | From Bondage
Henry Roth
St. Martin's | The Autobiography of My Mother
Jamaica Kincaid
Farrar, Straus & Giroux | About Schmidt
Louis Begley
Knopf |
|
Ashes To Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, The Public Health, And The Unabashed Triumph Of Philip Morris
Richard Kluger
Alfred A. Knopf | The Middle East
Bernard Lewis
Scribner | Hitler's Willing Executioners
Daniel Goldhagen
Knopf | The Great Books
David Denby
Simon & Schuster |
|
Fame and Folly
Cynthia Ozick
Alfred A. Knopf | The Love Affair as a Work of Art
Dan Hofstadter
Farrar, Straus & Giroux | Art for Art's Sake and Literary Life
Gene H. Bell-Villada
Nebraska | The True Story of the Novel
Margaret Anne Doody
Rutgers |
|
| |
1997 |
American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson
Joseph J. Ellis
Knopf | Walking in the Shade
Doris Lessing
HarperCollins | Virginia Woolf
Hermione Lee
Knopf |
|
Desire
Frank Bidart
Farrar, Straus & Giroux | Loose Sugar
Brenda Hillman
Wesleyan | Questions for Ecclesiastes
Mark Jarman
Story Line | Does Your House Have Lions?
Sonya Sanchez
Beacon |
|
Underworld
Don DeLillo
Scribner | American Pastoral
Philip Roth
Houghton Mifflin | Dreams of My Russian Summers
Andrei Makine
Arcade | Cold Mountain
Charles Frazier
Grove |
|
Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster
Jon Krakauer
Villard | How the Mind Works
Steven Pinker
W.W. Norton | The Bible as It Was
James Kugel
Belknap Press | American Scripture
Pauline Maier
Knopf |
|
God and the American Writer
Alfred Kazin
Knopf | The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets
Helen Vendler
Harvard | The Pleasures of the Imagination
John Brewer
Farrar, Straus & Giroux | The End of the Novel of Love
Vivian Gornick
Beacon |
|
| |
1998 |
Everbody Was So Young: Gerald and Sara Murphy: A Lost Generation Love Story
Amanda Vaill
Houghton | King of the World: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero
David Remnick
Random House | Rocket Boys: A Memoir
Homer H. Hickman Jr.
Delacorte | Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.
Ron Chernow
Random House |
|
The Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse
Ann Carson
Knopf | Self-Evidence
Pamela White Hadas
Triquarterly, Northwestern | Last Chance for the Tarzan Holler
Thylias Moss
Persea | Thieves of Paradise
Yusef Komunyakaa
Wesleyan |
|
The Hours
Michael Cunningham
Farrar, Straus and Giroux | Preston Falls
David Gates
Knopf | Birds of America
Lorrie Moore
Knopf | No Lease on Life
Lynne Tillman
Harcourt |
|
King Leopold's Ghost
Adam Hochschild
Houghton | Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America
Ira Berlin
Belknap: Harvard | The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity
Roy Porter
Norton | The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford Engligh Dictionary
Simon Winchester
HarperCollins |
|
Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
Harold Bloom
Riverhead: Putnam | Out of Sheer Rage
Geoff Dyer
North Point | Hip Hop America
Nelson George
Viking | The Sounds of Poetry
Robert Pinsky
Farrar, Straus & Giroux |
|
| |
1999 |
Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette
Judith Thurman
Knopf | Morgan: American Financier
Jean Strouse
Random | Coleridge: Vol. II: Darker Reflections
Richard Holmes
Pantheon | The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family Behind the New York Times
Susan E. Tifft & Alex S. Jones
Little, Brown |
|
Diva
Rafael Campo
Duke Univ. Press | On the Bus with Rosa Parks
Rita Dove
Norton | Dailies & Rushes
Susan Kingsolving
Grove | HIV, Mon Amour
Tory Dent
Sheep Meadow |
|
Midnight Champagne
A. Manette Ansay
Morrow | The Wonders of the Invisible World: Stories
David Gates
Knopf | The Night Inspector
Frederick Busch
Harmony: Crown | Disgrace
J.M. Coetzee
Viking |
|
Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II
John W. Dower
W.W. Norton & Company/The New Press | Five Thousand Days Like This One: An American Family History
Jane Brox
Beacon | The Black Room at Longwood: Napoleon's Exile on Saint Helena
Jean-Paul Kauffmann
Four Walls Eight Windows | I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory
Patricia Hampl
Norton |
|
Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season
David Shields
Crown | Lives of the Poets
Michael Schmidt
Knopf | Film Follies: The Cinema Out of Order
Stuart Klawans
Cassell | Reputations of the Tongue: On Poets and Poetry
William Logan
Univ. Pr. of Florida |
|
| |
Year | Biography | Poetry | Fiction | General Non-Fiction | Criticism | Memoir | Translation |
2000 |
The Chief: The Life of William Randolf Hearst
David Nasaw
Houghton Mifflin | Marcel Proust: A Life
Jean-Yves Tadie
Viking | The Monk in the Garden: The Lost and Found Genius of Gregor Mendel, the Father of Genetics
Robin Marantz Henig
Houghton Mifflin | I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1942-1945
Victor Kemplerer
Random House |
|
Men in the Off Hours
Anne Carson
Knopf | Ultima Thule
Davis McCombs
Yale | The Ledge
Michael Collier
Houghton Mifflin | Talking Dirty to the Gods
Yusef Komunyakaa
Farrar, Straus & Giroux |
|
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
Michael Chabon
Random House | A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You
Amy Bloom
Random House | Assorted Fire Events: Stories
David Means
Context Books | White Teeth
Zadie Smith
Random House |
|
The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach
Alice Kaplan
Univ. of Chicago | Way Out There in the Blue
Frances FitzGerald
Simon & Schuster | Crucible of War
Fred Anderson
Knopf | Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health
Laurie Garrett
Hyperion |
|
From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present
Jacques Barzun
HarperCollins | Critical Entertainments: Music Old and New
Charles Rosen
Harvard Univ. Press | Passionate Minds
Claudia Roth Pierpont
Knopf | A Poetry of Two Minds
Sherod Santos
University of Georgia Press |
|
| |
2001 |
The Scarlet Professor: Newton Arvin: A Literary Life Shattered by Scandal
Barry Werth
Nan A. Talese/Doubleday | Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina and Richard Farina
David Hajdu
Farrar, Straus & Giroux | Milking the Moon: A Southerner's Story of Life on this Planet
Katherine Clark
Crown | Borrowed Finery: A Memoir
Paula Fox
Holt |
|
The Seven Ages
Louise Glück
The ECCO Press/HarperCollins | Animal Soul
Bob Hicok
Invisible Cities | A Treatise on Poetry
Czeslaw Milosz
Ecco/HarperCollins | Given Sugar, Given Salt
Jane Hirshfield
HarperCollins |
|
John Henry Days
Colson Whitehead
Doubleday | The Corrections
Jonathan Franzen
Farrar, Straus and Giroux | Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories
Alice Monroe
Knopf | Bel Canto
Ann Patchett
HarperCollins |
|
Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland
Jan T. Gross
Princeton University | The Lost Children of Wilder: The Epic Struggle to Change Foster Care
Nina Bernstein
Pantheon | Seabiscuit: An American Legend
Laura Hillenbrand
Random House | The Brother: The Untold Story of Atomic Spy David Greenglass and How He Sent His Sister, Ethel Rosenberg, to the Electric Chair
Sam Roberts
Random House |
|
Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books
H.J. Jackson
Yale University | Ill Nature: Rants and Reflections on Humanity and Other Animals
Joy Williams
Lyons | As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender, and Art
Rebecca Solnit
University of Georgia | De/Compositions: 101 Good Poems Gone Wrong
W.D. Snodgrass
Graywolf |
|
| |
2002 |
Benjamin Franklin
Edmund S. Morgan
Yale University Press | Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone? The Carter Family and Their Legacy in American Music
Mark Zwonitzer with Charles Hirshberg
Simon & Schuster | Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson
Robert A. Caro
Alfred A. Knopf | The Last American Man
Elizabeth Gilbert
Viking/Penguin Putnam, Inc. |
|
Sleeping with the Dictionary
Harryette Mullen
University of California Press | The Unswept Room
Sharon Olds
Alfred A. Knopf | Leaving Saturn
Major Jackson
University of Georgia Press | Without End: New and Selected Poems
Adam Zagajewski
Farrar, Straus & Giroux |
|
Nowhere Man
Alexander Hemon
Doubleday/Nan A. Talese | Roscoe
William Kennedy
Viking | The Darts of Cupid and Other Stories
Edith Templeton
Pantheon | Middlesex
Jeffrey Eugenides
Farrar, Straus & Giroux |
|
War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning
Chris Hedges
Public Affairs | American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center
William Langewiesche
FSG/North Point Press | Brown: The Last Discovery of America
Richard Rodriguez
Viking | Edison’s Eve: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life
Gaby Wood
Knopf |
|
Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color
Philip Ball
Farrar, Straus & Giroux | Old Man Goya
Julia Blackburn
Pantheon | Reviewery
Christopher Ricks
Other Press/Handsel Books | Piano Notes: The World of the Pianist
Charles Rosen
Free Press |
|
| |
2003 |
A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates
Blake Bailey
Picador | The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage
Paul Elie
Farrar, Straus and Giroux | Jonathan Edwards
George Marsden
Yale University Press | Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake
Carol Loeb Shloss
Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
|
Blue Hour
Carolyn Forche
HarperCollins | What Narcissism Means To Me
Tony Hoagland
Graywolf | She Says
Venus Khoury-Ghata
Graywolf | Granted
Mary Szybist
Alice James Books |
|
Brick Lane
Monica Ali
Scribner (US)/Doubleday (UK) | A Distant Shore
Caryl Phillips
Knopf (US)/Secker & Warburg (UK) | The Time of Our Singing
Richard Powers
Farrar, Straus and Giroux | Old School
Tobias Wolff
Knopf |
|
Gulag: A History
Anne Applebaum
Doubleday/Random House, Inc. | The Bounty: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty
Caroline Alexander
Viking | Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble and Coming of Age in the Bronx
Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
Scribner | Rising Up and Rising Down
William T. Vollmann
McSweeney’s |
|
Gritos
Dagoberto Gilb
(Grove). | Songbook
Nick Hornby
McSweeney’s | Michelangelo & the Pope’s Ceiling
Ross King
Walker | Regarding the Pain of Others
Susan Sontag
Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
|
| |
2004 |
Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare
Stephen Greenblatt
W.W. Norton & Company | Alexander Hamilton
Ron Chernow
Penguin Press | Chronicles Vol. 1
Bob Dylan
Simon & Schuster | Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart
John Guy
Houghton Mifflin |
|
The Orchard
Brigit Pegeen Kelly
BOA Editions | Cocktails
D.A. Powell
Graywolf | Interglacial
James Richardson
Ausable Press | Danger on Peaks
Gary Snyder
Shoemaker & Hoard |
|
The Line of Beauty
Alan Hollinghurst
Picador | Cloud Atlas
David Mitchell
Sceptre | The Dew Breaker
Edwidge Danticat
Knopf | The Plot Against America
Philip Roth
Houghton Mifflin |
|
Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age
Kevin Boyle
Henry Holt & Company, LLC | Blue Blood
Edward Conlon
Riverhead | The Working Poor: Invisible in America
David Shipler
Knopf | Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story
Timothy B. Tyson
Crown |
|
Paper Trail: Selected Prose 1965-2003
Richard Howard
Farrar, Straus and Giroux | Strangers: Homosexual Love in the 19th Century
Graham Robb
Norton | Sontag & Kael: Opposites Attract Me
Craig Seligman
Counterpoint | The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel
James Wood
Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
|
| |
2005 |
Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln
Doris Kearns Goodwin
Simon & Schuster | Lee Miller
Carolyn Burke
Alfred A. Knopf | Like a Fiery Elephant
Jonathan Coe
Continuum International | Mark Twain
Ron Powers
Free Press |
|
The Shout
Simon Armitage
Harcourt | Bent to the Earth
Manuel Blas de Luna
Carnegie Mellon Univ. Press | Crush
Richard Siken
Yale University Press | The Incentive of the Maggot
Ron Slate
Houghton Mifflin/Mariner Books |
|
Europe Central
William T. Vollmann
Viking | Veronica
Mary Gaitskill
Pantheon | Never Let Me Go
Kazuo Ishiguro
Faber & Faber (UK) Alfred A. Knopf (US) | Small Island
Andrea Levy
Picador |
|
The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East
Robert Fisk
Alfred A. Knopf | Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild
Ellen Meloy
Pantheon | Human Cargo: A Journey Among Refugees
Caroline Moorehead
Henry Holt | Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War
Anthony Shadid
Henry Holt |
|
Gather at the River: Notes from the Post-millennial South
Hal Crowther
Louisiana State Univ. Press | Unnatural Wonders
Arthur Danto
Farrar, Straus & Giroux | Still Looking: Essays on American Art
John Updike
Alfred A. Knopf | What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles
Eliot Weinberger
New Directions |
|
The Year of Magical Thinking
Joan Didion
Alfred A. Knopf | Fat Girl
Judith Moore
Hudson Street Press | Two Lives
Vikram Seth
HarperCollins | Istanbul
Orhan Pamuk
Alfred A. Knopf |
|
|
2006 |
The Most Famous Man in Amerca: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher
Debby Applegate
Doubleday | Flaubert: A Biography
Frederick Brown
Little, Brown | A Sense of the World: How a Blind Man Became History's Greatest Traveler
Jason Roberts
HarperCollins | At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68
Taylor Branch
Simon & Schuster |
|
My Brother is Getting Arrested Again
Daisy Fried
University of Pittsburgh Press | Poems (1945-1971)
Miltos Sachtouris
Archipelego Books | Ooga-Booga
Frederick Seidel
Farrar, Straus & Giroux | Not for Specialists: New and Selected Poems
W. D. Snodgrass
BOA Editions |
|
Half of a Yellow Sun
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Knopf | What is the What
Dave Eggers
McSweeney's | The Lay of the Land
Richard Ford
Knopf | The Road
Cormac McCarthy
Knopf |
|
The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq
Patrick Cockburn
Verso | The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe V. Wade
Anne Fessler
Penguin Press | The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
Michael Pollan
Penguin Press | The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew and the Heart of the Middle East
Sandy Tolan
Bloomsbury |
|
While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West From Within
Bruce Bawer
Doubleday | Follies of the Wise: Dissenting Essays
Frederick Crews
Shoemaker & Hoard | Breaking the Spell: Religion As A Natural Phenomenon
Daniel Dennett
Viking | On Looking: Essays
Lia Purpura
Sarabande Books |
|
The Afterlife
Donald Antrim
Farrar, Straus & Giroux | Fun Home
Alison Bechdel
Houghton Mifflin | Stuart: A Life Backwards
Alexander Masters
Delacorte | Strange Piece of Paradise
Teri Jentz
Farrar, Straus & Giroux |
|
|
2007 |
Edith Wharton
Hermione Lee
Knopf | The Life Of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932
John Richardson
Knopf | Thomas Hardy
Claire Tomalin
Penguin Press | Ralph Ellison: A Biography
Arnold Rampersad
Alfred A. Knopf |
|
Modern Life
Matthea Harvey
Graywolf | Sleeping and Waking
Michael O'Brien
Flood | The Ballad of Jamie Allan
Tom Pickard
Flood | New Poems
Tadeusz Rozewicz
Archipelago |
|
Sacred Games
Vikram Chandra
HarperCollins | In The Country of Men
Hisham Matar
Dial Press | The Gravediggers Daughter
Joyce Carol Oates
HarperCollins | The Shadow Catcher
Marianne Wiggins
Simon and Schuster |
|
American Transcendentalism
Philip Gura
Farrar, Straus | What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America 1815-1848
Daniel Walker Howe
Oxford University Press | The World Without Us
Alan Weisman
Thomas Dunne BKs/St. Martin’s | Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA
Tim Weiner
Doubleday |
|
Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints
Acocella, Joan
Pantheon | Once Upon a Quinceanera
Alvarez, Julia
Viking | The Terror Dream
Faludi, Susan
Metropolitan/Holt | Coltrane: The Story of a Sound
Ratliff, Ben
Farrar, Straus |
|
Heart Like Water: Surviving Katrina and Life in Its Disaster Zone
Joshua Clark
Free Press | The Journals of Joyce Carol Oates, 1973–1982
Joyce Carol Oates
Ecco | Writing in an Age of Silence
Sara Paretsky
Verso | A Russian Diary: A Journalist's Final Account of Life, Corruption and Death in Putin's Russia
Anna Politkovskaya
Random House |
|
|
2008 |
The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family
Annette Gordon-Reed
W.W. Norton & Company | Ida, A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching
Paula J. Giddings
Amistad | The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family In An American Century
Steve Coll
Penguin Press | White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson & Thomas Wentworth Higginson
Brenda Wineapple
Knopf |
|
Sources
Devin Johnston
Turtle Point Press | The Landscapist
Pierre Martory (trans. John Ashbery, sort Martory)
Sheep Meadow Press | Human Dark with Sugar
Brenda Shaughnessy
Copper Canyon Press |
|
The Lazarus Project
Aleksandar Hemon
Riverhead | Home
Marilynne Robinson
Farrar, Straus & Giroux | The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart
M. Glenn Taylor
West Virginia University Press | Olive Kittredge
Elizabeth Strout
Random |
|
This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War
Drew Gilpin Faust
Alfred A. Knopf | The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals
Jane Mayer
Doubleday | White Protestant Nation
Allan Lichtman
Atlantic | From Colony to Superpower: US Foreign Relations Since 1776
George C. Herring
Oxford University Press |
|
Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life Of Jean-Luc Godard
Richard Brody
Metropolitan Books | The Men in My Life
Vivian Gornick
Boston Review/MIT | Maimonides: The Life and World of One of Civilization’s Greatest Minds
Joel L. Kraemer
Doubleday | Orpheus in the Bronx: Essays on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry
Reginald Shepherd
University of Michigan Press |
|
Why I Came West
Rick Bass
Houghton Mifflin. | The House On Sugar Beach
Helene Cooper
Simon and Schuster | The Bishop’s Daughter
Honor Moore
WW Norton | The Eaves Of Heaven.
Andrew X. Pham
Harmony Books. |
|
|
2009 |
Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor
Brad Gooch
Little, Brown | Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector
Benjamin Moser
Oxford University Press | Bitter Spring: A Life of Ignazio Silone
Stanislao G. Pugliese
Farrar, Straus and Giroux | Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line
Martha A. Sandweiss
Penguin Press |
|
A Village Life
Louise Glück
Farrar, Straus and Giroux | Chronic
D.A. Powell
Graywolf Press | Captive Voices: New and Selected Poems, 1960-2008
Eleanor Ross Taylor
Louisiana State University Press | Museum of Accidents
Rachel Zucker
Wave Books |
|
The Book of Night Women
Marlon James
Riverhead | Blame
Michelle Huneven
Sarah Crichton Books/FSG | Lark and Termite
Jayne Anne Phillips
Alfred A. Knopf | American Salvage
Bonnie Jo Campbell
Wayne State University Press |
|
The Hindus: An Alternative History
Wendy Doniger
Penguin Press | Strength in What Remain
Tracy Kidder
Random House | Imperial
William T. Vollmann
Viking | Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City
Greg Grandin
Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt |
|
Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry
Stephen Burt
Graywolf Press | Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression
Morris Dickstein
Norton | Heroes and Villains: Essays on Music, Movies, Comics, and Culture
David Hajdu
Da Capo Press | Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music
Greg Milner
Faber |
|
Lit
Mary Karr
Harper | Enemies of the People: My Family's Journey to America
Kati Marton
Simon & Schuster | City Boy
Edmund White
Bloomsbury | Live Through This: A Mother's Memoir of Runaway Daughters and Reclaimed Love
Debra Gwartney
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt |
|
|
Year | Biography | Poetry | Fiction | General Non-Fiction | Criticism | Memoir | Translation |
2010 |
The Secret Lives Of Somerset Maugham: A Biography
Selina Hastings
Random House | Charlie Chan: The Untold Story Of The Honorable Detective And His Rendezvous With American History
Yunte Huang
Norton | The Killing Of Crazy Horse
Thomas Powers
Knopf | Simon Wiesenthal: The Lives And Legends
Tom Segev
Doubleday |
|
Lighthead
Terrance Hayes
Viking Penguin | Nox
Anne Carson
New Directions | The Eternal City
Kathleen Graber
Princeton University Press | The Best of It
Kay Ryan
Grove | The Eternal City
Kathleen Graber
Princeton University Press |
|
Skippy Dies
Paul Murray
Penguin - Hamish Hamilton/Faber & Faber | Freedom
Jonathan Franzen
Farrar, Straus And Giroux | To The End Of The Land
David Grossman
Knopf | Comedy In A Minor Key
Hans Keilson
Farrar, Straus And Giroux |
|
Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea
Barbara Demick
Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group | Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American
S.C. Gwynne
Scribner | Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet
Jennifer Homans
Random | The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Scribner |
|
The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them
Elif Batuman
Farrar, Straus and Giroux | The Professor and Other Writings
Terry Castle
Harper | The Cruel Radiance
Susie Linfield
University of Chicago Press | Vanishing Point: Not a Memoir
Ander Monson
Graywolf |
|
Just Kids
Patti Smith
Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers | Crossing Mandelbaum Gate Coming of Age Between the Arabs and Israelis, 1956-1978
Kai Bird
Scribner | The Autobiography of an Execution
David Dow
Twelve | Hitch-22: A Memoir
Christopher Hitchens
Twelve | Hiroshima in the Morning
Rahna Reiko Rizzuto
Feminst Press |
|
|
2011 |
Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution
Mary Gabriel
Little, Brown and Company | Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention
Manning Marable
Viking Press | Hemingway’s Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-1961
Paul Hendrickson
Knopf | Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China
Ezra F. Vogel
Belknap Press: Harvard University Press |
|
The Chameleon Couch
Yusef Komunyakaa
Farrar, Straus and Giroux | Devotions
Bruce Smith
University of Chicago Press | Core Samples from the World
Forrest Gander
New Directions | Kingdom Animalia
Aracelis Girmay
BOA Editions |
|
The Stranger's Child
Alan Hollinghurst
Picador - Pan Macmillan | Open City
Teju Cole
Random House | The Marriage Plot
Jeffrey Eugenides
Farrar, Straus and Giroux | Stone Arabia
Dana Spiotta
Scribner |
|
A World on Fire: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War
Amanda Foreman
Random | The Information
James Gleick
Pantheon | To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918
Adam Hochschild
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt | Pulphead: Essays
John Jeremiah Sullivan
Farrar, Straus, & Giroux |
|
Is That a Fish in Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything
David Bellos
Faber & Faber | The Ecstasy of Influence
Jonathan Lethem
Doubleday | Karaoke Culture
Dubravka Ugresic
Open Letter | Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music
Ellen Willis
University of Minnesota Press |
|
One Hundred Names for Love: A Stroke, A Marriage, and the Language of Healing
Diane Ackerman
W.W. Norton | Harlem Is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America
Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts
Little, Brown | It Calls You Back: An Odyssey Through Love, Addiction, Revolutions, and Healing
Luis J. Rodríguez
Touchstone | Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War
Deb Olin Unferth
Henry Holt |
|
|
2012 |
All We Know: Three Lives
Lisa Cohen
Farrar, Straus and Giroux | Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece
Michael Gorra
A Liveright Book: W. W. Norton | Robert Duncan, The Ambassador from Venus: A Biography
Lisa Jarnot
University of California Press | The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo
Tom Reiss
Crown Publishers |
|
Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations
David Ferry
University of Chicago Press | On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths
Lucia Perillo
Copper Canyon Press | Fragile Acts
Allan Peterson
McSweeney’s Books | Olives
A. E. Stalling
Triquarterly: Northwestern University Press |
|
HHhH
Laurent Binet (translated by Sam Taylor)
Farrar, Straus and Giroux | The Orphan Master’s Son
Adam Johnson
Random House | Magnificence
Lydia Millet
W. W. Norton | NW
Zadie Smith
The Penguin Press |
|
Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity
Katherine Boo
Random House | Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power
Steve Coll
The Penguin Press | Why Does the World Exist? An Existential Detective Story
Jim Holt
A Liveright Book: W. W. Norton | Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic
David Quammen
W. W. Norton |
|
Reinventing Bach
Paul Elie
Farrar, Straus and Giroux | Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture
Daniel Mendelsohn
New York Review Books | Madness, Rack, and Honey
Mary Ruefle
Wave Books | The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness
Kevin Young
Graywolf Press |
|
House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East
Anthony Shadid
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt | The Distance Between Us
Reyna Grande
Atria Books | My Poets
Maureen N McLane
Farrar, Straus and Giroux | In the House of the Interpreter
Ng?g? wa Thiong’o
Pantheon |
|
|
2013 |
Birth Certificate: The Story of Danilo Kis
Mark Thompson
Cornell University Press | Holding On Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Morre
Linda Leavell
Farrar, Straus & Giroux | Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven
John Eliot Gardiner
Knopf | Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly, and the Making of the Modern Middle East
Scott Anderson
Doubleday |
|
Stay, Illusion
Lucie Brock-Broido
Alfred A. Knopf | Milk and Faith
Carmen Gimenez Smith
University of Arizona Press | Elegy Owed
Bob Hicok
Copper Canyon | Blowout
Denise Duhamel
University of Pittsburgh Press |
|
A Tale for the Time Being
Ruth Ozeki
Canongate | Someone
Alice McDermott
Farrar, Straus and Giroux | The Goldfinch
Donna Tartt
Little, Brown | The Infatuations
Javier Marias
Knopf | The Goldfinch
Donna Tartt
Little, Brown |
|
The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America
George Packer
Farrar, Straus and Giroux | Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood & the Prison of Belief
Lawrence Wright
Alfred A. Knopf/Random House | Thank You for Your Service
David Finkel
Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus & Giroux | Whitey Bulger: America’s Most Wanted Gangster and the Manhunt that Brought Him to Justice
Kevin Cullen and Shelley Murphy
Norton |
|
Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers
Janet Malcolm
Farrar, Straus & Giroux | The Kraus Project: Essays by Karl Kraus, translated and annotated by Jonathan Franzen with Paul Reiter and Daniel Kehlmann
Jonathan Franzen
Farrar, Straus & Giroux | Confronting the Classics: Traditions, Adventures, and Innovations
Mary Beard
Liveright | White Girls
Hilton Als
McSweeney’s |
|
Men We Reaped
Jesmyn Ward
Bloomsbury | The Faraway Nearby
Rebecca Solnit
Viking | The Book of My Lives
Aleksandar Hemon,
Farrar, Straus & Giroux | Wave
Sonali Deraniyagala
Knopf |
|
|
2014 |
William Wells Brown: An African American Life
Ezra Greenspan
W.W. Norton & Co. | Rebel Yell: The Violence, Passion and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson
S.C. Gwynne
Scribner | “Literchoor Is My Beat”: A Life of James Laughlin, Publisher of New Directions
Ian S. MacNiven
Farrar, Straus & Giroux | The Crusades of Cesar Chavez: A Biography
Miriam Pawel
Bloomsbury |
|
Prelude to Bruise
Saeed Jones
Coffee House Press | The Essential Hits of Shorty Bon Bon
Willie Perdomo
Penguin Books | Once in the West
Christian Wiman
Farrar, Straus & Giroux | Abide
Jake Adam York
Southern Illinois University Press |
|
An Unnecessary Woman
Rabih Alameddine
Grove Press/ Grove/Atlantic | A Brief History of Seven Killings
Marlon James
Riverhead Books | Euphoria
Lily King
Atlantic Monthly Press | On Such a Full Sea
Chang-rae Lee
Riverhead Books |
|
The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle over a Forbidden Book
Peter Finn and Petra Couvee
Pantheon | The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
Elizabeth Kolbert
Henry Holt & Co. | Capital in the Twenty-First Century
Thomas Piketty, translated from the French by Arthur Goldhammer
Belknap Press/Harvard University Press | Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle that Set Them Free
Hector Tobar
Farrar, Straus & Giroux |
|
Citizen: An American Lyric
Claudia Rankine
Graywolf Press | On Immunity: An Innoculation
Eula Biss
Graywolf Press | What Would Lynne Tillman Do?
Lynne Tillman
Red Lemonade | Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty
Vikram Chandra
Graywolf Press |
|
There Was and There Was Not
Meline Toumani
Metropolitan Books | The Other Side
Lacy M. Johnson
Tin House | The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait
Blake Bailey
W.W. Norton & Co. | Little Failure
Gary Shteyngart
Random House |
|
|
2015 |
Dietrich and Riefenstahl: Hollywood, Berlin, and a Century in Two Lives
Karin Wieland, translated by Shelley Frisch sort as Wieland
Liveright | Stalin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva
Rosemary Sullivan
Harper | Custer’s Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America
T.J. Stiles
Alfred A. Knopf | Fortune’s Fool: The Life of John Wilkes Booth
Terry Alford
Oxford University Press |
|
Bright Dead Things
Ada Limón
Milkweed Editions | How to Be Drawn
Terrance Hayes
Penguin/Penguin Random House | Parallax and Selected Poems
Sinéad Morrissey
Farrar, Straus and Giroux | What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford
Frank Stanford
Copper Canyon Press |
|
Fates and Furies
Lauren Groff
Riverhead Books/Penguin Random House | Eileen
Ottessa Moshfegh
Penguin Press | The Tsar of Love and Techno
Anthony Marra
Hogarth | The Story of My Teeth
Valeria Luiselli, translated by Christina MacSweeney sort as Luiselli
Coffee House Press |
|
What the Eye Hears: A History of Tap Dancing
Brian Seibert
Farrar, Straus and Giroux | Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America
Jill Leovy
Spiegel & Grau | Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America
Ari Berman
Farrar, Straus and Giroux | SPQR: A History of Rome
Mary Beard
Liveright |
|
Between the World and Me
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Spiegel & Grau/Penguin Random House | The Nearest Thing to Life
James Wood
Brandeis University Press | On Elizabeth Bishop
Colm Tóibín
Princeton University Press | Eternity’s Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake
Leo Damrosch
Yale University Press |
|
H Is for Hawk
Helen Macdonald
Grove Press | Bettyville
George Hodgman
Viking | The Odd Woman and the City
Vivian Gornick
Farrar, Straus and Giroux | The Light of the World
Elizabeth Alexander
Grand Central Publishing |
|
|
2016 |
Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story
Nigel Cliff
Harper | Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life
Ruth Franklin
Liveright | Black Elk: The Life of an American Visionary
Joe Jackson
Farrar, Straus and Giroux | Krazy: George Herriman, a Life in Black and White
Michael Tisserand
Harper | Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey
Frances Wilson
Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
|
Olio
Tyehimba Jess
Wave Books | Works and Days
Bernadette Mayer
New Directions | At the Foundling Hospital
Robert Pinsky
Farrar, Straus and Giroux | Blackacre
Monica Youn
Graywolf Press |
|
Commonwealth
Ann Patchett
Harper | Swing Time
Zadie Smith
Penguin Press | Imagine Me Gone
Adam Haslett
Little, Brown and Company/Hachette Book Group | Moonglow
Michael Chabon
Harper |
|
Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right
Jane Mayer
Doubleday | Writing to Save a Life: The Louis Till File
John Edgar Wideman
Scribner | Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America
Ibram X. Kendi
Nation Books | Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Harvard University Press |
|
Against Everything: Essays
Mark Greif
Pantheon | Looking for The Stranger: Albert Camus and the Life of a Literary Classic
Alice Kaplan
University of Chicago Press | The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone
Olivia Laing
Picador | Am I Alone Here?: Notes on Living to Read and Reading to Live
Peter Orner
Catapult |
|
The Iceberg
Marion Coutts
Black Cat Press | In Gratitude
Jenny Diski
Bloomsbury | The Return: Fathers, Sons, and the Land in Between
Hisham Matar
Random House | The Song Poet: A Memoir of My Father
Kao Kalia Yang
Metropolitan Books |
|
|
2017 |
Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times
Kenneth Whyte
Knopf | Gorbachev: His Life and Times
William Taubman
W.W. Norton | The Kelloggs: The Battling Brothers of Battle Creek
Howard Markel
Pantheon | The Invention of Angela Carter: A Biography
Edmund Gordon,
Oxford University Press |
|
Directions for Use, translated by Steven Teref and Maja Teref
Ana Ristovi?
Zephyr Press | The Darkness of Snow
Frank Ormsby
Wake Forest University Press | Earthling
James Longenbach
W.W. Norton | Fourth Person Singular
Nuar Alsadir
Oxford University Press |
|
Exit West
Mohsin Hamid
Hamish Hamilton | The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness
Arundhati Roy
Hamish Hamilton | Sing, Unburied, Sing
Jesmyn Ward
Scribner / Simon & Schuster | The Ninth Hour
Alice McDermott
Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
|
The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia
Masha Gessen
Riverhead Books / Penguin Random House | The Gulf: The Making of An American Sea
Jack E. Davis
Liveright | Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe
Kapka Kassabova
Graywolf | A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes
Adam Rutherford
The Experiment |
|
Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News
Kevin Young
Graywolf Press | Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions
Valeria Luiselli
Coffee House | Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood and History
Camille T. Dungy
W.W. Norton | The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story
Edwidge Danticat
Graywolf |
|
The Girl From the Metropol Hotel: Growing Up in Communist Russia, translated by Anna Summers
Ludmilla Petrushevskaya
Penguin | Admissions: Life as a Brain Surgeon
Henry Marsh
Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martins | Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body
Roxane Gay
Harper | The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir
Thi Bui
Abrams |
|
|
2018 |
Flash: The Making of Weegee the Famous
Christopher Bonanos
Henry Holt & Company | Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret
Craig Brown
Farrar, Straus and Giroux | Inseparable: The Original Siamese Twins and Their Rendezvous with American History
Yunte Huang
Liveright | The Man in the Glass House: Philip Johnson, Architect of the Modern Century
Mark Lamster
Little, Brown | The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World He Created
Jane Leavy
Harper/HarperCollins |
|
American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin
Terrance Hayes
Penguin Books / Penguin Random House | The Carrying
Ada Limón
Milkweed | Holy Moly Carry Me
Erika Meitner
Boa | Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl
Diane Seuss
Graywolf Press | Asymmetry. Translated by Clare Cavanagh
Adam Zagajewski
Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
|
Milkman
Anna Burns
Graywolf Press | Slave Old Man. Translated by Linda Coverdale
Patrick Chamoiseau
The New Press | The Largesse of the Sea Maiden
Denis Johnson
Random House | The Mars Room
Rachel Kushner
Scribner | The House of Broken Angels
Luis Alberto Urrea
Little, Brown |
|
We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights
Adam Winkler
Liveright / W. W. Norton & Company | Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan
Steve Coll
Penguin Press / Penguin Random House | The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border
Francisco Cantú
Riverhead Books | The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure
Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt
Penguin Press | God Save Texas: A Journey into the Soul of the Lone Star State
Lawrence Wright
Knopf |
|
Is It Still Good to Ya?: Fifty Years of Rock Criticism, 1967-2017
Robert Christgau
Duke University Press | Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics
Stephen Greenblatt
W.W. Norton | To Float in the Space Between: A Life and Work in Conversation with the Life and Work of Etheridge Knight
Terrance Hayes
Wave | The Reckonings: Essays
Lacy M. Johnson
Scribner | Feel Free: Essays
Zadie Smith
Penguin Press |
|
The Day That Went Missing: A Family’s Story
Richard Beard
Little, Brown | All You Can Ever Know: A Memoir
Nicole Chung
Catapult | What Drowns the Flowers in Your Mouth: A Memoir of Brotherhood
Rigoberto Gonzalez
University of Wisconsin Press | Belonging: A German Reckons With History and Home
Nora Krug
Scribner | Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over
Nell Painter
Counterpoint | Educated: A Memoir
Tara Westover
Random House |
|
|
2019 |
Gods of the Upper Air: How A Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century
Charles King
Doubleday | L.E.L.: The Lost Life and Scandalous Death of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, the Celebrated “Female Byron”
Lucasta Miller
Knopf | Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century
George Packer
Knopf | A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II
Sonia Purnell
Viking |
|
Doomstead Days
Brian Teare
Nightboat Books | Dunce
Mary Ruefle
Wave Books | Deaf Republic
Ilya Kaminsky
Graywolf Press | The Tradition
Jericho Brown
Copper Canyon Press |
|
The Nickel Boys
Colson Whitehead
Doubleday / Penguin Random House | Feast Your Eyes
Myla Goldberg
Scribner | The Topeka School
Ben Lerner
Farrar, Straus and Giroux | Lost Children Archive
Valeria Luiselli
Knopf |
|
Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future
Kate Brown
W.W. Norton | The Buried: An Archaeology of the Egyptian Revolution
Peter Hessler
Penguin Press | Out of the Shadows: Reimagining Gay Men’s Lives
Walt Odets
Farrar, Straus and Giroux | No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us
Rachel Louise Snyder
Bloomsbury |
|
Go Ahead in the Rain
Hanif Abdurraqib
University of Texas Press | Essays One
Lydia Davis
Farrar, Straus and Giroux | Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light, 100 Art Writings 1988-2018
Peter Schjeldahl
Abrams | Axiomatic
Maria Tumarkin
Transit Books |
|
Five Days Gone: The Mystery of My Mother’s Disappearance as a Child
Laura Cumming
Scribner | Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators
Ronan Farrow
Little, Brown | Sounds Like Titanic: A Memoir
Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman
W. W. Norton | Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations
Mira Jacob
One World |
|
|
Year | Biography | Poetry | Fiction | General Non-Fiction | Criticism | Memoir | Translation |
2020 |
The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X
Les Payne and Tamara Payne
Liveright / W. W. Norton & Company | The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes
Zachary D. Carter
Random House | Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath
Heather Clark
Knopf | The Equivalents: A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s
Maggie Doherty
Knopf |
|
Obit
Victoria Chang
Copper Canyon Press | Imperial Liquor
Amaud Jamaul Johnson
Univ. of Pittsburgh Press | The Shore
Chris Nealon
Wave | Homie
Danez Smith
Graywolf |
|
If I Had Two Wings
Randall Kenan
W. W. Norton & Company | Inside Story
Martin Amis
Knopf | How to Pronounce Knife
Souvankham Thammavongsa
Little, Brown | Memorial
Bryan Washington
Riverhead |
|
Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
Isabel Wilkerson
Random House / Penguin Random House | The Broken Heart of America: St, Louis and the Violent History of the United States
Walter Johnson
Basic | Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future
James Shapiro
Penguin Press | She Come By It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs
Sarah Smarsh
Scribner |
|
Stranger Faces
Namwali Serpell
Transit | Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country
Cristina Rivera Garza
Feminist Press | Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader
Vivian Gornick
Farrar, Straus and Giroux | Crap: A History of Cheap Stuff in America
Wendy A. Woloson
Univ. of Chicago Press |
|
This Is Major: Notes on Diana Ross, Dark Girls, and Being Dope
Shayla Lawson
HarperPerennial | Golem Girl
Riva Lehrer
One World | The Dragons, The Giant, The Women
Wayétu Moore
Graywolf | Home Baked: My Mom, Marijuana, and the Stoning of San Francisco
Alia Volz
HMH |
|
|
2021 |
Clairvoyant of the Small: The Life of Robert Walser
Susan Bernofsky
Yale University Press | Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer's Enduring Message to America
Keisha N. Blain
Beacon Press | Mike Nichols: A Life
Mark Harris
Penguin Press | Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York
Alexander Nemerov
Penguin Press |
|
Ceive
B.K. Fischer
BOA | The Renunciations
Donika Kelly
Graywolf | Cutlish
Rajiv Mohabir
Four Way | The Rhinehart Frames
Cheswayo Mphanza
Univ. of Nebraska |
|
Second Place
Rachel Cusk
Faber | The Netanyahus
Joshua Cohen
NYRB | Burntcoat
Sarah Hall
Custom House | Harlem Shuffle
Colson Whitehead
Doubleday |
|
Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty
Patrick Radden Keefe
Doubleday | The Family Roe: An American Story
Joshua Prager
Norton | The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth
Sam Quinones
Bloomsbury | Orwell's Roses
Rebecca Solnit
Viking |
|
Why Didn't You Do What You Were Told?
Jenny Diski
Bloomsbury | Who Will Pay Reparations On My Soul?
Jesse McCarthy
Liveright | Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon
Mark McGurl
Verso | The Right To Sex
Amia Srinivasan
FSG |
|
A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance
Hanif Abdurraqib
Random House / Penguin Random House | A Farewell To Gabo And Mercedes: A Son’s Memoir
Rodrigo Garcia
HarperVia | A Ghost In the Throat
Doireann Ní Ghríofa
Biblioasis | Concepcion: An Immigrant Family’s Fortunes
Albert Samaha
Riverhead |
|
|
2022 |
The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family
Kerri K. Greenidge
Liveright | Mr. B: George Balanchine's 20th Century
Jennifer Homans
Random House | Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life
Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman
Doubleday | Up from the Depths: Herman Melville, Lewis Mumford, and Rediscovery in Dark Times
Aaron Sachs
Princeton University Press |
|
Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear
Mosab Abu Toha
City Lights | Hello I Must be Going
David Hernandez
Pitt | banana [ ]
Paul Hlava Ceballos
Pitt | Milkweed Smithereens
Bernadette Mayer
New Directions |
|
Dr. No
Percival Everett
Graywolf | A New Name
Jon Fosse, trans. by Damion Searls
Transit Books | All the Lovers in the Night
Mieko Kawakami, trans. by Sam Bett and David Boyd
Europa Editions | The Furrows
Namwali Serpell
Hogarth |
|
Virology: Essays for the Living, the Dead, and the Small Things in Between
Joseph Osmundson
Norton | Fen, Bog, & Swamp: A Short History of Peatland Destruction and Its Role in the Climate Crisis
Annie Proulx
Scribner | An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us
Ed Yong
Random House | Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands
Kelly Lytle Hernández
W. W. Norton & Company |
|
Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us
Rachel Aviv
Farrar, Straus and Giroux | Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative
Peter Brooks
NYRB | Constructing a Nervous System: A Memoir
Margo Jefferson
Pantheon | When Women Kill: Four Crimes Retold
Alia Trabucco Zerán, trans. by Sophie Hughes
Coffee House Press |
|
Linea Nigra: An Essay on Pregnancy and Earthquakes
Jazmine Barrera, trans. by Christina MacSweeney
Two Lines Press | A Line in the World: A Year on the North Sea Coast
Dorthe Nors, trans. by Caroline Waight
Graywolf | Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-Seventh Street, Manhattan
Darryl Pinckney
Farrar, Straus and Giroux | The Man Who Could Move Clouds: A Memoir
Ingrid Rojas Contreras
Doubleday |
|
You Can Be the Last Leaf
Maya Abu Al-Hayyat, trans. by Fady Joudah
Milkweed Editions | When I Sing, Mountains Dance
Irene Solà, trans. by Mara Faye Lethem
Graywolf Press | The Books of Jacob
Olga Tokarczuk (Translated from the Polish by Jennifer Croft)
Riverhead Books / Penguin Random House |
|
2023 |
King: A Life
Jonathan Eig
Farrar, Straus and Giroux / Macmillan Publishers | The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts: The True Story of the Bondwoman’s Narrative
Gregg Hecimovich
Ecco | Daughter of the Dragon: Anna May Wong’s Rendezvous with American History
Yunte Huang
Liveright | Betty Friedan: Magnificent Disruptor
Rachel Shteir
Yale University Press |
|
Trace Evidence
Charif Shanahan
Tin House Books | All Souls
Saskia Hamilton
Graywolf Press | The Gathering of Bastards
Romeo Oriogun
University of Nebraska Press | Information Desk
Robyn Schiff
Penguin Books |
|
Blackouts
Justin Torres
Farrar, Straus and Giroux / Macmillan Publishers | Tremor
Teju Cole
Random House | North Woods
Daniel Mason
Random House | Vengeance Is Mine
Marie NDiaye, translation by Jordan Stump
Knopf | Blackouts
Justin Torres
Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
|
Ordinary Notes
Christina Sharpe
Farrar, Straus and Giroux / Macmillan Publishers | Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs
Kerry Howley
Knopf | Who Gets Believed? When the Truth Isn’t Enough
Dina Nayeri
Catapult Books | The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War
Jeff Sharlet
W. W. Norton |
|
The Chapter: A Segmented History from Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century
Nicholas Dames
Princeton University Press | Creep: Accusations and Confessions
Myriam Gurba
Avid Reader Press | Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World
Naomi Klein
Farrar, Straus and Giroux | Pleasure and Efficacy: Of Pen Names, Cover Versions, and Other Trans Techniques
Grace E. Lavery
Princeton University Press |
|
I Would Meet You Anywhere: A Memoir
Susan Kiyo Ito
The Ohio State University Press | Secret Harvests: A Hidden Story of Separation and the Resilience of a Family Farm
David Mas Masumoto, with artwork by Patricia Wakida
Red Hen Press | Rotten Evidence: Reading and Writing in an Egyptian Prison
Ahmed Naji, translation by Katharine Halls
McSweeney’s | Story of a Poem: A Memoir
Matthew Zapruder
Unnamed Press |
|
The Last Pomegranate Tree
Bachtyar Ali and translated by Kareem Abdulrahman
Archipelago Books | Owlish
Dorothy Tse and translated by Natascha Bruce
Graywolf Press | Zakwato & Loglêdou’s Peril
Azo Vauguy and translated by Todd Fredson
Action Books | Happy Stories, Mostly
Norman Erikson Pasaribu and Translated by Tiffany Tsao
Feminist Press | Phantom Pain Wings
Kim Hyesoon, translation by Don Mee Choi
New Directions |
|
2024 |
Candida Royalle and the Sexual Revolution: A History from Below
Jane Kamensky
W. W. Norton | Family Romance: John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers
Jean Strouse
Farrar, Straus and Giroux | Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People
Tiya Miles
Penguin Press | The World She Edited: Katharine S. White at The New Yorker
Amy Reading
Mariner |
|
An Authentic Life
Jennifer Chang
Copper Canyon | Consider the Rooster
Oliver Baez Bendorf
Nightboat | Instructions for the Lovers
Dawn Lundy Martin
Nightboat | Scattered Snows, to the North
Carl Phillips
Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
|
James
Percival Everett
Doubleday / Penguin Random House | Beautyland
Marie-Helene Bertino
Farrar, Straus and Giroux | Godwin
Joseph O'Neill
Pantheon | Us Fools
Nora Lange
Two Dollar Radio |
|
The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq
Steve Coll
Penguin Press | The Freaks Came Out To Write: The Definitive History of the Village Voice, the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture
Tricia Romano
PublicAffairs | Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood
Gretchen Sisson
St. Martin’s | We’re Alone
Edwidge Danticat
Graywolf |
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Black Meme: A History of the Images that Make Us
Legacy Russell
Verso | The Blue Period: Black Writing in the Early Cold War
Jesse McCarthy
University of Chicago | Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance Today
Claire Bishop
Verso | Intervals
Marianne Brooker
Fitzcarraldo |
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The Last Fire Season: A Personal and Pyronatural History
Manjula Martin
Pantheon | Little Seed
Wei Tchou
Deep Vellum | The Minotaur at Calle Lanza
Zito Madu
Belt | Mother Archive: A Dominican Family Memoir
Erika Morillo
University of Iowa |
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The Children of the Ghetto: Star of the Sea
Elias Khoury, translation by Humphrey Davies
Archipelago | Herscht 07769
László Krasznahorkai, translation by Ottilie Mulzet
New Directions | Melvill
Rodrigo Fresán, translation by Will Vanderhyden
Letter | O
Judith Kiros, translation by Kira Josefsson
World Poetry | Traces of Enayat
Iman Mersal, translation by Robin Moger
Transit |
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