The finalists for the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) awards have been announced. The NBCC honours outstanding writing and fosters a national conversation about reading, criticism and literature.
Fiction
- The Sellout by Paul Beatty
- Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff
- The Story of My Teeth by Valeria Luiselli
- The Tsar of Love and Techno by Anthony Marra
- Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh
Non-fiction
- SPQR: A History of Rome by Mary Beard
- Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America by Ari Berman
- Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America by Jill Leovy
- Dreamland: The True Story of America’s Opiate Epidemic by Sam Quinones
- What the Eye Hears: A History of Tap Dancing by Brian Seibert
Autobiography
- The Light of the World by Elizabeth Alexander
- The Odd Woman and the City by Vivian Gornick
- Bettyville by George Hodgman
- Negroland by Margo Jefferson
- H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald
Biography
- Fortune’s Fool: The Life of John Wilkes Booth by Terry Alford
- Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley by Charlotte Gordon
- Custer’s Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America by T.J. Stiles
- Stalin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva by Rosemary Sullivan
- Dietrich and Riefenstahl: Hollywood, Berlin, and a Century in Two Lives by Karin Wieland and Shelly Frisch
Criticism
- Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
- Eternity’s Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake by Leo Damrosch
- The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson
- On Elizabeth Bishop by Colm Tóibín
- The Nearest Thing to Life by James Wood
Poetry
- Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude by Ross Gay
- How to Be Drawn by Terrance Hayes
- Bright Dead Things by Ada Limón
- Parallax by Sinéad Morrissey
- What About This by Frank Stanford
