National Book Critics Circle Award
The National Book Critics Circle Awards are a set of annual American literary awards by the National Book Critics Circle to promote "the finest books and reviews published in English".
The first NBCC awards were announced and presented January 16, 1976.
There are six awards to books published in the U.S. during the preceding calendar year, in six categories: Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Memoir/Autobiography, Biography, and Criticism. Four of them span the entire NBCC award history; Memoir/Autobiography and Biography were recognized by one "Autobiography/Biography" award for publication years 1983 to 2004, then replaced by two awards. Beginning in 2014, the NBCC also presents a special "first book" award across all 6 categories, named the John Leonard Award in honor of literary critic and NBCC founding member John Leonard, who died in 2008.
Books previously published in English are not eligible, such as re-issues and paperback editions. Nor does the NBC Circle consider "cookbooks, self help books, reference books, picture books or children's books". They do consider "translations, short story and essay collections, self published books, and any titles that fall under the general categories".
The judges are the volunteer directors of the NBCC who are 24 members serving rotating three-year terms, with eight elected annually by the voting members,
namely "professional book review editors and book reviewers".
Winners of the awards are announced each year at the NBCC awards ceremony in conjunction with the yearly membership meeting, which takes place in March.
Winners
Fiction
General nonfiction
Memoir/Autobiography
Biography
Biography/Autobiography (discontinued)
Poetry
Criticism
John Leonard Award
Award for a best first book in any genre.Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award
Ivan Sandrof was one founder of the National Book Critics Circle and its first President.The Sandrof Award has also been presented as the "Ivan Sandrof Award for Lifetime Achievement in Publishing" and the "Ivan Sandrof Award, Contribution to American Arts & Letters".
Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing
The Balakian Citation is annual. It honors Nona Balakian, who was one of three NBCC founders.For 43 years, Balakian was an editor on the staff of the New York Times Book Review.
Five finalists are announced each year, one of whom is selected as the winner of the citation. The award has been called "the most prestigious award for book criticism in the country".
Finalists
2019
Finalists were announced on January 11, 2020. The winners were announced March 12, 2020.Fiction
- Edwidge Danticat, Everything Inside
- Myla Goldberg, Feast Your Eyes
- Ben Lerner, The Topeka School
- Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive
- Colson Whitehead, The Nickel Boys
- Kate Brown, Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future
- Peter Hessler, The Buried: An Archaeology of the Egyptian Revolution
- Patrick Radden Keefe, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland
- Walt Odets, Out of the Shadows: Reimagining Gay Men's Lives
- Rachel Louise Snyder, No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us
- Laura Cumming, Five Days Gone: The Mystery of My Mother's Disappearance as a Child
- Ronan Farrow, Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators
- Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman, Sounds Like Titanic: A Memoir
- Mira Jacob, Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations
- Chanel Miller, Know My Name: A Memoir
- Charles King, Gods of the Upper Air: How A Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century
- Josh Levin, The Queen: The Forgotten Life Behind an American Myth
- Lucasta Miller, L.E.L.: The Lost Life and Scandalous Death of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, the Celebrated “Female Byron”
- George Packer, Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century
- Sonia Purnell, A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II
- Hanif Abdurraqib, Go Ahead in the Rain
- Lydia Davis, Essays One
- Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval
- Peter Schjeldahl, Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light, 100 Art Writings 1988-2018
- Maria Tumarkin, Axiomatic
- Jericho Brown, The Tradition
- Ilya Kaminsky, Deaf Republic
- Morgan Parker, Magical Negro
- Mary Ruefle, Dunce
- Brian Teare, Doomstead Days
2018
Fiction
- Anna Burns, Milkman
- Patrick Chamoiseau, Slave Old Man. Translated by Linda Coverdale
- Denis Johnson, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden
- Rachel Kushner, The Mars Room
- Luis Alberto Urrea, The House of Broken Angels
- Francisco Cantú, The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border
- Steve Coll, Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan
- Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure
- Adam Winkler, We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights
- Lawrence Wright, God Save Texas: A Journey into the Soul of the Lone Star State
- Richard Beard, The Day That Went Missing: A Family's Story
- Nicole Chung, All You Can Ever Know: A Memoir
- Rigoberto Gonzalez, What Drowns the Flowers in Your Mouth: A Memoir of Brotherhood
- Nora Krug, Belonging: A German Reckons With History and Home
- Nell Painter, Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over
- Tara Westover, Educated: A Memoir
- Christopher Bonanos, Flash: The Making of Weegee the Famous
- Craig Brown, Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret
- Yunte Huang, Inseparable: The Original Siamese Twins and Their Rendezvous with American History
- Mark Lamster, The Man in the Glass House: Philip Johnson, Architect of the Modern Century
- Jane Leavy, The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World He Created
- Robert Christgau, Is It Still Good to Ya?: Fifty Years of Rock Criticism, 1967-2017
- Stephen Greenblatt, Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics
- Terrance Hayes, To Float in the Space Between: A Life and Work in Conversation with the Life and Work of Etheridge Knight
- Lacy M. Johnson, The Reckonings: Essays
- Zadie Smith, Feel Free: Essays
- Terrance Hayes, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin
- Ada Limón, The Carrying
- Erika Meitner, Holy Moly Carry Me
- Diane Seuss, Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl
- Adam Zagajewski, Asymmetry. Translated by Clare Cavanagh
- Tommy Orange, There There
- Arte Público Press
- Maureen Corrigan
2017
Fiction
- Mohsin Hamid, Exit West
- Alice McDermott, The Ninth Hour
- Arundhati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
- Joan Silber, Improvement
- Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing
- Jack Davis, Gulf: The Making of An American Sea
- Frances FitzGerald, The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America
- Masha Gessen, The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia
- Kapka Kassabova, Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe
- Adam Rutherford, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes
- Thi Bui, The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir
- Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of Body
- Henry Marsh, Admissions: Life as a Brain Surgeon
- Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, The Girl From the Metropol Hotel: Growing Up in Communist Russia
- Xiaolu Guo, Nine Continents: A Memoir In and Out of China
- Caroline Fraser, Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder
- Edmund Gordon, The Invention of Angela Carter: A Biography
- Howard Markel, The Kelloggs: The Battling Brothers of Battle Creek
- William Taubman, Gorbachev: His Life and Times
- Ken Whyte, Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times
- Carina Chocano, You Play the Girl: On Playboy Bunnies, Stepford Wives, Train Wrecks, & Other Mixed Messages
- Edwidge Danticat, The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story
- Camille Dungy, Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History
- Valeria Luiselli, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions
- Kevin Young, Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts and Fake News
- Nuar Alsadir, Fourth Person Singular
- James Longenbach, Earthling
- Layli Long Soldier, Whereas
- Frank Ormsby, The Darkness of Snow
- Ana Ristović, Directions for Use
- John McPhee
- Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties
- Charles Finch
2016
Fiction
- Michael Chabon, '
- Louise Erdrich, LaRose
- Adam Haslett, Imagine Me Gone
- Ann Patchett, Commonwealth
- Zadie Smith, Swing Time
- Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
- Ibram X. Kendi,
- Marion Coutts, The Iceberg
- Jenny Diski, In Gratitude
- Hope Jahren, Lab Girl
- Hisham Matar, '
- Kao Kalia Yang, The Song Poet: A Memoir of My Father
- Nigel Cliff, Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story
- Ruth Franklin, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life
- Joe Jackson, Black Elk: The Life of an American Visionary
- Michael Tisserand, Krazy: George Herriman, a Life in Black and White
- Frances Wilson, Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey
- Carol Anderson, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide
- Mark Greif, Against Everything: Essays
- Alice Kaplan, Looking for The Stranger: Albert Camus and the Life of a Literary Classic
- Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone
- Peter Orner, Am I Alone Here?: Notes on Living to Read and Reading to Live
- Ishion Hutchinson, House of Lords and Commons
- Tyehimba Jess, Olio
- Bernadette Mayer, Works and Days
- Robert Pinsky, At the Foundling Hospital
- Monica Youn, Blackacre
- Margaret Atwood
- Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing
- Michelle Dean
2015
Fiction
- Paul Beatty, The Sellout
- Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies
- Valeria Luiselli, The Story of My Teeth
- Anthony Marra, The Tsar of Love and Techno
- Ottessa Moshfegh, Eileen
- Mary Beard, '
- Ari Berman, Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America
- Jill Leovy, Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America
- Sam Quinones, Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic
- Brian Seibert, What the Eye Hears: A History of Tap Dancing
- Elizabeth Alexander, The Light of the World
- Vivian Gornick, The Odd Woman and the City
- George Hodgman, Bettyville
- Margo Jefferson,
- Terry Alford, Fortune’s Fool: The Life of John Wilkes Booth
- Charlotte Gordon, Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley
- T.J. Stiles, Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America
- Rosemary Sullivan, Stalin's Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva
- Karin Wieland and Shelly Frisch, Dietrich and Riefenstahl: Hollywood, Berlin, and a Century in Two Lives
- Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me
- Leo Damrosch, Eternity's Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake
- Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts
- Colm Tóibín, On Elizabeth Bishop
- James Wood, The Nearest Thing to Life
- Ross Gay, Catalogue of Unabashed Gratitude
- Terrance Hayes, How to Be Drawn
- Ada Limón, Bright Dead Things
- Sinéad Morrissey, '
- Frank Stanford, What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford
- Wendell Berry
- Kirstin Valdez Quade, Night at the Fiestas
- Carlos Lozada
2014
Fiction
- Rabih Alameddine, An Unnecessary Woman
- Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings
- Lily King, Euphoria
- Chang-rae Lee, On Such a Full Sea
- Marilynne Robinson, Lila
- David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation
- Peter Finn and Petra Couvee, The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle over a Forbidden Book
- Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
- Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, translated from the French by Arthur Goldhammer
- Hector Tobar, Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle that Set Them Free
- Saeed Jones, Prelude to Bruise
- Willie Perdomo, The Essential Hits of Shorty Bon Bon
- Claudia Rankine, '
- Christian Wiman, Once in the West
- Jake Adam York, Abide
- Blake Bailey, The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait
- Roz Chast, Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?
- Lacy M. Johnson, The Other Side
- Gary Shteyngart, Little Failure
- Meline Toumani, There Was and There Was Not
- Ezra Greenspan, William Wells Brown: An African American Life
- S. C. Gwynne, Rebel Yell: The Violence, Passion and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson
- John Lahr,
- Eula Biss, On Immunity: An Innoculation
- Vikram Chandra, Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty
- Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric
- Lynne Tillman, What Would Lynne Tillman Do?
- Ellen Willis, The Essential Ellen Willis, edited by Nona Willis Aronowitz
- Toni Morrison
- Phil Klay, Redeployment
- Alexandra Schwartz
- Charles Finch
- B. K. Fischer
- Benjamin Moser
- Lisa Russ Spaar
2013
Fiction
- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah
- Alice McDermott, Someone
- Javier Marías, The Infatuations, translated by Margaret Jull Costa
- Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being
- Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch
- Kevin Cullen and Shelley Murphy, Whitey Bulger: America's Most Wanted Gangster and the Manhunt That Brought Him to Justice
- Sheri Fink, '
- David Finkel, Thank You for Your Service
- George Packer, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America
- Lawrence Wright, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief
- Frank Bidart, Metaphysical Dog
- Lucie Brock-Broido, Stay, Illusion
- Denise Duhamel, Blowout
- Bob Hicok, Elegy Owed
- Carmen Gimenez Smith, Milk and Filth
- Sonali Deraniyagala, Wave
- Aleksandar Hemon, The Book of My Lives
- Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby
- Jesmyn Ward, Men We Reaped
- Amy Wilentz, Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter From Haiti
- Scott Anderson, Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East
- Leo Damrosch, Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World
- John Eliot Gardiner, Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven
- Linda Leavell, Holding On Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore
- Mark Thompson, Birth Certificate: The Story of Danilo Kis
- Hilton Als, White Girls
- Mary Beard, Confronting the Classics: Traditions, Adventures and Innovations
- Jonathan Franzen, The Kraus Project: Essays by Karl Kraus, translated and annotated by Jonathan Franzen with Paul Reitter and Daniel Kehlmann
- Janet Malcolm, Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers
- Franco Moretti, Distant Reading
- Rolando Hinojosa-Smith
- Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena
- Katherine A. Powers
- Ruth Franklin
- James Marcus
- Roxana Robinson
- Alexandra Schwartz
2012
Fiction
- Laurent Binet, HHhH tr. by Sam Taylor
- Ben Fountain, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
- Adam Johnson, The Orphan Master's Son
- Lydia Millet, Magnificence
- Zadie Smith, NW
- Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity
- Steve Coll, '
- Jim Holt, '
- David Quammen, '
- Andrew Solomon, '
- Paul Elie, Reinventing Bach
- Daniel Mendelsohn, Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture
- Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey
- Marina Warner, Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights
- Kevin Young, The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness
- David Ferry, Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations
- Lucia Perillo, On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths
- Allan Peterson, Fragile Acts
- D. A. Powell, Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys
- A. E. Stallings, Olives
- Reyna Grande, The Distance Between Us
- Maureen N. McLane, My Poets
- Anthony Shadid, '
- Leanne Shapton, Swimming Studies
- Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, In the House of the Interpreter
- Robert A. Caro, The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson
- Lisa Cohen, All We Know: Three Lives
- Michael Gorra, Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece
- Lisa Jarnot, Robert Duncan, The Ambassador from Venus: A Biography
- Tom Reiss,
- Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar
- William Deresiewicz
2011
Fiction
- Dana Spiotta, Stone Arabia
- Teju Cole, Open City
- Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot
- Alan Hollinghurst, The Stranger's Child
- Edith Pearlman, '
- John Jeremiah Sullivan,
- David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything
- Geoff Dyer, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition: Selected Essays and Reviews
- Jonathan Lethem, The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, Etc.
- Dubravka Ugresic, Karaoke Culture: Essays
- Ellen Willis, Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music
- Bruce Smith, Devotions
- Yusef Komunyakaa, The Chameleon Couch
- Aracelis Girmay, Kingdom Animalia
- Forrest Gander, Core Samples From the World
- Laura Kasischke, Space, In Chains
- Diane Ackerman, One Hundred Names for Love: A Stroke, a Marriage, and the Language of Healing
- Mira Bartók, The Memory Palace
- Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, Harlem is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America
- Luis J. Rodriguez, It Calls You Back: An Odyssey through Love, Addiction, Revolutions, and Healing
- Deb Olin Unferth, Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War
- Mary Gabriel, Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of the Revolution
- John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life
- Paul Hendrickson, Hemingway's Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934–1961
- Manning Marable, '
- Ezra F. Vogel, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China
- Robert Silvers, editor of New York Review of Books
- Kathryn Schulz
2010
Fiction
- Jennifer Egan, A Visit From the Goon Squad
- Jonathan Franzen, Freedom
- David Grossman, To The End of the Land
- Hans Keilson, Comedy in a Minor Key
- Paul Murray, Skippy Dies
- Barbara Demick, '
- S.C. Gwynne, '
- Jennifer Homans, '
- Siddhartha Mukherjee, '
- Isabel Wilkerson, '
- Elif Batuman,
- Sarah Bakewell, How To Live, Or A Life Of Montaigne
- Selina Hastings, '
- Yunte Huang, '
- Thomas Powers, The Killing Of Crazy Horse
- Tom Segev, '
- Kai Bird, Crossing Mandelbaum Gate Coming of Age Between the Arabs and Israelis, 1956-1978
- David Dow, The Autobiography of an Execution
- Christopher Hitchens,
- Anne Carson, Nox
- Kathleen Graber, The Eternal City
- Terrance Hayes, Lighthead
- Kay Ryan, The Best of It
- C.D. Wright, One With Others
- Sarah L. Courteau
- William Deresiewicz
- Ruth Franklin
- Kathryn Harrison
- Parul Sehgal
- Dalkey Archive Press
2009
Fiction
- Bonnie Jo Campbell, American Salvage
- Marlon James, The Book of Night Women
- Michelle Huneven, Blame
- Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall
- Jayne Anne Phillips, Lark and Termite
- Wendy Doniger, '
- Greg Grandin, '
- Richard Holmes, '
- Tracy Kidder, Strength in What Remains
- William T. Vollmann, Imperial
- Eula Biss, Notes From No Man's Land: American Essays
- Stephen Burt, Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry
- Morris Dickstein, Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression
- David Hajdu, Heroes and Villains: Essays on Music, Movies, Comics, and Culture
- Greg Milner, Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music
- Blake Bailey, Cheever: A Life
- Brad Gooch, Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor
- Benjamin Moser,
- Diana Athill, Somewhere Towards the End
- Debra Gwartney, Live Through This: A Mother's Memoir of Runaway Daughters and Reclaimed Love
- Mary Karr, Lit
- Kati Marton, Enemies of the People: My Family's Journey to America
- Edmund White, City Boy
- Rae Armantrout, Versed
- Louise Glück, A Village Life
- D. A. Powell, Chronic
- Eleanor Ross Taylor, Captive Voices: New and Selected Poems, 1960–2008
- Rachel Zucker, Museum of Accidents
- Joan Acocella
- Michael Antman
- William Deresiewicz
- Donna Seaman
- Wendy Smith
- Joyce Carol Oates
2008
Fiction
- Roberto Bolaño, 2666
- Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project
- Marilynne Robinson, Home
- Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge
- M. Glenn Taylor, The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart
- Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering
- Dexter Filkins, The Forever War
- George C. Herring, From Colony to Superpower: US Foreign Relations Since 1776
- Allan Lichtman, White Protestant Nation
- Jane Mayer, The Dark Side
- Rick Bass, Why I Came West
- Helene Cooper, The House on Sugar Beach
- Honor Moore, The Bishop’s Daughter
- Andrew X. Pham, The Eaves of Heaven
- Ariel Sabar, My Father’s Paradise: A Son’s Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq
- Steve Coll, The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in an American Century
- Patrick French, '
- Paul J. Giddings, Ida, A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching
- Annette Gordon-Reed, '
- Brenda Wineapple, White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson & Thomas Wentworth Higginson
- Juan Felipe Herrera, Half the World in Light
- Devin Johnston, Sources
- August Kleinzahler, Sleeping it Off in Rapid City
- Pierre Martory, The Landscapist
- Brenda Shaughnessy, Human Dark with Sugar
- Richard Brody, Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard
- Vivian Gornick, The Men in My Life
- Joel L. Kraemer, Maimonides: The Life and World of One Of Civilization’s Greatest Minds
- Seth Lerer, Children’s Literature: A Reader's History from Aesop to Harry Potter
- Reginald Shepard, Orpheus in the Bronx: Essays on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry
- Michael Antman
- Ron Charles
- Kathryn Harrison
- Laila Lalami
- Todd Shy
- PEN American Center
2007
Fiction
- Vikram Chandra, Sacred Games
- Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
- Hisham Matar, In the Country of Men
- Joyce Carol Oates, The Gravedigger's Daughter
- Marianne Wiggins, The Shadow Catcher
- Philip Gura, American Transcendentalism
- Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America 1815–1848
- Harriet Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present
- Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA
- Alan Weisman, The World Without Us
- Joshua Clark, Heart Like Water: Surviving Katrina and Life in Its Disaster Zone
- Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I'm Dying
- Joyce Carol Oates, The Journals of Joyce Carol Oates, 1973–1982
- Sara Paretsky, Writing in an Age of Silence
- Anna Politkovskaya, Russian Diary: A Journalist's Final Account of Life, Corruption and Death in Putin's Russia
- Tim Jeal, Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer
- Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton
- Arnold Rampersad, Ralph Ellison
- John Richardson, A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917–1932
- Claire Tomalin, Thomas Hardy
- Mary Jo Bang, Elegy
- Matthea Harvey, Modern Life
- Michael O'Brien, Sleeping and Waking
- Tom Pickard, The Ballad of Jamie Allan
- Tadeusz Różewicz, New Poems
- Joan Acocella, Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints
- Julia Alvarez, Once Upon a Quniceanera
- Susan Faludi, The Terror Dream
- Ben Ratliff, Coltrane: The Story of a Sound
- Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
- Brooke Allen
- Sam Anderson, book critic for New York magazine
- Ron Charles
- Walter Kirn
- Adam Kirsch
- Emilie Buchwald, writer, editor, and founding publisher of Milkweed Editions, in Minneapolis.