National Book Critics Circle Winners

The NBCC winners were announced last night (annotations are from the press release):

Fiction

Edith Pearlman, Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories (U of N.C., Wilmington, Lookout Books); “a collection of 34 Chekhov-like short stories that was also nominated for the National Book Award. The publication is the first from Lookout Books and a triumph for Pearlman’s distinctive storytelling, bringing it to a larger audience.”

 

Nonfiction

Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (RH/Knopf);  “a book of fresh, original, and sprightly scholarship, by Harvard professor of British history Jasanoff, acknowledging colonists’ response to Loyalists during the Revolutionary War and the consequences for Britain’s entire empire thereafter.”

Biography

John Lewis Gaddis,  George F. Kennan: An American Life (Penguin Press); “a book that brings alive the remarkable American statesman while also delivering a profound understanding of U.S. foreign policy in the 20th-century.”

Poetry

Laura Kasischke, Space, in Chains, (Copper Canyon Press);  “a formally inventive work that speaks to the horrors and delights of ordinary life in an utterly original way.”

Autobiography

Mira Bartók, The Memory Palace: A Memoir (S&S/Free Press); “a book that rose to the formal challenge of blending her mother’s journals, reflections on her mother’s mental illness and subsequent homelessness, and thoughts on her own recovery from a head injury to create a heartfelt yet respectful work of art.”

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