National Book Critics Circle Award Criticism Winners — Complete List (1975–2025) Home › National Book Critics Circle Award › Criticism Hayek's Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right by Quinn Slobodian 2025NBCCCriticism There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension by Hanif Abdurraqib 2024NBCCCriticism AmazonBookshop Deadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpression by Tina Post 2023NBCCCriticism Free Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age by Timothy Bewes 2022NBCCCriticism AmazonBookshop Girlhood by Melissa Febos 2021NBCCCriticism AmazonBookshop Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration by Nicole R. Fleetwood 2020NBCCCriticism AmazonBookshop Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Stories of Social Upheaval by Saidiya Hartman 2019NBCCCriticism AmazonBookshop Feel Free: Essays by Zadie Smith 2018NBCCCriticism AmazonBookshop You Play the Girl: On Playboy Bunnies, Stepford Wives, Train Wrecks, & Other Mixed Messages by Carina Chocano 2017NBCCCriticism AmazonBookshop White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide by Carol Anderson 2016NBCCCriticism AmazonBookshop The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson 2015NBCCCriticism AmazonBookshop The Essential Ellen Willis by Ellen Willis, edited byNona Willis Aronowitz 2014NBCCCriticism AmazonBookshop Distant Reading by Franco Moretti 2013NBCCCriticism AmazonBookshop Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights by Marina Warner 2012NBCCCriticism AmazonBookshop Otherwise Known as the Human Condition: Selected Essays and Reviews by Geoff Dyer 2011NBCCCriticism AmazonBookshop Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics: Russia, Poland, and the West by Clare Cavanagh 2010NBCCCriticism AmazonBookshop Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays by Eula Biss 2009NBCCCriticism AmazonBookshop Children's Literature: A Readers' History: Reader's History from Aesop to Harry Potter by Seth Lerer 2008NBCCCriticism AmazonBookshop The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross 2007NBCCCriticism AmazonBookshop Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences by Lawrence Weschler 2006NBCCCriticism AmazonBookshop The Undiscovered Country: Poetry in the Age of Tin by William Logan 2005NBCCCriticism AmazonBookshop Where You're At: Notes From the Frontline of a Hip-Hop Planet by Patrick Neate 2004NBCCCriticism AmazonBookshop River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West by Rebecca Solnit 2003NBCCCriticism AmazonBookshop Tests of Time by William H. Gass 2002NBCCCriticism AmazonBookshop The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews, 1971–2000 by Martin Amis 2001NBCCCriticism AmazonBookshop Quarrel & Quandary by Cynthia Ozick 2000NBCCCriticism AmazonBookshop Selected Non-Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges 1999NBCCCriticism AmazonBookshop Visions of Jazz: The First Century by Gary Giddins 1998NBCCCriticism AmazonBookshop Making Waves by Mario Vargas Llosa 1997NBCCCriticism AmazonBookshop Finding a Form by William H. Gass 1996NBCCCriticism AmazonBookshop The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France by Robert Darnton 1995NBCCCriticism AmazonBookshop The Culture of Bruising: Essays on Prizefighting, Literature, and Modern American Culture by Gerald Early 1994NBCCCriticism AmazonBookshop Opera in America: A Cultural History by John Dizikes 1993NBCCCriticism AmazonBookshop Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America by Garry Wills 1992NBCCCriticism AmazonBookshop Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory by Lawrence L. Langer 1991NBCCCriticism AmazonBookshop Encounters and Reflections: Art in the Historical Present by Arthur C. Danto 1990NBCCCriticism AmazonBookshop Not by Fact Alone: Essays on the Writing and Reading of History by John Clive 1989NBCCCriticism AmazonBookshop Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author by Clifford Geertz 1988NBCCCriticism AmazonBookshop Dance Writings by Edwin Denby 1987NBCCCriticism AmazonBookshop Less Than One: Selected Essays by Joseph Brodsky 1986NBCCCriticism AmazonBookshop Habitations of the Word: Essays by William H. Gass 1985NBCCCriticism AmazonBookshop Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry by Robert Hass 1984NBCCCriticism AmazonBookshop Hugging the Shore: Essays and Criticism by John Updike 1983NBCCCriticism AmazonBookshop The Second American Revolution and Other Essays by Gore Vidal 1982NBCCCriticism AmazonBookshop A Virgil Thomson Reader by Virgil Thomson 1981NBCCCriticism AmazonBookshop Part of Nature, Part of Us: Modern American Poets by Helen Vendler 1980NBCCCriticism AmazonBookshop The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels 1979NBCCCriticism AmazonBookshop Modern Art: 19th and 20th Centuries (Selected Papers, Volume 2) by Meyer Schapiro 1978NBCCCriticism AmazonBookshop On Photography by Susan Sontag 1977NBCCCriticism AmazonBookshop The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales by Bruno Bettelheim 1976NBCCCriticism AmazonBookshop The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell 1975NBCCCriticism AmazonBookshop
