National Book Critics Circle Award Criticism Winners — Complete List (1975–2025)

• 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

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• Deadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpression by Tina Post

  2023NBCCCriticism
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  Free Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age by Timothy Bewes

  2022NBCCCriticism

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  Girlhood by Melissa Febos

  2021NBCCCriticism

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  Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration by Nicole R. Fleetwood

  2020NBCCCriticism

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  Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Stories of Social Upheaval by Saidiya Hartman

  2019NBCCCriticism

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  Feel Free: Essays by Zadie Smith

  2018NBCCCriticism

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  You Play the Girl: On Playboy Bunnies, Stepford Wives, Train Wrecks, & Other Mixed Messages by Carina Chocano

  2017NBCCCriticism

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  White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide by Carol Anderson

  2016NBCCCriticism

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  The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson

  2015NBCCCriticism

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  The Essential Ellen Willis by Ellen Willis, edited byNona Willis Aronowitz

  2014NBCCCriticism

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  Distant Reading by Franco Moretti

  2013NBCCCriticism

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• Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights by Marina Warner

  2012NBCCCriticism

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  Otherwise Known as the Human Condition: Selected Essays and Reviews by Geoff Dyer

  2011NBCCCriticism

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  Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics: Russia, Poland, and the West by Clare Cavanagh

  2010NBCCCriticism

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  Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays by Eula Biss

  2009NBCCCriticism

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• Children's Literature: A Readers' History: Reader's History from Aesop to Harry Potter by Seth Lerer

  2008NBCCCriticism

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• The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross

  2007NBCCCriticism

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  Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences by Lawrence Weschler

  2006NBCCCriticism

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  The Undiscovered Country: Poetry in the Age of Tin by William Logan

  2005NBCCCriticism

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  Where You're At: Notes From the Frontline of a Hip-Hop Planet by Patrick Neate

  2004NBCCCriticism

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  River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West by Rebecca Solnit

  2003NBCCCriticism

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• Tests of Time by William H. Gass

  2002NBCCCriticism

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  The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews, 1971–2000 by Martin Amis

  2001NBCCCriticism

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  Quarrel & Quandary by Cynthia Ozick

  2000NBCCCriticism

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  Selected Non-Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges

  1999NBCCCriticism

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  Visions of Jazz: The First Century by Gary Giddins

  1998NBCCCriticism

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  Making Waves by Mario Vargas Llosa

  1997NBCCCriticism

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  Finding a Form by William H. Gass

  1996NBCCCriticism

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  The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France by Robert Darnton

  1995NBCCCriticism

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  The Culture of Bruising: Essays on Prizefighting, Literature, and Modern American Culture by Gerald Early

  1994NBCCCriticism

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  Opera in America: A Cultural History by John Dizikes

  1993NBCCCriticism

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  Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America by Garry Wills

  1992NBCCCriticism

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  Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory by Lawrence L. Langer

  1991NBCCCriticism

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  Encounters and Reflections: Art in the Historical Present by Arthur C. Danto

  1990NBCCCriticism

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  Not by Fact Alone: Essays on the Writing and Reading of History by John Clive

  1989NBCCCriticism

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  Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author by Clifford Geertz

  1988NBCCCriticism

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  Dance Writings by Edwin Denby

  1987NBCCCriticism

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  Less Than One: Selected Essays by Joseph Brodsky

  1986NBCCCriticism

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  Habitations of the Word: Essays by William H. Gass

  1985NBCCCriticism

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  Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry by Robert Hass

  1984NBCCCriticism

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• Hugging the Shore: Essays and Criticism by John Updike

  1983NBCCCriticism

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  The Second American Revolution and Other Essays by Gore Vidal

  1982NBCCCriticism

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  A Virgil Thomson Reader by Virgil Thomson

  1981NBCCCriticism

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  Part of Nature, Part of Us: Modern American Poets by Helen Vendler

  1980NBCCCriticism

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  The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels

  1979NBCCCriticism

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• Modern Art: 19th and 20th Centuries (Selected Papers, Volume 2) by Meyer Schapiro

  1978NBCCCriticism
• On Photography by Susan Sontag

  1977NBCCCriticism

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  The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales by Bruno Bettelheim

  1976NBCCCriticism

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  The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell

  1975NBCCCriticism

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