National Book Critics Circle

“’The Portrait of a Lady,’ Gorra argues, is ‘a drama of the perceiving mind, and one that… hangs upon the point of view of its protagonist.’ Much the same can be said of Gorra’s fresh take on biography itself.””—Marcela Valdes on Michael Gorra’s “Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of An American Masterpiece,” an NBCC finalist in autobiography.

“Perillo is everywhere.  A slate gray boulder, glinting with mica.”—John Reed on Lucy Perillo’s On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths, an NBCC finalist in poetry.

“For a 702-page book with 199 pages of notes and bibliography, Andrew Solomon’s Far From the Treefeels surprisingly intimate.”—-Laurie Muchnick on Andrew Solomon’s Far From the Tree, an NBCC finalist in nonfiction

“Creating The Black Count, Reiss has performed rather like a super-hero himself. Blowing up a safe, hunting down ancient letters, military reports, and newspaper clippings, he has reconstructed the life of a man who has been dead for more than 200 years. With precision and élan, he captures the suspense and vigor of Dumas’s life while also turning it into a study of “the world’s first civil rights movement,” a time in the 1750s and 1760’s when the French Revolution ended both slavery and discrimination based on race.”—Marcela Valdes on Tom Reiss’ The Black Count, an NBCC finalist in biography

“His essays often have a deft structure, building an essential question that is left hanging. Keep reading… and eventually you’ll arrive at the answer. But the pleasure is not in the answer, necesssarily — it’s in the process.”—Carolyn Kellogg on Daniel Mendelsohn’s Waiting for the Barbarians, an NBCC finalist in criticism

“I prefer to consider that the NW postal zone is more akin to Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha County and his novel As I Lay Dying. Both employ stream of consciousness technique, multiple narrators and varying chapter lengths and voices. One section will have quotation marks, while another will do without the punctuation. NW speaks in the polyglot of the street and in slogans and the TV news sound bites of dinner parties.” —-Gregg Barrios on Zadie Smith’s NW, an NBCC finalist in fiction.

“In language that is impressionistic and style that rejects chronological narrative, Leanne Shapton’s Swimming Studies is both paean to and rejection of the lap lane.”—-Elizabeth Taylor on Leanne Shapton’s Swimming Studies, an NBCC finalist in autobiography

“In these verses, Powell constructs a palimpsest to a younger more idealized self, a guidebook that perhaps went unwritten as he – and scores of others – were growing up gay.”—NBCC board member Gregg Barrios on D.A. Powell’s Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys, a poetry finalist in this year’s awards.

“[I]t is an ambitious book, not so much for the sweep of its action as for its deep and nuanced investigation of all the most important issues: life, death, love, longing, extinction, the ongoing existential dilemma of what we are doing here”—-David L. Ulin on Lydia Millet’s Magnificence, a fiction finalist in this year’s NBCC awards.