What the Critics Picked: The NBCC Award Judges on the 30 Finalists

On January 18th, The National Book Critics Circle Awards announced its finalists for the publishing year 2015 in six categories, autobiography, biography, criticism, fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. The award ceremony will take place tonight at the New School, and is free and open to the public. In the meantime, check out what the judges of the NBCC awards have to say about each finalist’s work.

Autobiography:

The Light of the World, Elizabeth Alexander (Grand Central Publishing)

The Odd Woman and the City, Vivian Gornick (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Bettyville, George Hodgman (Viking)

Negroland, Margo Jefferson (Pantheon)

H Is for Hawk, Helen Macdonald (Grove Press)

Biography:

Fortune’s Fool: The Life of John Wilkes Booth, Terry Alford (Oxford University Press)

Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley, Charlotte Gordon (Random House)

Custer’s Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America, T.J. Stiles (Alfred A. Knopf)

Stalin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva, Rosemary Sullivan (Harper)

Dietrich and Riefenstahl: Hollywood, Berlin, and a Century in Two Lives, Karin Wieland, trans. Shelley Frisch (Liveright)

Criticism:

Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates (Spiegel & Grau)

Eternity’s Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake, Leo Damrosch (Yale University Press)

The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson (Graywolf)

On Elizabeth Bishop, Colm Tóibín (Princeton University Press)

The Nearest Thing to Life, James Wood (Brandeis University Press)

Fiction:

The Sellout, Paul Beatty (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Fates and Furies, Lauren Groff (Riverhead)

The Story of My Teeth, Valeria Luiselli, trans. Christina MacSweeney (Coffee House Press)

The Tsar of Love and Techno, Anthony Marra (Hogarth)

Eileen, Ottessa Moshfegh (Penguin Press)

Nonfiction:

SPQR: A History of Rome, Mary Beard (Liveright)

Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America, Ari Berman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America, Jill Leovy (Spiegel & Grau)

Dreamland: The True Story of America’s Opiate Epidemic, Sam Quinones (Bloomsbury)

What the Eye Hears: A History of Tap Dancing, Brian Seibert (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Poetry:

Catalogue of Unabashed Gratitude, Ross Gay (University of Pittsburgh Press)

How to Be Drawn, Terrance Hayes (Penguin)

Bright Dead Things, Ada Limón (Milkweed Editions)

Parallax and Selected Poems, Sinéad Morrissey (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford, Frank Stanford (Copper Canyon Press)