Here are this year’s finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Awards.
Autobiography
Hanif Abdurraqib, A Little Devil in America: Notes In Praise Of Black Performance
(Random House)
Jeremy Atherton Lin, Gay Bar: Why We Went Out
(Little, Brown)
Rodrigo Garcia, A Farewell To Gabo And Mercedes: A Son’s Memoir
(HarperVia)
Doireann Ní Ghríofa, A Ghost In the Throat
(Biblioasis)
Albert Samaha, Concepcion: An Immigrant Family’s Fortunes
(Riverhead)
Biography
Susan Bernofsky, Clairvoyant of the Small: The Life of Robert Walser
(Yale University Press)
Keisha N. Blain, Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America
(Beacon Press)
Rebecca Donner, All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler
(Little, Brown)
Mark Harris, Mike Nichols: A Life
(Penguin Press)
Alexander Nemerov, Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York
(Penguin Press)
Criticism
Melissa Febos, Girlhood
(Bloomsbury)
Jenny Diski, Why Didn’t You Do What You Were Told?
(Bloomsbury)
Jesse McCarthy, Who Will Pay Reparations On My Soul?
(Liveright)
Mark McGurl, Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon
(Verso)
Amia Srinivasan, The Right To Sex
(FSG)
Fiction
Joshua Cohen, The Netanyahus
(NYRB)
Rachel Cusk, Second Place
(FSG)
Sarah Hall, Burntcoat
(Custom House)
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Love Songs of W.E.B. DuBois
(Harper)
Colson Whitehead, Harlem Shuffle
(Doubleday)
Nonfiction
Patrick Radden Keefe, Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty
(Doubleday)
Joshua Prager, The Family Roe: An American Story
(Norton)
Sam Quinones, The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth
(Bloomsbury)
Clint Smith, How the Word Is Passed
(Little, Brown)
Rebecca Solnit, Orwell’s Roses
(Viking)
Poetry
B.K. Fischer, Ceive
(BOA)
Donika Kelly, The Renunciations
(Graywolf)
Rajiv Mohabir, Cutlish
(Four Way)
Cheswayo Mphanza, The Rhinehart Frames
(University of Nebraska)
Diane Seuss, frank: sonnets
(Graywolf)
John Leonard Prize