The National Book Critics Circle selects awards in six categories: Fiction, Nonfiction, Biography, Autobiography, Poetry, and Criticism. The board divides itself into committees for each category, which are responsible for nominating books to be considered in each category.
The National Book Critics Circle was founded in April 1974 at the Algonquin Hotel in New York City, with founding members John Leonard, Nona Balakian, and Ivan Sandrof intending to extend the Algonquin round table to a national conversation. The NBCC gained 501(c)(3) status in October 2006, and in 2010 received an NEA grant to support the website and its literary blog, Critical Mass.
The finalists are as follows:
Autobiography
- Five Days Gone: The Mystery of My Mother’s Disappearance as a Child by Laura Cumming (Scribner)
- Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators by Ronan Farrow (Little, Brown)
- Sounds Like Titanic: A Memoir by Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman (W. W. Norton)
- Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations by Mira Jacob (One World)
- Know My Name: A Memoir by Chanel Miller (Viking)
Biography
- Gods of the Upper Air: How A Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century by Charles King (Doubleday)
- The Queen: The Forgotten Life Behind an American Myth by Josh Levin (Little, Brown)
- L.E.L.: The Lost Life and Scandalous Death of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, the Celebrated “Female Byron” by Lucasta Miller (Knopf)
- Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century by George Packer (Knopf)
- A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II by Sonia Purnell (Viking)
Criticism
- Go Ahead in the Rain by Hanif Abdurraqib (University of Texas Press)
- Essays One by Lydia Davis (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
- Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval by Saidiya Hartman (W.W. Norton)
- Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light, 100 Art Writings 1988-2018 by Peter Schjeldahl (Abrams)
- Axiomatic by Maria Tumarkin (Transit Books)
Fiction
- Everything Inside by Edwidge Danticat (Knopf)
- Feast Your Eyes by Myla Goldberg (Scribner)
- The Topeka School by Ben Lerner (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
- Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli (Knopf)
- The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead (Doubleday)
Nonfiction
- Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future by Kate Brown (W.W. Norton)
- The Buried: An Archaeology of the Egyptian Revolution by Peter Hessler (Penguin Press)
- Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe (Doubleday)
- Out of the Shadows: Reimagining Gay Men’s Lives by Walt Odets (Farrar, Straus and Girioux)
- No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us by Rachel Louise Snyder (Bloomsbury)
Poetry
- The Tradition by Jericho Brown (Copper Canyon Press)
- Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky (Graywolf Press)
- Magical Negro by Morgan Parker (Tin House)
- Dunce by Mary Ruefle (Wave Books)
- Doomstead Days by Brian Teare (Nightboat Books)
