National Book Critics Circle Awards: 2012 Winners

The 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award winners were announced on March 8.

Fiction	Nonfiction	Biography
Binocular Vision by Edith Pearlman	Liberty's Exiles by Maya Jasanoff	George F. Kennan: An American Life by John Lewis Gaddis
Starred Review. A finely tuned collection by writer's writer Pearlman combines the best of previous collections (How to Fall; etc.) with austere, polished new work. Pearlman's characters for the most part are stiff-upper-lipped Northeasterners who take wha... Read more	As well as a war of independence, the Revolutionary War was a civil conflict in which the losers, white, black, and Indian loyalists, paid dearly. Facing retribution from the victorious patriots, tens of thousands fled the new U.S. to havens in the British... Read more	We can be grateful to John Lewis Gaddis for bringing Kennan back to us, thoughtful, human, self-centred, contradictory, inspirational - a permanent spur as consciences are wont to be. Masterfully researched, exhaustively documented, Gaddis's moving work gi... Read more
Autobiography	Poetry	Criticism
The Memory Palace by Mira Bartok	Space, In Chains by Laura Kasischke	Otherwise Known as the Human Condition by Geoff Dyer
Starred Review. This moving, compassionately candid memoir by artist and children... Read more	Laura Kasischke's poems have the same haunting qualities and truth as our most potent memories and dreams. Through ghostly voices, fragmented narratives, overheard conversations, songs, and prayers in language reminiscent of medieval lyrics... Read more	Geoff Dyer has earned the devotion of passionate fans on both sides of the Atlantic through his wildly inventive, romantic novels as well as several brilliant, uncategorizable works of nonfiction. All the while he has been writing some of the wittiest, most incisive criticism...Read more