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At the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) awards last night, each winner was introduced by a critic–the only literary award to include a free book review along with the prize. GalleyCat Reviews has excerpted choice passages from each of these literary essays.
The criticism award went to Eula Biss for Notes From No Man’s Land: American Essays (Graywolf Press). Lizzie Skurnick reviewed: “By approaching her subjects sideways, Biss avoids sounding dry or clumsily political. But she also makes an implicit point–the story of our country is not straightforward, but one of unexpected siblings and strange adoptions, a story of change, adaptation, and surprising ancestry.”
The poetry award went to Rae Armantrout for Versed (Wesleyan). James Marcus reviewed: “Here as elsewhere, she has a fondness for the snub-nosed, snapped-off line bequeathed to American poetry by William Carlos Williams. Her attitude to the sort of humble objects that prompted Williams’s famous credo (‘No ideas but in things’) is a little more complicated.”
The nonfiction award went to Richard Holmes for The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (Pantheon). Scott McLemee reviewed: “The book’s style would once have been called ‘racy.’ It moves with extraordinary speed, freedom, and casual grace across a wide range of topics and levels of detail; it shifts between sober scholarship and humorous observation with an ease that is occasionally astounding.”
The autobiography award went to Diana Athill for Somewhere Towards the End (Norton). Art Winslow reviewed: “Her clear eye on one’s final years, while stripped of any hint of romanticism, is freighted with optimism despite the stark logic of finality that attends much of what she describes, in which physical deterioration and the inevitability of death often loom large.”
The biography award went to Blake Bailey for Cheever: A Life (Knopf). Steven G. Kellman reviewed: “Bailey … offers an ancestors-to-afterlife, kitchen-sink biography of an heir to the Yankee Protestant descendancy whose kitchen was littered with empty gin bottles. A prodigious feat of research that required processing thousands of unpublished pages and coaxing testimony out of reluctant witnesses, Bailey’s exhaustive account fills more than 700 pages.”
The fiction award went to Hilary Mantel for Wolf Hall (Holt).