In early March 2012, the new winners of the National Book Critics Circle Award were announced. Edith Perlman’s short story collection, Binocular Vision, won for Fiction; Laura Kasischke’s collection, Space, in Chains, won for Poetry; Maya Jasanoff’s Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World won for General Nonfiction; John Lewis Gaddis’s George F. Kennan: An American Life won the Biography category; Mira Bartok’s The Memory Palace: A Memoir took the award for Autobiography; and Geoff Dyer’sessay collection, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition: Selected Essays and Reviews won for Criticism. This year’s awards did not come with a cash prize.

At Library Journal, Barbara Hoffert, Awards Chair and former president of the NBCC, said the awards represent a “triumph of good books and, just as significantly, rigorous and considered book conversation… I’m happy with every winner.” Hoffert maintains that the awards are a means to promoting critical thinking, well-articulated views over “basic thumbs-up, thumbs-down ratings,” and the pleasure a book delivers.

She cited Perlman for her “condensed, jewel-like stories”; Kasischke’s “compacted musical line and artful consideration of the everyday”; Jasanoff’s “original look at a subject rarely considered”; Gaddis’s “magisterial” work; Bartok’s blend of “art, journal entries, and fine writing”; and Dyer’s “example of how a supreme working critic works.”

The NBCC also gave two honorary prizes: The Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award went to Robert Silvers who helped found The New York Review of Books nearly fifty years ago, and the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing went to Kathryn Schulz, the book critic for New York magazine.

Sources: Library Journal // Book Critics