National Book Critics Circle Awards Ceremony and After Party, Tonight!

One-third of the finalists for the awards are small press books. Bravo, N.B.C.C.!

While I’d love to see Paul Beatty’s The Sellout win the fiction award, and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me the criticism, tonight, I’m rooting for the small presses: the following books in their respective categories:

Poetry:
Ross Gay, Catalogue of Unabashed Gratitude (University of Pittsburgh Press)
Ada Limón, Bright Dead Things (Milkweed Editions)
Frank Stanford, What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford (Copper Canyon Press)

Criticism:
Leo Damrosch, Eternity’s Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake (Yale University Press)
Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts (Graywolf)
Colm Tóibín, On Elizabeth Bishop (Princeton University Press)

Autobiography:
Helen Macdonald, H Is for Hawk (Grove Press)

Biography:
Terry Alford, Fortune’s Fool: The Life of John Wilkes Booth (Oxford University Press)

Fiction:
Valeria Luiselli, The Story of My Teeth, translated by Christina MacSweeney (Coffee House Press)

John Madera is the author of Nervosities (Anti-Oedipus Press, 2024). His other fiction is published in Conjunctions, Salt Hill, The &Now Awards 2: The Best Innovative Writing, and many other journals. His nonfiction is published in American Book Review, Bookforum, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Rain Taxi: Review of Books, The Believer, The Brooklyn Rail, and many other venues. Recipient of an M.F.A. in Literary Arts from Brown University, New York State Council on the Arts awardee John Madera lives in New York City, Rhizomatic and manages and edits Big Other.

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