National Book Critics Circle Award Criticism Winners and Finalists 2000-19
1. 
The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone
by:
Olivia Laing
3.92 avg rating β 33,167 ratings 
6. 
Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers
by:
Janet Malcolm
3.97 avg rating β 737 ratings 
8. 
The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them
by:
Elif Batuman
3.71 avg rating β 5,946 ratings 
11. 
From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present
by:
Jacques Barzun
4.13 avg rating β 4,605 ratings 12. 
Is It Still Good to Ya? Fifty Years of Rock Criticism, 1967-2017
by:
Robert Christgau
3.96 avg rating β 97 ratings 13. 
To Float in the Space Between: A Life and Work in Conversation with the Life and Work of Etheridge Knight
by:
Terrance Hayes
4.31 avg rating β 143 ratings 
16. 
You Play the Girl: And Other Vexing Stories That Tell Women Who They Are
by:
Carina Chocano
3.89 avg rating β 1,613 ratings 
18. 
Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History
by:
Camille T. Dungy
4.21 avg rating β 495 ratings 19. 
Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions
by:
Valeria Luiselli
4.39 avg rating β 16,458 ratings 20. 
Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News
by:
Kevin Young
3.17 avg rating β 1,068 ratings 21. 
White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide
by:
Carol Anderson
4.47 avg rating β 14,603 ratings 
23. 
Looking for The Stranger: Albert Camus and the Life of a Literary Classic
by:
Alice Kaplan
4.12 avg rating β 310 ratings 24. 
Am I Alone Here?: Notes on Living to Read and Reading to Live
by:
Peter Orner
3.96 avg rating β 1,052 ratings 25. 
Eternity's Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake
by:
Leo Damrosch
4.15 avg rating β 160 ratings 
30. 
Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty
by:
Vikram Chandra
3.27 avg rating β 1,005 ratings 
34. 
Confronting the Classics: Traditions, Adventures and Innovations
by:
Mary Beard
3.70 avg rating β 2,354 ratings 
36. 
Stranger Magic: Charmed States & The Arabian Nights
by:
Marina Warner
4.11 avg rating β 166 ratings 
38. 
Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture 3.90 avg rating β 308 ratings
40. 
Otherwise Known as the Human Condition: Selected Essays and Reviews
by:
Geoff Dyer
3.81 avg rating β 686 ratings 41. 
Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything
by:
David Bellos
3.77 avg rating β 2,759 ratings 42. 
45. 
Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics: Russia, Poland, and the West
by:
Clare Cavanagh
4.12 avg rating β 8 ratings 
47. 
The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence
by:
Susie Linfield
3.99 avg rating β 214 ratings 
51. 
Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression
by:
Morris Dickstein
3.28 avg rating β 450 ratings 52. 
Heroes and Villains: Essays on Music, Movies, Comics, and Culture
by:
David Hajdu
3.56 avg rating β 106 ratings 53. 
Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music
by:
Greg Milner
4.17 avg rating β 1,379 ratings 54. 
Children's Literature: A Reader's History, from Aesop to Harry Potter
by:
Seth Lerer
3.67 avg rating β 301 ratings 55. 
Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard
by:
Richard Brody
4.08 avg rating β 539 ratings 
57. 
Maimonides: The Life and World of One of Civilization's Greatest Minds
by:
Joel Kraemer
3.83 avg rating β 275 ratings 58. 
Orpheus in the Bronx: Essays on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry 4.61 avg rating β 38 ratings
59. 
The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
by:
Alex Ross
4.10 avg rating β 15,701 ratings 
61. 
Once Upon a Quinceanera: Coming of Age in the USA
by:
Julia Alvarez
3.43 avg rating β 1,068 ratings 62. 
The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America
by:
Susan Faludi
3.83 avg rating β 871 ratings 
64. 
65. 
While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within
by:
Bruce Bawer
3.88 avg rating β 1,112 ratings 
69. 
The Undiscovered Country: Poetry in the Age of Tin
by:
William Logan
really liked it 4.00 avg rating β 29 ratings 70. 
Gather at the River: Notes from the Post-Millennial South
by:
Hal Crowther
3.93 avg rating β 28 ratings 71. 
Unnatural Wonders: Essays from the Gap Between Art and Life
by:
Arthur C. Danto
4.07 avg rating β 74 ratings 
74. 
Where You're At: Notes from the Frontline of a Hip-Hop Planet
by:
Patrick Neate
3.66 avg rating β 133 ratings 
76. 
Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century
by:
Graham Robb
4.07 avg rating β 504 ratings 
78. 
79. 
River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West
by:
Rebecca Solnit
4.15 avg rating β 1,578 ratings 
88. 
The War Against ClichΓ©: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000
by:
Martin Amis
4.09 avg rating β 1,651 ratings 
91. 
As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender, and Art
by:
Rebecca Solnit
4.14 avg rating β 150 ratings 
96. 
Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest (American Music Series)
by:
Hanif Abdurraqib
4.46 avg rating β 6,391 ratings 
98. 
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals
by:
Saidiya Hartman
4.43 avg rating β 4,693 ratings 99. 
Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light, 100 Art Writings 1988-2018
by:
Peter Schjeldahl
4.42 avg rating β 362 ratings 