National Book Critics Circle Finalists

On Feb. 12, the 24 members of the board of directors of the National Book Critics Circle will meet in New York to select the five winners of the NBCC book awards. The awards will be presented at New York University on March 8.

FICTION

“Spartina” by John Casey (Alfred A. Knopf).

“Billy Bathgate” by E. L. Doctorow (Random House).

“The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love” by Oscar Hijuelos (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).

“Ordinary Love, and Good Will” by Jane Smiley (Alfred A. Knopf).

“The Joy Luck Club” by Amy Tan (G. P. Putnam’s Sons).

GENERAL NONFICTION

“The Broken Cord” by Michael Dorris (Harper & Row).

“Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class” by Barbara Ehrenreich (Pantheon Books).

“A Peace to End All Peace: Creating the Modern Middle East 1914-1922” by David Fromkin (Henry Holt).

“Among Schoolchildren” by Tracy Kidder (Richard Todd/

Houghton Mifflin).

“The Rainy Season: Haiti Since Duvalier” by Amy Wilentz (Simon & Schuster).

BIOGRAPHY/AUTOBIOGRAPHY

“Glenn Gould: A Life and Variations” by Otto Friedrich (Random House).

“And God Gave Us This Country: Tekamthi and the First American Civil War” by Bill Gilbert (Atheneum).

“Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician” by Roger Morris (Henry Holt).

“A First Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt” by Geoffrey C. Ward (Harper & Row).

“This Boy’s Life: A Memoir” by Tobias Wolff (Atlantic Monthly Press).

POETRY

“Human Wishes” by Robert Hass (Ecco Press).

“Transparent Gestures” by Rodney Jones (Houghton Mifflin).

“Earthquake Weather” by August Kleinzahler (Moyer Bell Ltd.).

“Pyramid of Bone” by Thylias Moss (University Press of Virginia).

“Water Walker” by Nancy Willard (Alfred A. Knopf).

CRITICISM

“A Choice of Inheritance: Self and Community From Edmund Burke to Robert Frost” by David Bromwich (Harvard University Press).

“Not by Fact Alone: Essays on the Writing and Reading of History” by John Clive (Alfred A. Knopf).

“Metaphor & Memory” by Cynthia Ozick (Alfred A. Knopf).

“Enchanted Drawings: The History of Animation” by Charles Solomon (Alfred A. Knopf).

“America’s Rome,” Volume I, “Classical Rome,” and Volume II, “Catholic and Contemporary Rome” by William L. Vance (Yale University Press).