NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDS

BEST FICTION AWARD

"Being Dead"
Jim Crace
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In Jim Crace's "Being Dead," Celice and Joseph, married 30 years, are reliving their first amorous encounter in the sand dunes when a burglar beats them to death with a rock. Alternating chapters move forward and back in time in hourly (and two-hourly) increments, giving their demise a sense of narrative inevitability. If this is a mystery, it's the most original one in some time.

BEST NONFICTION AWARD

"Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing"
Ted Conover
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Ted Conover spent almost a year in America's most notorious prison to write "Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing." His report? "Instead of feeling like a big, tough guard, the gallery officer at the end of the day often feels like a waiter serving a hundred tables or like the mother of a nightmarishly large brood of sullen, dangerous, and demanding children.... Under the inmates' surface bluster, their cruelty and selfishness, was almost always something ineffably sad."

BEST BIOGRAPHY AWARD

"Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan"
Herbert P. Bix
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Some consider Emperor Hirohito of Japan a helpless figurehead who knew nothing of the plan to bomb Pearl Harbor and had no power to stop atrocities like the Rape of Nanking. In "Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan," Herbert P. Bix argues that such accepted beliefs are false. To find out why he won the NBCC prize, read an exclusive essay by the author.

BEST POETRY AWARD

"Carolina Ghost Woods"
Judy Jordan
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The family-haunted poems in Judy Jordan's "Carolina Ghost Woods" (such as "Killing at the Neighbors'" and "In the 25th Year of My Mother's Death") already won the Academy of American Poets' Walt Whitman Award, and now they've won the NBCC Award too.

BEST CRITICISM AWARD

"Quarrel & Quandary: Essays"
Cynthia Ozick
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Read Amazon.com's exclusive interview with Cynthia Ozick, author of the NBCC 2000 prizewinner "Quarrel & Quandary," and hear what she thinks about Kafka's Jewish problem, the evils of spirituality in verse, and the difference between Anne Frank and Candace Bushnell.

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