The finalists for the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) awards have been announced. The NBCC honours outstanding writing and fosters a national conversation about reading, criticism and literature.

Fiction

• The Sellout by Paul Beatty
• Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff
• The Story of My Teeth by Valeria Luiselli
• The Tsar of Love and Techno by Anthony Marra
• Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh

Non-fiction

• SPQR: A History of Rome by Mary Beard
• Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America by Ari Berman
• Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America by Jill Leovy
• Dreamland: The True Story of America’s Opiate Epidemic by Sam Quinones
• What the Eye Hears: A History of Tap Dancing by Brian Seibert

Autobiography

• The Light of the World by Elizabeth Alexander
• The Odd Woman and the City by Vivian Gornick
• Bettyville by George Hodgman
• Negroland by Margo Jefferson
• H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald

Biography

• Fortune’s Fool: The Life of John Wilkes Booth by Terry Alford
• Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley by Charlotte Gordon
• Custer’s Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America by T.J. Stiles
• Stalin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva by Rosemary Sullivan
• Dietrich and Riefenstahl: Hollywood, Berlin, and a Century in Two Lives by Karin Wieland and Shelly Frisch

Criticism

• Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
• Eternity’s Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake by Leo Damrosch
• The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson
• On Elizabeth Bishop by Colm Tóibín
• The Nearest Thing to Life by James Wood

Poetry

• Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude by Ross Gay
• How to Be Drawn by Terrance Hayes
• Bright Dead Things by Ada Limón
• Parallax by Sinéad Morrissey
• What About This by Frank Stanford

Find out more about the NBCC here.