The National Book Critics Circle, consisting of nearly 700 active book reviewers, each year presents awards for the best book in five categories: fiction, general nonfiction, biography/autobiography, poetry, and criticism. Prior to 1997, the award was limited to American citizens, when the eligibility rules were changed to include all authors of the best books published in the United States, regardless of nationality.

2007
Fiction: Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverhead)

Autobiography: Edwidge Danticat's Brother, I'm Dying (Knopf)

Biography: Tim Jeal's Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer (Yale University Press)

Poetry: Mary Jo Bang's Elegy (Graywolf Press)

Nonfiction: Harriet Washington's Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present (Doubleday)

Criticism: Alex Ross's The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (FSG)

2006
Fiction: The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai (Atlantic Monthly Press)

Nonfiction: Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution by Simon Schama (Ecco)

Biography: James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon by Julie Phillips (St. Martin's)

Memoir/Autobiography: The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million by Daniel Mendelsohn (HarperCollins)

Poetry: Tom Thomson in Purgatory by Troy Jollimore (Margie/Intuit House)

Criticism: Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences by Lawrence Weschler (McSweeney's)

The Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing: Steven Kellman

Nonfiction: Voices From Chernobyl, Svetlana Alexievich (Dalkey Archive Press)

Biography: American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, Kai Bird, Martin J. Sherwin (Knopf)

Autobiography: Them: A Memoir of Parents, Francine du Plessix Gray (Penguin Press)

Criticism: The Undiscovered Country: Poetry in the Age of Tin, William Logan (Columbia University Press)

General Nonfiction: The Reformation: A History, Diarmaid MacCulloch(Viking)

Biography/Autobiography: De Kooning: An American Master, Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan (Knopf)

Criticism: Where You're At: Notes From the Frontline of a Hip-Hop Planet, Patrick Neate (Riverhead)

General Nonfiction: Sons of Mississippi: A Story of Race and Its Legacy, Paul Hendrickson (Vintage)

Biography/Autobiography: Khrushchev: The Man and His Era, William Taubman (Norton)

Poetry: Columbarium, Susan Stewart (University of Chicago Press)

Criticism: River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, Rebecca Solnit (Viking)

General Nonfiction: A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, Samantha Power (Basic Books)

Biography/Autobiography: Charles Darwin: The Power of Place, Vol. II, Janet Browne (Knopf)

Poetry: Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest, B.H. Fairchild (Norton)

General Nonfiction: Double Ford: Libraries and the Assault on Paper, Nicholson Baker, (Random House)

Biography/Autobiography: Boswell's Presumptuous Task: The Making of the Life of Dr. Johnson, Adam Sisman (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Poetry: Saving Lives, Albert Goldbarth (Ohio State University Press)

Criticism: The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews, 1971-2000, Martin Amis (Talk Miramax)

General Nonfiction: Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing, Ted Conover(Random House)

Biography/Autobiography: Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, Herbert P. Bix (HarperCollins)

Poetry: Carolina Ghost Woods, Judy Jordan (Louisiana State University Press)

General Nonfiction: Time, Love, Memory: A Great Biologist and His Quest for the Origins of Behavior, Jonathan Weiner(Knopf)

Biography/Autobiography: The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White, Henry Wiencek (St. Martin's)

Criticism: Selected Non-Fictions, Jorge Louis Borges (Viking)

General Nonfiction: We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda, Philip Gourevitch (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Biography/Autobiography: A Beautiful Mind, Sylvia Nasar (Simon & Schuster)

Criticism: Visions of Jazz: The First Century, Gary Giddons (Oxford University Press)

General Nonfiction: The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, Anne Fadiman (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Biography/Autobiography: Ernie Pyle's War, James E. Tobin (Free Press)

Poetry: Black Zodiac, Charles Wright (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Criticism: Making Waves, Mario Vargas Llosa (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Biography/Autobiography: Angela's Ashes, Frank McCourt (Scribner)

Poetry: Sun Under Wood, Robert Hass (Ecco Press)

Criticism: Finding a Form, William Gass (Knopf)

General Nonfiction: A Civil Action, Jonathon Harr (Random House)

Biography/Autobiography: Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson, Robert Polito (Knopf)

Criticism: The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France, Robert Darnton (W.W. Norton)

General Nonfiction: The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe's Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War, Lynn H. Nicholas (Knopf)

Biography/Autobiography: Shot in the Heart, Mikal Gilmore (Doubleday)

Criticism: The Culture of Bruising: Essays on Prizefighting, Literature and Modern American Culture, Gerald Early (Ecco Press)

General Nonfiction: The Land Where the Blues Began, Alan Lomax (Pantheon)

Criticism: Opera in America: A Cultural History, John Dizikes (Yale University)

General Nonfiction: Young Men and Fire, Norman Maclean (University of Chicago Press)

Biography/Autobiography: Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy and Her World, Carol Brightman (Clarkson N. Potter)

Poetry: Collected Shorter Poems 1946-1991, Hayden Carruth (Copper Canyon Press)

Criticism: Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America, Garry Wills (Simon & Schuster)

General Nonfiction: Backlash: The Undeclared War Against America Women, Susan Faludi (Crown)

Biography/Autobiography: Patrimony: A True Story, Philip Roth (Simon & Schuster)

Poetry: Heaven and Earth: A Cosmology, Albert Goldbarth (University of Georgia Press)

Criticism: Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory, Lawrence L. Langer (Yale University Press)

General Nonfiction: The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America, Shelby Steele (HarperCollins)

Biography/Autobiography: Means of Ascent: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Vol. II, Robert A. Caro (Knopf)

Criticism: Encounters and Reflections: Art in the Historical Present, Arthur C. Danto (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

General Nonfiction: The Broken Cord, Michael Dorris (Harper & Row)

Biography/Autobiography: A First-Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt, Geoffrey C. Ward (Harper & Row)

Poetry: Transparent Gestures, Rodney Jones (Houghton Mifflin)

Criticism: Not by Fact Alone: Essays on the Writing and Reading of History, John Clive (Knopf)

General Nonfiction: Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63, Taylor Branch (Simon & Schuster)

Criticism: Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author, Clifford Geertz (Stanford University Press)

General Nonfiction: The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Richard Rhodes (Simon & Schuster)

Biography/Autobiography: Chaucer: His Life, His Works, His World, Donald R. Howard (Abrahams/Dutton)

Poetry: Flesh and Blood, C.K. Williams (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Criticism: Dance Writings, Edwin Denby, edited by Robert Cornfield and William MacKay (Knopf)

General Nonfiction: War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War, John W. Dower (Pantheon)

Biography/Autobiography: Tombee: Portrait of a Cotton Planter, Theodore Rosengarten (Morrow)

Criticism: Less Than One: Selected Essays, Joseph Brodsky (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

General Nonfiction: Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families, J. Anthony Lukas (Knopf)

Biography/Autobiography: Henry James: A Life, Leon Edel (Harper & Row)

Criticism: Habitations of the Word: Essays, William H. Gass (Simon & Schuster)

General Nonfiction: Weapons and Hope, Freeman Dyson (Harper & Row)

Biography/Autobiography: Dostoevsky: The Years of Ordeal, 1850-1859, Joseph Frank (Princeton University Press)

Criticism: Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry, Robert Hass (Ecco Press)

General Nonfiction: The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House, Seymour M. Hersch (Summit Books)

Biography/Autobiography: Minor Characters, Joyce Johnson (Houghton Mifflin)

Poetry: The Changing Light at Sandover, James Merrill (Antheneum)

Criticism: Hugging the Shore: Essays and Criticism, John Updike (Knopf)

General Nonfiction: The Path of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Robert Caro (Knopf)

Criticism: The Second American Revolution and Other Essays, Gore Vidal (Random House)

General Nonfiction: The Mismeasure of Man, Stephen Jay Gould (Norton)

Criticism: A Virgil Thomson Reader, Virgil Thomson (Houghton Mifflin)