Annal:1981 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the National Book Critics Circle Award in the year 1981. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 1982 NBA–Fiction winner
- 1982 Pulitzer–fiction winner
- 1981 NBCC–Fiction winner
- Score: 30.32
The hero of John Updike’s Rabbit, Run (1960), ten years after the hectic events described in Rabbit Redux (1971), has come to enjoy considerable prosperity as Chief Sales Representative of Springer Motors, a Toyota agency in Brewer, Pennsylvania. The time is 1979: Skylab is falling, gas lines are lengthening, the President collapses while running in a marathon, and double-digit inflation coincides with a deflation of national confidence. Nevertheless, Harry Angstrom feels in good shape, ready to enjoy life at last—until his son, Nelson, returns from…
- 1982 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- 1982 PEN-faulkner finalist
- 1981 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 18.32
With these audacious and murderously witty stories, Donald Barthelme threw the preoccupations of our time into the literary equivalent of a Cuisinart and served up a gorgeous salad of American culture, high and low. Here are the urban upheavals reimagined as frontier myth; travelogues through countries that might have been created by Kafka; cryptic dialogues that bore down to the bedrock of our longings, dreams, and angsts. Like all of Barthelme’s work, the sixty stories collected in this volume are triumphs of language and perception, at once unsettling and irresistible.
- 1982 Campbell 1st
- 1981 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- 1981 Nebula nominee
- Score: 22.32
A brilliant, unique, and completely realized work of fiction, “Riddley Walker”—first published in 1980—is set in a remote future in a post-nuclear holocaust England (Inland), where humanity has regressed to an iron-age, semi-literate state, represented by a language created especially by Hoban for the book.
- 1982 LATimes–Fiction winner
- 1982 NBA–Fiction finalist
- 1982 PEN-faulkner finalist
- 1982 Pulitzer–fiction finalist
- 1981 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 34.32
An emotional, dramatic and philosophical novel about Americans drawn into a small Central American country on the brink of revolution.
- 1981 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.31
The timely and prescient novel that anticipated by a decade the men’s movement of today.
“Brilliant and resonant…A story that every man could tell if he dared to, but only a writer as gifted as Leonard Michaels could shape.” —Los Angeles Herald-Examiner
“Short, funny, and discomforting…. Love stories based on lost connections, incompatible longings, and lacerating fights…. Anger rather than tenderness seems to be the chief means of communication between the sexes…. The climax is fitting, horrific, and wonderfully droll.” —New York Times Book Review
