Annal:1992 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the National Book Critics Circle Award in the year 1992. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
All the Pretty Horses: Volume 1 of The Border Trilogy
- 1992 NBA–Fiction winner
- 1992 NBCC–Fiction winner
- Score: 20.42
The national bestseller and the first volume in Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy, All the Pretty Horses is the tale of John Grady Cole, who at sixteen finds himself at the end of a long line of Texas ranchers, cut off from the only life he has ever imagined for himself. With two companions, he sets off for Mexico on a sometimes idyllic, sometimes comic journey to a place where dreams are paid for in blood.
- 1993 Pulitzer–fiction finalist
- 1992 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 12.43
Joyce Carol Oates has taken a shocking story that has become an American myth and, from it, has created a novel of electrifying power and illumination.
Kelly Kelleher is an idealistic, twenty-six-year-old “good girl” when she meets the Senator at a Fourth of July party. In a brilliantly woven narrative, we enter her past and her present, her mind and her body as she is fatally attracted to this older man, this hero, this soon-to-be-lover. Kelly becomes the very embodiment of the vulnerable, romantic dreams of bight and brave women, drawn to the power that…
- 1992 NBA–Fiction finalist
- 1992 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 12.42
In this towering story about a man pitting himself against the sea, against society, and against himself, Robert Stone again demonstrates that he is “one of the most impressive novelists of his generation” (New York Review of Books). Inviting comparison with the great sea novels of Conrad, Melville, and Hemingway, Outerbridge Reach is also the portrait of two men and the powerful, unforgettable woman they both love - and for whom they are both ready, in their very different ways, to stake everything. As the San Francisco Chronicle said, “Robert…
- 1992 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.42
Veteran homicide detective Rocco Klein’s passion for the job gave way long ago. His beat is a rough New Jersey neighborhood where the drug murders blur together…until the day Victor Dunham—a twenty-year-old with a steady job and a clean record—confesses to a shooting outside a fast-food joint. It doesn’t take long for Rocco’s attention to turn to Victor’s brother, a street-corner crack dealer named Strike who seems a more likely suspect for the crime.
At once an intense mystery, and a revealing study of two men on opposite sides of an unwinnable war,…
Let the Dead Bury Their Dead: Stories
- 1992 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- 1992 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 12.42
Folk in the eastern North Carolina town of Tims Creek are pretty much like folk anywhere else, only more interesting—at least when Randall Kenan tells their stories. Here are tales about blacks and whites, young and old, rich and poor, rural and sophisticated—stories at once grittily down to earth and soaringly fantastical.
