Annal:1994 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the National Book Critics Circle Award in the year 1994. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 1995 Pulitzer–fiction winner
- 1994 NBCC–Fiction winner
- 1993 Governor General's winner
- 1993 Booker shortlist
- Score: 36.45
The Stone Diaries is the story of one woman’s life; a truly sensuous novel that reflects and illuminates the unsettled decades of our century.
Born in 1905, Daisy Goodwill drifts through the chapters of childhood, marriage, widowhood, remarriage, motherhood and old age. Bewildered by her inability to understand her own role, Daisy attempts to find a way to tell her own story within a novel that is itself about the limitations of autobiography.
In the Time of the Butterflies
- 1994 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.44
It is November 25, 1960, and the bodies of three beautiful, convent-educated sisters have been found near their wrecked Jeep at the bottom of a 150-foot cliff on the north coast of the Dominican Republic. El Caribe, the official newspaper, reports their deaths as an accident. It does not mention that a fourth sister lives. Nor does it explain that the sisters were among the leading opponents of Gen. Raphael Leonidas Trujillo’s dictatorship. It doesn’t have to. Everyone knows of Las Mariposas—“The Butterflies.”
Now, three decades later, Julia Alvarez, also a…
- 1994 NBA–Fiction winner
- 1994 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 16.44
With the publication of the Recognitions in 1955, William Gaddis was hailed as the American heir to James Joyce. His two subsequent novels, J R (winner of the National Book Award) and Carpenter’s Gothic, have secured his position among America’s foremost contemporary writers.
Now A Frolic of His Own, his long-anticipated fourth novel, adds more luster to his reputation, as he takes on life in our litigious times. “Justice?—You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.” So begins this mercilessly funny,…
The Prince of West End Avenue: A Novel
- 1994 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.44
Comedy and tragedy are combined in The Prince of West End Avenue as Otto Korner, the narrator, directs his quirky, libidinous fellow residents of a retirement home in a production of Hamlet, all the while recalling his life’s adventures spanning the 20th century in Europe and then America. Korner is a Holocaust survivor, and the arrival of a luscious new employee who bears a shocking resemblance to a woman he had loved in his youth throws him back into the past.
The narrator weaves together past and present, with events cresting at the performance of…
And All Our Wounds Forgiven: A Novel
- 1994 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.44
When John Calvin Marshall graduated from Harvard in 1956 with a Ph.D. in philosophy, he was prepared for a life of teaching and relative tranquility. But History had another plan for him: in the nascent civil rights movement of the 1960s, he became first a spokesman, then a leader, and finally a shining symbol of the new generation of blacks who were demanding their full rights as citizens.
And All Our Wounds Forgiven is the story of John Calvin Marshall’s brief, turbulent, charismatic life, which ended, perhaps inevitably, in assassination. The novel…
