Annal:1995 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the National Book Critics Circle Award in the year 1995. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 1995 NBCC–Fiction winner
- Score: 10.45
In language that is “rich, musical and playful, like that of a Joyce who grew up on Yiddish” (Michiko Kakutani, New York Times), Stanley Elkin offers us the extraordinary Dorothy Bliss, an eighty-two-year-old widow caught in a tragicomic world, forced to find purpose in endless card games and “Good Neighbor Policy Night” at a Florida retirement community.
- 1996 PEN-faulkner winner
- 1996 Pulitzer–fiction winner
- 1995 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 26.46
Frank Bascombe is no longer a sportswriter, yet he’s still living in Haddam, New Jersey, where he now sells real estate. He’s still divorced, though his ex-wife, to his dismay, has remarried and moved along with their children to Connecticut. But Frank is happy enough in his work and pursuing various civic and entrepreneurial sidelines. He has high hopes for this 4th of July weekend: a search for a house for deeply hapless clients relocating to Vermont; a rendezvous on the Jersey shore with his girlfriend; then up to Connecticut to pick up his larcenous and…
- 1995 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.45
Nestled in the heart of the Midwest, amid cow pastures and waving fields of grain, lies Moo University, a distinguished institution devoted to the art and science of agriculture. Here, among an atmosphere rife with devious plots, mischievous intrigue, lusty liaisons, and academic one-upmanship, Chairman X of the Horticulture Department harbors a secret fantasy to kill the dean; Mrs. Walker, the provost’s right hand and campus information queen, knows where all the bodies are buried; Timothy Nonahan, associate professor of English, advocates eavesdropping for his…
Galatea 2.2: A Novel
- 1995 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.45
After four novels and several years of living abroad, the fictional protagonist of Galatea 2.2—Richard Powers—returns to the United States as Humanist-in-Residence at the enormous Center for the Study of Advanced Sciences. There he falls afoul of Philip Lentz, an outspoken cognitive neurologist intent upon modeling the human brain by means of computer-based neural networks. Lentz involves Powers in an outlandish and irresistible project: to train a neural net on a canonical list of Great Books until the machine becomes capable of passing a comprehensive exam in…
The Tent of Orange Mist: A Novel
- 1995 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.45
In December 1937 the city of Nanking, China, falls to brutal Japanese invaders, and thus begins a compelling drama of widespread chaos and personal courage.
Against a backdrop of burning buildings and random atrocities stands Scald Ibis, the teenage daughter of an eminent scholar, who must transform herself completely in order to survive. With her family gone, she is forced to work as a prostitute in a bordello, changing slowly and painfully from a girl into a woman. Her fortunes improve when a Japanese warlord, Hayashi, takes a fancy to her; but her greatest…
