Annal:1996 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the National Book Critics Circle Award in the year 1996. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
Women in Their Beds: New and Selected Stories
- 1997 PEN-faulkner winner
- 1996 NBCC–Fiction winner
- Score: 20.47
Half the women in the world are right now in bed, theirs or somebody else’s, whether it’s night or day, whether they want to be or not…” In the title story of Gina Berriault’s latest collection, an unsure young actress watches as wrenching changes take place, row upon row, bed upon bed, in the women’s ward of a hospital where she fills in as a social worker. Finding there both kindness and harsh fate, she also discovers a reflection of her own life.
Nine new stories are included in this collection of thirty-five. All are such models of economy that they seem almost telepathic. Berriault employs her vital sensibility—sometimes subtly ironic and sometimes achingly raw—to touch on the inevitability of suffering and the nature of individuality, daring to see into the essence of our predicaments. What moves us? What dictates our behavior? What alters us? These stories illustrate Berriault’s depth of emotional understanding: the tragic loss of innocence in “The Stone Boy,” where nine-year-old Arnold accidentally kills his brother with a shotgun; the pointed wit in “God…
About Schmidt: A Novel
- 1996 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- 1996 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 12.46
After years of careful management, the life of Albert Schmidt—proud, traditional gentleman and lawyer of the old school—lies about him in shambles. The wife he adored is recently dead. The clients he has served superbly and devotedly throughout his long career are turning to his firm’s aggressive young comers as Schmidt stumbles into early retirement. And relations with his only child are going from bad to worse.
Charlotte, once the flower of all her father’s hopes, and the sole beneficiary of the best of everything he could provide, has matured into a banal yuppie, only too willing to apply her peerless education to work in public relations. And now a desperate quarrel divides them: Charlotte announces her intention to marry a man Schmidt cannot approve of, for reasons he can scarcely admit—even to himself. As the beleaguered father gropes his way out of the corners he is forever backing himself into, he finds the possibility of regeneration, perhaps even happiness, in a new love the old “Schmidtie” could not have imagined.
Set in the Hamptons and Manhattan, infused with…
Dancing After Hours: Stories
- 1996 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.46
In each of these 14 stories, Dubus uncovers the mysteries of ordinary life as his characters wrestle with love, faith, and luck—often perseverant, yet occasionally crazed by desire, loss, or disappointment. Featuring his characteristic resonant prose, rendered with perception and compassion, this collection—Dubus’ first in nearly ten years—is a literary achievement which combines great artistry and singular humanity.
The Autobiography of My Mother
- 1998 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- 1997 PEN-faulkner finalist
- 1996 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 18.48
Jamaica Kincaid’s new novel is the haunting, deeply charged story of a woman’s life on the island of Dominica. Xuela Claudette Richardson, daughter of a Carib mother and a half-Scottish, half-African father, was delivered to his laundress as an infant, bundled up like his clothes. The Autobiography of My Mother is a story of love, fear, loss, and the forging of a character, an account of one woman’s inexorable evolution evoked in startling and magical poetry.
From Bondage: A Novel
- 1996 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.46
Completed in the last year of his life, From Bondage is perhaps Roth’s most profound work, for like Tolstoy in The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Roth examines his own imminent passing in the most plaintive of ways, telling the story of the old man, Ira Stigman, who, in spite of his physical frailties, finds solace in re-creating the lost love affair of his youth. Capturing the bohemian downtown world of Manhattan in the 1920s, Roth has set the stage for one of the most memorable of literary romances.
At its heart, From Bondage is the mesmerizing love triangle involving young Ira, an impressionable neophyte from Jewish Harlem, and Edith Welles, a sophisticated professor of English, a muse to starving poets and lovelorn men, who sweeps Ira into her world of soigne parties and literary debaucheries. Edith, as the old man Ira relays the story, is still physically involved with her former student Larry Gordon when she finds herself attracted to Ira, who is Larry’s best friend. To complicate the matter even more, Edith is also carrying on a simultaneous affair with Lewlyn, the separated…
