Annal:1998 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the National Book Critics Circle Award in the year 1998. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
The Love of a Good Woman: Stories
- 1998 Giller Prize winner
- 1998 NBCC–Fiction winner
- Score: 20.48
In eight new stories, a master of the form extends and magnifies her great themes—the vagaries of love, the passion that leads down unexpected paths, the chaos hovering just under the surface of things, and the strange, often comical desires of the human heart.
Time stretches out in some of the stories: a man and a woman look back forty years to the summer they met—the summer, as it turns out, that the true nature of their lives was revealed. In others time is telescoped: a young girl finds in the course of an evening that the mother she adores, and whose…
Birds of America: Stories
- 1998 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.48
A long-awaited collection of stories—twelve in all—by one of the most exciting writers at work today, the acclaimed author of Who Will Run the Frog Hos-pital? and Self-Help. Stories remarkable in their range, emotional force, and dark laughter, and in the sheer beauty and power of their language.
From the opening story, “Willing”—about a second-rate movie actress in her thirties who has moved back to Chicago, where she makes a seedy motel room her home and becomes involved with a mechanic who has not the least idea of who she is as a human…
The Hours: A Novel
- 1999 PEN-faulkner winner
- 1999 Pulitzer–fiction winner
- 2000 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- 1998 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 32.49
A daring, deeply affecting third novel by the author of A Home at the End of the World and Flesh and Blood.
In The Hours, Michael Cunningham, widely praised as one of the most gifted writers of his generation, draws inventively on the life and work of Virginia Woolf to tell the story of a group of contemporary characters struggling with the conflicting claims of love and inheritance, hope and despair. The narrative of Woolf’s last days before her suicide early in World War II counterpoints the fictional stories of Samuel, a famous poet whose…
- 1998 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.48
In this comic, fiercely compassionate novel, David Gates, whose first novel Jernigan was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, sends his protagonist on a visceral journey to the dark side of suburban masculinity, explores the claims youth makes on middle age, and the tenacious —at times perverse—power of love to assert itself.
When Doug Willis has a mid-life crisis, he doesn’t join a gym or have an affair. Instead he gets himself arrested while camping with his wife and kids, takes a two month leave of absence from his PR job, and retreats to his farmhouse…
No Lease on Life: A Novel
- 1998 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.48
It’s 5:00 a.m. and Elizabeth Hall can’t sleep. She sits at her apartment window, entertaining murderous fantasies, while on the street below morons smash bottles, flip trash cans, vomit, and dance. Elizabeth struggles heroically to keep her wits, whether fighting with her landlord, the housing agency, or simply trying to survive. Twenty-four hours later the morons are back on the street, but this time Elizabeth is ready to strike a final, defiant-and hilarious-blow. Desperately funny, dark, and altogether entertaining, No Lease on Life perfectly captures a woman and a city on the edge.
