Annal:2000 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the National Book Critics Circle Award in the year 2000. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 2000 NBCC–Fiction winner
- 1999 Whitbread-Novel shortlist
- Score: 16.5
A haunting new novel about love, death, and the afterlife, from the author of Quarantine.
Baritone Bay, mid-afternoon. A couple, naked, married almost thirty years, are lying murdered in the dunes.
Their bodies had expired, but anyone could tell—just look at them—that Joseph and Celice were still devoted. For while his hand was touching her, curved round her shin, the couple seemed to have achieved that peace the world denies, a period of grace, defying even murder. Anyone who found them there, so wickedly disfigured, would nevertheless be bound to see that…
A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You: Stories
- 2000 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.5
A great short story has the emotional depth and intensity of a poem and the wholeness and breadth of a novel. Amy Bloom writes great short stories. Her first collection, Come to Me, was a finalist for the National Book Award, and here she deepens and extends her mastery of the form.
Real people inhabit these pages, the people we know and are, the people we long to be and are afraid to be: a mother and her brave, smart little girl, each coming to terms with the looming knowledge that the little girl will become a man; a wildly unreliable narrator bent on…
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
- 2001 Pulitzer–fiction winner
- 2001 PEN-faulkner finalist
- 2001 Spectrum shortlist
- 2000 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- 2000 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 34.51
It is New York City in 1939. Joe Kavalier, a young artist who has also been trained in the art of Houdini-esque escape, has just pulled off his greatest feat to date: smuggling himself out of Nazi-occupied Prague. He is looking to make big money, fast, so that he can bring his family to freedom. His cousin, Brooklyn’s own Sammy Clay, is looking for a collaborator to create the heroes, stories, and art for the latest novelty to hit the American dreamscape: the comic book. Out of their fantasies, fears, and dreams, Joe and Sammy weave the legend of that…
Assorted Fire Events: Stories
- 2000 LATimes–Fiction winner
- 2000 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 16.5
In just a few years David Means has emerged as one of the most distinct voices of his generation, producing superbly generous stories that-like the work of his predecessors Raymond Carver and Alice Munro-push the form to a new level. Bringing together Means’s unforgettable characters and plots in diamond-cutter prose, Assorted Fire Events is a major literary event.
From a married man consummating a hazy summer affair and getting lost in a reverie that explains the “far-away look in his eyes” (“Coitus”) to a recently widowed mother who must decide what to do…
White Teeth: A Novel
- 2000 JT Black-Fiction winner
- 2000 Whitbread-1st Novel winner
- 2000 LATimes–1st Fiction finalist
- 2000 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- 2000 Orange shortlist
- Score: 38.5
On New Year’s morning, 1975, Archie Jones sits in his car on a London road and waits for the exhaust fumes to fill his Cavalier Musketeer station wagon. Archie—working-class, ordinary, a failed marriage under his belt—is calling it quits, the deciding factor being the flip of a 20-pence coin. When the owner of a nearby halal butcher shop (annoyed that Archie’s car is blocking his delivery area) comes out and bangs on the window, he gives Archie another chance at life and sets in motion this richly imagined, uproariously funny novel.
Epic and intimate,…
