2014 National Book Critics Circle (NBCC)Award

The finalists were announced on January 14, 2014.The winners () were announced on March 13, 2014.
Fiction

• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah (Knopf)

• Alice McDermott, Someone (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Javier Marías, The Infatuations, translated by Margaret Jull Costa (Knopf)
• Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being (Viking)
• Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch (Little, Brown)

Nonfiction

• Kevin Cullen and Shelley Murphy, Whitey Bulger: America's Most Wanted Gangster and the Manhunt That Brought Him to Justice (Norton)
• Sheri Fink, Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital (Crown)
• David Finkel, Thank You for Your Service (Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• George Packer, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Lawrence Wright, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief (Knopf)

Poetry

• Frank Bidart, Metaphysical Dog (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Lucie Brock-Broido, Stay, Illusion (Knopf)
• Denise Duhamel, Blowout (University of Pittsburgh Press)
• Bob Hicok, Elegy Owed (Copper Canyon)
• Carmen Gimenez Smith, Milk and Filth (University of Arizona Press)

Autobiography

• Sonali Deraniyagala, Wave (Knopf)
• Aleksandar Hemon, The Book of My Lives (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby (Viking)
• Jesmyn Ward, Men We Reaped (Bloomsbury)
• Amy Wilentz, Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter From Haiti (Simon & Schuster)

Biography

• Scott Anderson, Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East (Doubleday)
• Leo Damrosch, Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World (Yale University Press)
• John Eliot Gardiner, Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven (Knopf)
• Linda Leavell, Holding On Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Mark Thompson, Birth Certificate: The Story of Danilo Kis (Cornell University Press)

Criticism

• Hilton Als, White Girls (McSweeney’s)
• Mary Beard, Confronting the Classics: Traditions, Adventures and Innovations (Liveright)
• Jonathan Franzen, The Kraus Project: Essays by Karl Kraus, translated and annotated by Jonathan Franzen with Paul Reitter and Daniel Kehlmann (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Janet Malcolm, Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Franco Moretti, Distant Reading (Verso)

Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award

• Rolando Hinojosa-Smith

John Leonard Prize

• Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (Hogarth)