If some bored suit-and-ties decide the world needs another awards show, let’s hope they model it on the National Book Critics Circle ceremony. Much as it has the last few years, the show went down without a hiccough or yawn last night at the New School in New York City’s West Village. I was sitting in my usual seat right next to the exits, the perfect spot to sight authors (howdy, Richard Ford!; hey-ya, Dave Eggers!), steal away to the bathroom, and whisper naughty commentary to my colleagues. 

After NBCC president John Freeman set the tone for this heartfelt-without-being-hokey celebration of ass-kicking books, we cut straight to the winners. It didn’t matter that I had never heard of Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award winner John Leonard or that I hadn’t read a single nominee—I invested myself in every winner because the speeches were so damn good (and mainly off-the-cuff). Clearly, these are people who live, eat, and breathe for books. They just might die writing, too, and it would be a better way to go than in sleep.

Aspiring writers would do well to attend this free ceremony—you don’t need a tux, an attitude, or a business card. Just bring your punk self and soak up the love. You’ll learn a lot about book reviewing, the writing life, and witness firsthand the joy of being recognized for years of blood, sweat, and tears.

Without further ado, here are the winners:

• Criticism: Lawrence Weschler’s Everything That Rises: A Book of Contemporary Convergences (McSweeny’s)
• Poetry: Troy Jollimore’s Tom Thomson in Purgatory (Margie/Intuit House)
• Julie Philips’s James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon (St. Martin’s)
• General Nonfiction: Simon Schama’s Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution (Ecco)
• Autobiography: Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost: A Search for Six of the Six Million (HarperCollins)
• Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss (Atlantic Monthly)