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Edith Pearlman, John Lewis Gaddis win book critics' prizes

(CBS/AP) NEW YORK - Massachusetts short-story writer Edith Pearlman has won the National Book Critics Circle award for fiction.

Pearlman was cited Thursday at a gala at the New School in New York for her collection "Binocular Vision."

"I thought if I won I would faint," Pearlman reportedly told the assembled guests. "It's a very sweet moment to me."

Pearlman beat out four other finalists, including Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jeffrey Eugenides, who latest novel "The Marriage Plot" has been getting a lot of buzz.

Historian John Lewis Gaddis won the biography prize for his epic " George F. Kennan." Harvard professor Maya Jasanoff's "Liberty's Exiles" was the nonfiction winner, and the poetry award went to Laura Kasischke, who teaches at the University of Michigan, for "Space, in Chains.

The autobiography prize was given to Mira Bartok for "The Memory Palace," and British writer Geoff Dyer's "Otherwise Known as the Human Condition" won the prize for criticism.

Honorary prizes went to Robert B. Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books, and Kathryn Schulz, book critic of New York magazine.

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