| 2025 | Winner | Hayek's Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right | Quinn Slobodian | Princeton University Press |
| 2025 | Finalist | Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue | Yoko Tawada | Unknown |
| 2025 | Finalist | Greyhound | Joanna Pocock | Fitzcarraldo Editions |
| 2025 | Finalist | One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This | Omar El Akkad | Knopf |
| 2025 | Finalist | To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other | Viet Thanh Nguyen | Belknap Press |
| 2025 | Longlist | Algorithm of the Night: Film Writing, 2019-2025 | A.S. Hamrah | Unknown |
| 2025 | Longlist | Authority: Essays | Andrea Long Chu | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| 2025 | Longlist | Dismantling the Master’s Clock: On Race, Space, and Time | Rasheedah Phillips | Unknown |
| 2025 | Longlist | Erik Satie Three Piece Suite | Ian Penman | Unknown |
| 2025 | Longlist | Medium Hot: Images in the Age of Heat | Hito Steyerl | Verso Books |
| 2024 | Winner | There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension | Hanif Abdurraqib | Penguin Books |
| 2024 | Finalist | Black Meme: A History of the Images that Make Us | Legacy Russell | Verso Books |
| 2024 | Finalist | Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance Today | Claire Bishop | Verso Books |
| 2024 | Finalist | Intervals | Marianne Brooker | Fitzcarraldo Editions |
| 2024 | Finalist | The Blue Period: Black Writing in the Early Cold War | Jesse McCarthy | Unknown |
| 2024 | Longlist | Magical/Realism: Essays on Music, Memory, Fantasy, and Borders | Vanessa Angélica Villarreal | Unknown |
| 2024 | Longlist | Opacities: On Writing and the Writing Life | Sofia Samatar | Unknown |
| 2024 | Longlist | Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative | Isabella Hammad | Unknown |
| 2024 | Longlist | When The Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s | John Ganz | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| 2024 | Longlist | Write like a Man: Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals | Ronnie A. Grinberg | Princeton University Press |
| 2023 | Winner | Deadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpression | Tina Post | New York University Press |
| 2023 | Finalist | Creep: Accusations and Confessions | Myriam Gurba | Simon & Schuster |
| 2023 | Finalist | Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World | Naomi Klein | Unknown |
| 2023 | Finalist | Pleasure and Efficacy: Of Pen Names, Cover Versions, and Other Trans Techniques | Grace Lavery | Unknown |
| 2023 | Finalist | The Chapter: A Segmented History from Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century | Nicholas Dames | Princeton University Press |
| 2022 | Winner | Free Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age | Timothy Bewes | Columbia University Press |
| 2022 | Finalist | Constructing a Nervous System: A Memoir | Margo Jefferson | Pantheon |
| 2022 | Finalist | Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative | Peter Brooks | New York Review Books |
| 2022 | Finalist | Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us | Rachel Aviv | Macmillan |
| 2022 | Finalist | When Women Kill: Four Crimes Retold | Alia Trabucco Zerán | Coffee House Press |
| 2021 | Winner | Girlhood | Melissa Febos | Bloomsbury |
| 2021 | Finalist | Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon | Mark McGurl | Verso Books |
| 2021 | Finalist | The Right To Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century | Amia Srinivasan | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| 2021 | Finalist | Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul?: Essays | Jesse McCarthy | Liveright |
| 2021 | Finalist | Why Didn't You Just Do What You Were Told?: Essays | Jenny Diski | Bloomsbury |
| 2020 | Winner | Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration | Nicole R. Fleetwood | Harvard University Press |
| 2020 | Finalist | Crap: A History of Cheap Stuff in America | Wendy A. Woloson | University of Chicago Press |
| 2020 | Finalist | Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country | Cristina Rivera Garza | Feminist Press |
| 2020 | Finalist | Stranger Faces | Namwali Serpell | Transit Books |
| 2020 | Finalist | Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader | Vivian Gornick | Unknown |
| 2019 | Winner | Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals | Saidiya Hartman | W. W. Norton |
| 2019 | Finalist | Axiomatic | Maria Tumarkin | Transit Books |
| 2019 | Finalist | Essays One | Lydia Davis | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| 2019 | Finalist | Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest | Hanif Abdurraqib | University of Texas Press |
| 2019 | Finalist | Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light, 100 Art Writings 1988-2018 | Peter Schjeldahl | Abrams Press |
| 2018 | Winner | Feel Free: Essays | Zadie Smith | Penguin Books |
| 2018 | Finalist | Is It Still Good to Ya?: Fifty Years of Rock Criticism, 1967-2017 | Robert Christgau | Duke University Press |
| 2018 | Finalist | The Reckonings: Essays | Lacy M. Johnson | Scribner |
| 2018 | Finalist | To Float in the Space Between: A Life and Work in Conversation with the Life and Work of Etheridge Knight | Terrance Hayes | Wave Books |
| 2018 | Finalist | Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics | Stephen Greenblatt | W. W. Norton |
| 2017 | Winner | You Play the Girl: On Playboy Bunnies, Stepford Wives, Train Wrecks, & Other Mixed Messages | Carina Chocano | Unknown |
| 2017 | Finalist | Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News | Kevin Young | Graywolf Press |
| 2017 | Finalist | Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History | Camille Dungy | W. W. Norton |
| 2017 | Finalist | Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions | Valeria Luiselli | Coffee House Press |
| 2017 | Finalist | The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story | Edwidge Danticat | Graywolf Press |
| 2016 | Winner | White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide | Carol Anderson | Bloomsbury |
| 2016 | Finalist | Against Everything: Essays | Mark Greif | Pantheon |
| 2016 | Finalist | Am I Alone Here?: Notes on Living to Read and Reading to Live | Peter Orner | Catapult |
| 2016 | Finalist | Looking for The Stranger: Albert Camus and the Life of a Literary Classic | Alice Kaplan | University of Chicago Press |
| 2016 | Finalist | The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone | Olivia Laing | Unknown |
| 2015 | Winner | The Argonauts | Maggie Nelson | Graywolf Press |
| 2015 | Finalist | Between the World and Me | Ta-Nehisi Coates | Spiegel & Grau |
| 2015 | Finalist | Eternity's Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake | Leo Damrosch | Unknown |
| 2015 | Finalist | On Elizabeth Bishop | Colm Tóibín | Princeton University Press |
| 2015 | Finalist | The Nearest Thing to Life | James Wood | Unknown |
| 2014 | Winner | The Essential Ellen Willis | Ellen Willis, edited by Nona Willis Aronowitz | Unknown |
| 2014 | Finalist | Citizen: An American Lyric | Claudia Rankine | Unknown |
| 2014 | Finalist | Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty | Vikram Chandra | Graywolf Press |
| 2014 | Finalist | On Immunity: An Inoculation | Eula Biss | Graywolf Press |
| 2014 | Finalist | What Would Lynne Tillman Do? | Lynne Tillman | Unknown |
| 2013 | Winner | Distant Reading | Franco Moretti | Verso Books |
| 2013 | Finalist | Confronting the Classics: Traditions, Adventures and Innovations | Mary Beard | Profile Books |
| 2013 | Finalist | Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers | Janet Malcolm | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| 2013 | Finalist | The Kraus Project: Essays by Karl Kraus | Jonathan Franzen with Paul Reitter, Daniel Kehlman | Unknown |
| 2013 | Finalist | White Girls | Hilton Als | McSweeney's |
| 2012 | Winner | Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights | Marina Warner | Harvard University Press |
| 2012 | Finalist | Madness, Rack, and Honey | Mary Ruefle | Wave Books |
| 2012 | Finalist | Reinventing Bach | Paul Elie | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| 2012 | Finalist | The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness | Kevin Young | Graywolf Press |
| 2012 | Finalist | Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture | Daniel Mendelsohn | Secker & Warburg |
| 2011 | Winner | Otherwise Known as the Human Condition: Selected Essays and Reviews | Geoff Dyer | Graywolf Press |
| 2011 | Finalist | Is That a Fish in Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything | David Bellos | Unknown |
| 2011 | Finalist | Karaoke Culture: Essays | Dubravka Ugresic | Unknown |
| 2011 | Finalist | Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music | Ellen Willis | Unknown |
| 2011 | Finalist | The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, Etc. | Jonathan Lethem | Doubleday |
| 2010 | Winner | Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics: Russia, Poland, and the West | Clare Cavanagh | Yale University Press |
| 2010 | Finalist | The Cruel Radiance | Susie Linfield | University of Chicago Press |
| 2010 | Finalist | The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them | Elif Batuman | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| 2010 | Finalist | The Professor and Other Writings | Terry Castle | Harper |
| 2010 | Finalist | Vanishing Point: Not a Memoir | Ander Monson | Graywolf Press |
| 2009 | Winner | Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays | Eula Biss | Graywolf Press |
| 2009 | Finalist | Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry | Stephen Burt | Graywolf Press |
| 2009 | Finalist | Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression | Morris Dickstein | W. W. Norton |
| 2009 | Finalist | Heroes and Villains: Essays on Music, Movies, Comics, and Culture | David Hajdu | Unknown |
| 2009 | Finalist | Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music | Greg Milner | Unknown |
| 2008 | Winner | Children's Literature: A Readers' History: Reader's History from Aesop to Harry Potter | Seth Lerer | University of Chicago Press |
| 2008 | Finalist | Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard | Richard Brody | Macmillan |
| 2008 | Finalist | Maimonides: The Life and World of One Of Civilization's Greatest Minds | Joel L. Kraemer | Doubleday |
| 2008 | Finalist | Orpheus in the Bronx: Essays on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry | Reginald Shepard | Unknown |
| 2008 | Finalist | The Men in My Life | Vivian Gornick | MIT Press |
| 2007 | Winner | The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century | Alex Ross | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| 2007 | Finalist | Coltrane: The Story of a Sound | Ben Ratliff | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| 2007 | Finalist | Once Upon a Quniceanera | Julia Alvarez | Unknown |
| 2007 | Finalist | The Terror Dream | Susan Faludi | Picador |
| 2007 | Finalist | Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints | Joan Acocella | Pantheon |
| 2006 | Winner | Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences | Lawrence Weschler | McSweeney's |
| 2006 | Finalist | Breaking the Spell: Religion As a Natural Phenomenon | Daniel Dennett | Viking |
| 2006 | Finalist | Follies of the Wise: Dissenting Essays | Frederick Crews | Unknown |
| 2006 | Finalist | On Looking: Essays | Lia Purpura | Unknown |
| 2006 | Finalist | While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West From Within | Bruce Bawer | Broadway Books |
| 2005 | Winner | The Undiscovered Country: Poetry in the Age of Tin | William Logan | Columbia University Press |
| 2005 | Finalist | Gather at the River: Notes From the Post-Millennial South | Hal Crowther | LSU Press |
| 2005 | Finalist | Still Looking: Essays on American Art | John Updike | Penguin Books |
| 2005 | Finalist | Unnatural Wonders | Arthur Danto | Unknown |
| 2005 | Finalist | What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles | Eliot Weinberger | Unknown |
| 2004 | Winner | Where You're At: Notes From the Frontline of a Hip-Hop Planet | Patrick Neate | Bloomsbury |
| 2004 | Finalist | Paper Trail: Selected Prose, 1965-2003 | Richard Howard | Unknown |
| 2004 | Finalist | Sontag & Kael: Opposites Attract Me | Craig Seligman | Counterpoint |
| 2004 | Finalist | Strangers: Homosexual Love in the 19th Century | Graham Robb | Unknown |
| 2004 | Finalist | The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel | James Wood | Jonathan Cape |
| 2003 | Winner | River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West | Rebecca Solnit | Penguin Books |
| 2003 | Finalist | Gritos | Dagoberto Gilb | Grove Press |
| 2003 | Finalist | Michelangelo & the Popes Ceiling | Ross King | Random House |
| 2003 | Finalist | Regarding the Pain of Others | Susan Sontag | Unknown |
| 2003 | Finalist | Songbook | Nick Hornby | Riverhead Books |
| 2002 | Winner | Tests of Time | William H. Gass | University of Chicago Press |
| 2001 | Winner | The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews, 1971–2000 | Martin Amis | Vintage Books |
| 2000 | Winner | Quarrel & Quandary | Cynthia Ozick | Vintage Books |
| 1999 | Winner | Selected Non-Fictions | Jorge Luis Borges | Penguin Books |
| 1998 | Winner | Visions of Jazz: The First Century | Gary Giddins | Oxford University Press |
| 1997 | Winner | Making Waves | Mario Vargas Llosa | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| 1996 | Winner | Finding a Form | William H. Gass | Cornell University Press |
| 1995 | Winner | The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France | Robert Darnton | Fontana |
| 1994 | Winner | The Culture of Bruising: Essays on Prizefighting, Literature, and Modern American Culture | Gerald Early | Ecco |
| 1993 | Winner | Opera in America: A Cultural History | John Dizikes | Yale University Press |
| 1992 | Winner | Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America | Garry Wills | Simon & Schuster |
| 1991 | Winner | Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory | Lawrence L. Langer | Yale University Press |
| 1990 | Winner | Encounters and Reflections: Art in the Historical Present | Arthur C. Danto | Unknown |
| 1989 | Winner | Not by Fact Alone: Essays on the Writing and Reading of History | John Clive | Unknown |
| 1988 | Winner | Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author | Clifford Geertz | Stanford University Press |
| 1987 | Winner | Dance Writings | Edwin Denby | University Press of Florida |
| 1986 | Winner | Less Than One: Selected Essays | Joseph Brodsky | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| 1985 | Winner | Habitations of the Word: Essays | William H. Gass | Cornell University Press |
| 1984 | Winner | Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry | Robert Hass | Ecco |
| 1983 | Winner | Hugging the Shore: Essays and Criticism | John Updike | Penguin Putnam |
| 1982 | Winner | The Second American Revolution and Other Essays | Gore Vidal | Random House |
| 1981 | Winner | A Virgil Thomson Reader | Virgil Thomson | Plume |
| 1981 | Finalist | Boccaccio | Thomas G. Bergin | Viking |
| 1981 | Finalist | Early Auden | Edward Mendelson | Faber & Faber |
| 1981 | Finalist | Science: Good, Bad and Bogus | Martin Gardner | Unknown |
| 1981 | Finalist | The Geography of the Imagination: Forty Essays | Guy Davenport | David R. Godine |
| 1980 | Winner | Part of Nature, Part of Us: Modern American Poets | Helen Vendler | Harvard University Press |
| 1980 | Finalist | Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars | Paul Fussell | Oxford University Press |
| 1980 | Finalist | Henry Adams | R.P. Blackmur, ed. by Veronica A. Makowsky | Unknown |
| 1980 | Finalist | Lectures on Literature | Vladimir Nabokov, ed. by Fredson Bowers | Unknown |
| 1980 | Finalist | Nature and Culture: American Landscape Painting, 1825–1875 | Barbara Novak | Oxford University Press |
| 1979 | Winner | The Gnostic Gospels | Elaine Pagels | Random House |
| 1979 | Finalist | A Lion for Love: A Critical Biography of Stendhal | Robert Alter with Carol Cosman | Unknown |
| 1979 | Finalist | America Revised: History Schoolbooks in the Twentieth Century | Frances FitzGerald | Vintage Books |
| 1979 | Finalist | Decadence: The Strange Life of an Epithet | Richard Gilman | Unknown |
| 1979 | Finalist | The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination | Sandra M. Gilbert, Susan Gubar | Yale University Press |
| 1978 | Winner | Modern Art: 19th and 20th Centuries (Selected Papers, Volume 2) | Meyer Schapiro | George Braziller |
| 1978 | Finalist | And I Worked at the Writer's Trade: Chapters of Literary History 1918–1978 | Malcolm Cowley | Penguin Books |
| 1978 | Finalist | Orientalism | Edward W. Said | Penguin Press |
| 1978 | Finalist | The Eye of the Story: Selected Essays and Reviews | Eudora Welty | Unknown |
| 1978 | Finalist | The World Within the Word: Essays | William H. Gass | Unknown |
| 1977 | Winner | On Photography | Susan Sontag | Macmillan |
| 1977 | Finalist | Afterimages | Arlene Croce | Bloomsbury |
| 1977 | Finalist | Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties | Morris Dickstein | Unknown |
| 1977 | Finalist | Matters of Fact and of Fiction: Essays, 1973-1976 | Gore Vidal | Random House |
| 1977 | Finalist | Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing | Richard Poirier | Oxford University Press |
| 1976 | Winner | The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales | Bruno Bettelheim | Thames & Hudson |
| 1976 | Finalist | Arnold Schoenberg | Charles Rosen | University of Chicago Press |
| 1976 | Finalist | Kicked a Building Lately? | Ada Louise Huxtable | Quadrangle/The New York Times Book Co. |
| 1976 | Finalist | Letters of E.B. White | E.B. White, ed. by Dorothy Lobrano Guth | Unknown |
| 1976 | Finalist | Representations: Essays on Literature and Society | Steven Marcus | Unknown |
| 1975 | Winner | The Great War and Modern Memory | Paul Fussell | Oxford University Press |