Paul Beatty’s novel “The Sellout,” a scorching satire that wrenches humor out of painful subjects like slavery, police violence and segregation, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction on Thursday. The novel, which was widely praised by critics, features an unhinged social scientist and marijuana dealer who is taken before the Supreme Court for reintroducing segregation and owning a slave.

The nonfiction prize went to Sam Quinones’s book “Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic,” a deeply reported account of the devastation that opiate and pain pill addiction has caused in small towns and suburbs across America.

The awards were presented during a public ceremony at the New School on Thursday night. The finalists and winners, in six categories, are selected by the board of directors of the National Book Critics Circle, which was founded in 1974 and is made up of more than 700 literary critics and editors.

This year’s batch of winners held some surprises. Some thought Ta-Nehisi Coates would take home another prize for “Between the World and Me,” his memoir and meditation on race in America, which won the National Book Award. Instead, the winner in the criticism category was Maggie Nelson for “The Argonauts,” her memoir about gender, identity and sexuality, which describes her pregnancy and her relationship with the artist Harry Dodge. Lauren Groff’s novel “Fates and Furies,” about the secrets of a marriage, also seemed like a front-runner in the fiction prize, which went to “The Sellout.”