A year after declining to present the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the jurors went ahead and named a winner this year. Perhaps nudged by the North Korea’s mad, headline-grabbing sabre-rattling, the award has gone to Adam Johnson’s novel of the hermit kingdom, The Orphan Master’s Son. Nathan Englander and Eowyn Ivey were the other fiction finalists.
Here are this year’s Pulitzer winners and finalists with bonus links:
Fiction:
Winner: The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson – (excerpt)
What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank by Nathan Englander (Englander’s Year in Reading, excerpt)
The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey
General Nonfiction:
Winner: Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America by Gilbert King
Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo (The Millions Interview)
The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature by David George Haskell (excerpt)
History:
Winner: Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam by Fredrik Logevall (excerpt)
The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675 by Bernard Bailyn (excerpt)
Lincoln’s Code: The Laws of War in American History by John Fabian Witt (excerpt)
Biography:
Winner: The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo by Tom Reiss (excerpt)
Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece by Michael Gorra (excerpt)
The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy by David Nasaw (excerpt)
Winners and finalists in other categories are available at the Pulitzer Web site.
Any of these you would particularly recommend?
I haven't read any of them, yet, but if I were going to chose two to start it would be Black Swan Green (which is sitting on my "to be read" shelf) and Seven Lies because I loved James Lasdun's book, The Horned Man. I'd love to hear any informed opinions, though.
I thought Lasdun's was brilliantly good; Lasdun and Mitchell are the only 2 I've read. The two I'm most excited about reading next are Claire Messud and Sarah Waters; both on all accounts very good but the advance buzz on Messud is particularly enthusiastic.
I have read and enjoyed Black Swan Green, and The Secret River is in my to-be-read pile.
I loved David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, so Black Swan Green is on my list to read even though I hear it's completely different.
Everyone loves Peter Carey except for me – I don't hate him, I just find him pretty good, not great.
And yes, Mitchell did get robbed for the Booker with Cloud Atlas.
MacGregor's If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things was one of the best books I read last year. I will certainly read his latest. And I'm reading Waters's Fingersmith now and can't wait to begin Night Watch