2008’s Pulitzer Winners

The Tournament of Books is a wacky enterprise, but for the second year in a row, it has predicted the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Last year it was Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, this year it’s Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Here are this year’s Pulitzer winners and finalists with excerpts where available:

Fiction

• Winner: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz – Junot Díaz participates in our Year in Reading
• Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson – excerpt, Garth’s review
• Shakespeare’s Kitchen by Lore Segal

General Nonfiction:

• Winner: The Years of Extermination by Saul Friedlander
• The Cigarette Century by Allan Brandt
• The Rest Is Noise by Alex Ross – excerpt

History:

• Winner: What Hath God Wrought by Daniel Walker Howe
• Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power by Robert Dallek – excerpt
• The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War by the late David Halberstam

Biography:

• Winner: Eden’s Outcasts by John Matteson
• The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein by Martin Duberman – excerpt
• The Life of Kingsley Amis by Zachary Leader – excerpt

Winners and finalists in other categories are available at the Pulitzer Web site.