Goon Squad Takes the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

Prizes
April 18, 2011 | 14 books mentioned 2

Related Books:

coverThis year’s Pulitzer Prize for fiction has gone to Jennifer Egan’s much praised A Visit from the Goon Squad. The win caps a year that saw this “novel in stories” go from a book anticipated by the literary set to becoming a prize winner and bestseller. Jonathan Dee and Chang-rae Lee are the runners up. Lee is a past winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award, while Dee continues to receive critical notice as a novelist. Incidentally, this marks the third year in five that The Tournament of Books has predicted the Pulitzer result. The Road won both in 2007, as did The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao in 2008.

Here are this year’s Pulitzer winners and finalists with excerpts where available:

Fiction:

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General Nonfiction:

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History:

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Biography:

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

created The Millions and is its publisher. He and his family live in New Jersey.

Prizes

The Booker’s Dozen: The 2017 Booker Longlist

Prizes
July 26, 2017 | 14 books mentioned 8

In the fourth year that the Booker Prize has been open to U.S. authors, four American authors again make the longlist, including National Book Award and Pulitzer-winner Colson Whithead. Arundhati Roy is the lone former winner on the list. Notable names like George Saunders, Paul Auster, Zadie Smith and Mohsin Hamid make for formidable competition alongside three debut novels.

All the Booker Prize longlisters are below (with bonus links where available):

4 3 2 1 by Paul Auster (Free Speech Is a Black-and-White Issue: The Millions Interviews Paul Auster)
Days Without End by Sebastian Barry
History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund (A Classic Nightmare: On Emily Fridlund’s History of Wolves)
Exit West by Mohsin Hamid (The World-Spanning Humanism of Mohsin Hamid)
Solar Bones by Mike McCormack
Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor
Elmet by Fiona Mozley
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders (In the Between: Lincoln in the Bardo)
Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie
Autumn by Ali Smith (Wordsmith: The Beguiling Gifts of Ali Smith)
Swing Time by Zadie Smith (Nameless and Undefined: On Zadie Smith’s Swing Time)
Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead (Scars That Never Fade: On Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad)

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Prizes

Denis Johnson Wins 2007 National Book Award

Prizes
November 15, 2007 | 14 books mentioned 2

Last year we noted that by honoring William T. Vollmann in 2005 and then Richard Powers the following year, the National Book Award seemed to be making a move toward “honoring some of the names on the leading edge of American fiction,” as opposed to the old guard or the merely obscure. One could say that the NBA has always filled this roll, but it seemed to have lost its focus in the years before 2005, particularly in 2004, when five relative unknowns were nominated for the fiction prize and the entire literary community seemed collectively bewildered.The NBA has stayed true to form, however, in 2007 with a strong slate of nominees and with this year’s fiction winner, named last night, Denis Johnson, for his Vietnam War novel Tree of Smoke. In discussing the finalists, we called Johnson the “presumptive favorite,” and he was a favorite that many readers seemed to want to win. We have a review of the book available, and curious readers can also check out an excerpt. With Johnson away on assignment in Iraq, his wife accepted the award for him.Moving to the other categories, Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes: The History of the C.I.A. (excerpt) took home the non-fiction prize, beating out Christopher Hitchens. Sherman Alexie, whose adult fiction has never made the cut for the fiction award, was a winner in the Young People’s Literature category for The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (excerpt). The poetry award went to Robert Hass for Time and Materials (poem).For more on the award ceremony, check out the Times writeup. And Ed, who attended with several other bloggers, offered his own coverage as well.

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The 2017 BTBA Finalists for Fiction and Poetry

Prizes
April 18, 2017 | 14 books mentioned 2 min read

Last month, we unveiled the longlists for the Best Translated Book Awards (BTBA), an award founded by Three Percent that comes with a $5,000 prize for author and translator alike. Below, behold the finalists. The winner will be announced at a ceremony in New York and at The Millions on May 4.

For more information on the award, its history, the judges, etc., please visit the official Best Translated Book Award site and the official BTBA Facebook page, and follow the award on Twitter.

Best Translated Book Award 2017: Fiction Finalists

Wicked Weeds by Pedro Cabiya, translated from the Spanish by Jessica Powell (Dominican Republic, Mandel Vilar Press)

Chronicle of the Murdered House by Lúcio Cardoso, translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson (Brazil, Open Letter Books)

Eve Out of Her Ruins by Ananda Devi, translated from the French by Jeffrey Zuckerman (Mauritius, Deep Vellum)

Zama by Antonio di Benedetto, translated from the Spanish by Esther Allen (Argentina, New York Review Books)

Doomi Golo by Boubacar Boris Diop, translated from the Wolof by Vera Wülfing-Leckie and El Hadji Moustapha Diop (Senegal, Michigan State University Press)

War and Turpentine by Stefan Hertmans, translated from the Dutch by David McKay (Belgium, Pantheon)

Umami by Laia Jufresa, translated from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes (Mexico, Oneworld)

Oblivion by Sergi Lebedev, translated from the Russian by Antonina W. Bouis (Russia, New Vessel Press)

Ladivine by Marie NDiaye, translated from the French by Jordan Stump (France, Knopf)

Among Strange Victims by Daniel Saldaña Paris, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney (Mexico, Coffee House Press)

 

 

 

Best Translated Book Award 2017: Poetry Finalists

Berlin-Hamlet by Szilárd Borbély, translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet (Hungary, New York Review Books)

Of Things by Michael Donhauser, translated from the German by Nick Hoff and Andrew Joron (Austria, Burning Deck Press)

Cheer Up, Femme Fatale by Yideum Kim, translated from the Korean by Ji Yoon Lee, Don Mee Choi, and Johannes Göransson (South Korea, Action Books)

In Praise of Defeat by Abdellatif Laâbi, translated from the French by Donald Nicholson-Smith (Morocco, Archipelago Books)

Extracting the Stone of Madness by Alejandra Pizarnik, translated from the Spanish by Yvette Siegert (Argentina, New Directions) (read our review)

 

Prizes
| 14 books mentioned 2 min read
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2 comments:

  1. The PowerPoint chapter in Egan’s novel was one of the most unexpectedly moving sixty-odd pages I think I’ve ever seen in a novel.

    Just thinking about Pulitzer winners in the past few years, I wonder how Egan’s experimentation with time relates to the way Diaz explores the relationship between the individual and history in “Oscar Wao.” After so many years of novels trying to divorce or strain the individual’s relationship with time, are we seeing something of an effort to re-insert characters into history in the past year(s)? (Franzen’s “Freedom” certainly, and maybe even to a certain extent “Super Sad True Love Story”)

  2. Argh, I am filled with literary regret b/c I got Goon Squad on audio book and missed it in print. Only recently did I pick up the print copy and flip through at a bookstore and was just slammed by how inventive the Power Point chapter is. I have mixed feelings about the “Making Hats in Third Reich United States” chapter, but overall I had a really positive experience with this novel, but argh, I wish I had READ not LISTENED.

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