I have finished my goal to read all the 21st Century Pulitzer Prize
winning fiction titles (and a few finalists.) At a later date I will add the 20th Century Pulitzer winners I've read. This My Pulitzer Project provides a space for me to organize my
reviews in one spot. Follow the links to read my reviews and feel free to leave
comments so we can have discussions about these excellent books.
See all the books I've read at The Pulitzer Prize Master List.
21st
Century Pulitzer Prize Fiction Winners
2024
To the shock of just about the whole world, Night
Watch by Jayne Anne Phillips won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
this year. No one was talking about this book. It wasn't on anyone's
end-of-year best books of 2023 lists. Awarding this high literary honor
to Night Watch and the other two finalists felt like a minor league
team won the world series without anyone knowing they were even in the
playoffs.
So why did Night Watch win the Pulitzer.
Let's see if I can figure anything out.
Night Watch is set in West Virginia before,
during, and after the Civil War. Instead of focusing on slavery or on the death
tolls of the battles, this book examines the horrors citizens had to endure in
the aftermath of the conflict. It also shines a light on one example of
enlightened treatment of the mentally ill during this period. (Read on...)
2023 (Co-winner)
Barbara Kingsolver's latest novel, Demon Copperhead,
was inspired by a literary great, Charles Dickens, and his
semi-autobiographical novel, David Copperfield. It has been years since I
read the latter, fifty at least, so I will have to take her word for it on many
points, but others were so blatant even I caught the similarities. To start
with one doesn't have to look far as the opening lines set the tone, spoken by
the narrators of the novels: David and Demon. David's book starts with these
famous lines -- "Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own
life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must
show." While Demon's first few lines match the sentiment but with an
updated, more fatalistic flair -- First, I got myself born. A decent crowd
was on hand to watch, and they’ve always given me that much: the worst of the
job was up to me, my mother being let’s just say out of it... Save or be saved,
these are questions. You want to think it’s not over till the last page. In
the afterward Kingsolver acknowledges her gratitude for Dickens and his
"outrage, inventiveness, and empathy." Even Demon gets into the act
of praising Dickens when he discovers this author in school. Charles Dickens,
he says, is “one seriously old guy, dead and a foreigner, but Christ Jesus did
he get the picture on kids and orphans getting screwed over and nobody giving a
rat’s ass. You’d think he was from around here.”
Damen Fields is born to a young addict mom and his life
starts off as a struggle, including being renamed by other children as Demon
Copperhead. "Demon" because he was a bit of a hellion, and
"Copperhead" because he liked to climb around on the rocks which
everyone said was where loads of snakes hung out, but mostly because of his red
hair. (Read on...)
2023 (Co-winner)
This past week my husband, daughter, and I listened to the
co-Pulitzer Prize fiction winner for 2023, Trust by Hernan
Diaz. In a nutshell it is the same story, or parallel stories, told from four
perspectives.
Trust opens with the text of Bonds, a
(fictional) novel written by Harold Vanner, about a wealthy recluse, Benjamin
Rask, who makes a killing in the 1920s stock market and is viewed as an
investing savant. Rask's wife, Helen, is also a bit of a recluse and she
eventually dies from mental health treatments. Rask is devastated but will go
on.
The second section of Trust is the outline
of an unfinished and highly self-aggrandized autobiography of Andrew Bevel, a
New York financier and widower, whose life parallels the story of Harold Rask
in Bonds. (Read on...)
2022
In an afterword Joshua Cohen explains how he decided to
write a fictionalized story about a real family. He once interviewed the famous
literary critic Harold Bloom, who relayed his encounter with the Netanyahus
family when Benzion arrived for an interview at Cornell University. He
elaborated very little. This is what Cohen remembered:
[Bloom] was asked to coordinate the campus visit of an
obscure Israeli historian named Ben-Zion Netanyahu, who showed up for a job
interview and lecture with his wife and three children in tow and proceeded to
make a mess. Of all of Harold's tales, this was the one that stuck with me the
most, perhaps because it was one of the last he ever told me, and following his
death in 2019, I wrote it down, and in the process found myself having to
invent a number of details he'd left out, and, due to circumstances I'm about
to explain, having to fictionalize a few others.
This book, The Netanyahus, is based, more or
less, on an actual event. This, to my way of thinking, makes the story even
funnier and more interesting. (And explains the subtitle, which, as you know,
is a rare feature for fictional books.) (Read on...)
2021
Louise Erdrich herself wondered why anyone would want to
read a book about a dreadful bill that passed out of Congress in 1954. Yet here
she is the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for her book, The Night
Watchman. As I read this book club selection, I kept asking myself what was
it that made this book, this moment, this story so exceptional, and worthy of
such a grand prize? Erdrich, a member of the Turtle Mountain band of the
Chippewa, lives in Minneapolis. It broke her heart to see what happened in her
city with George Floyd's murder and the subsequent protests. Race relations in
this country are so messy, not only for blacks but for all BIPOC individuals.
This story, about the atrocities leveled against Native people throughout
history, is just one more account to prove this point. Erdrich called the
Pulitzer a "welcome contrast to the news of the last year." Stories
of race, racism, and colonialism swept the Pulitzer Prizes for the Arts this
year. Another Native author, Natalie Diaz, won the poetry award for Post
Colonial Love Poems, and all the other awards in the arts went to those writing
about the Black experience (Pulitzer
Prize Winners, 2021).
The Pulitzer committee said this about the book: It is
"a majestic, polyphonic novel about a community’s efforts to halt the
proposed displacement and elimination of several Native American tribes in the
1950s, rendered with dexterity and imagination." A Native American Studies
professor from Dartmouth, N Bruce Duthu, said “Perhaps more than any other
contemporary writer, Louise has helped to elevate the national IQ on issues of
social, historical, and legal significance relating to Native peoples. She is a
national treasure” (Dartmouth).
Clearly The Night Watchman and Louise Erdrich were worthy of
this, the grandest of all book prizes. (Read on...)
2020
My husband and I listened to The Nickel Boys on
audiobook on a recent road trip. I honestly had to turn off the audio player
several times to take a break from the on-going horror. I knew that this book
was based on an actual juvenile detention facility that operated in Florida for
over 100 years, closing some time in the 1980s. And here is the thing. It
suddenly hit me that I wasn't expecting a good ending. When I discussed this
with my husband, he said that may be one of the unidentified aspects of
racism--- that even fictional accounts which involve people of color don't
necessarily end on a good note. In fact, perhaps one comes to expect the
opposite. Colson Whitehead is an excellent writer and his topics are red-hot. I
am so grateful that he is sharing his skills at both research and writing with
the world. (Read on...)
2020, a finalist
When Cyril Conroy buys the Dutch House as a gift for his
wife and two children, Maeve and Danny, he is shocked at his wife's reaction.
She hates it. The purchase of the house sets in motion the undoing of a family.
Danny, the book’s narrator, and his older sister, Maeve, rely heavily on each
other for support after their mother leaves and their stepmother exiles them
from the house. The sibling bond is unshakable, and it saves both of their
lives, yet also seems to thwart them at the same time. Described as a dark
fairy tale on the book jacket, the story takes place over five decades and
tells the tale of how two smart siblings cannot seem to overcome their past and
at the center of the story is the odd but beguiling mansion, the Dutch House. (Read on...)
2019
The Overstory is such an epic story on
such an important topic (saving the planet for trees through acts of resistance
and in the process, we save ourselves) I don't really feel qualified to review
it. I will do my best but need some help. Therefore, I will point you to the
sources I used to gain some insights. I recommend that you visit these sources,
too.
The Pulitzer committee had this to say about the book after it won the prize in 2019, " [The Overstory is] an ingeniously structured narrative that branches and
canopies like the trees at the core of the story whose wonder and connectivity
echo those of the humans living amongst them."
In a Q & A with the author Richard Powers, he gives a series of questions that would be very helpful for book clubs who choose to read his book. One of the many I'd like to discuss with someone is, "Can we free ourselves from the grip of groupthink, the parochial narrowness of human time, and the colonizing consensus of “the real world?” (Read on...)
2019, a finalist
I started teaching in the fall of 1980. I was a junior high
teacher at the time teaching health and PE. As a college student majoring in
health education, I learned everything there was to know at the time about what
we then called STDs or sexually transmitted diseases, and I was prepared to
impart my knowledge onto my students in hopes that they wouldn't get one of
them. In those days scientists didn't know that HPV (genital warts) were
related to genital cancers and the worst STD that I knew about was syphilis,
though there was a cure if treated early enough. I remember the moment in 1983
or '84 when a parent questioned me about what I was teaching about AIDS. At the
time I had no inkling of how serious and life-threatening the disease was and
how it would dominate my curriculum for years to come. In 1988 or '89 our state
required mandatory AIDS prevention lessons for every student from grades 5-12,
every year. In my schools those required lessons often fell to me, though not
always. Not only would students' eyes glass over during those lessons but so
would the teachers' eyes. An important topic became boring and tedious. I did a
lot of personal education on the topic of HIV and AIDS, attending conferences,
visiting AIDS hospice houses, interviewing people who were HIV+ about the drugs
they had to take and the symptoms they were hoping to thwart. I remember
throwing around terms like cytomegalovirus, histoplasmosis, thrush,
toxoplasmosis, Kaposi sarcoma, and HIV-wasting syndrome. I knew more about
HIV/AIDS on the educational level than the average person, but not much on the
personal level.
As I started reading The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai
this past week, I was hit head-on with how very little I really understood
about the AIDS crisis on a personal level. The book chronicles the AIDS
epidemic from its inception in 1983 to the current time. Surprisingly this
hasn't been done in literature up to this point. (Read on...)
2019, a finalist
I am reeling. I just got done listening to There
There by Tommy Orange and I don't know what to think and what to feel.
There There was one of the top ten books of 2018 and won the Center
for Fiction First Novel Prize. And it is a simply astonishing audiobook
utilizing four narrators to cover the twelve main characters we meet in the
novel. Orange wanted to write a book about urban Indians, like those he
knew growing up in Oakland himself. These Indians “came to know the
downtown Oakland skyline better than we did any sacred mountain range, the
redwoods in the Oakland hills better than any other deep wild forest.” The
title of the book comes from a Gertrude Stein quote about Oakland, "there
is no there there."
Each of the characters in There There are American Indians who
come to life in their own chapters but soon we see that they are almost dancing
around each other as the circle dance draws closer and closer to the final
event, the Big Oakland Powwow. Some of the characters will come to dance in
their regalia, others will come to fulfill work commitments, while others will
come with mischief in their hearts. (Read on...)
2018
Next week's book club selection is Less by
Andrew Sean Greer. The club, which is made up of teachers and retired teachers,
is getting a reputation for selecting serious books. Books which deal with
important topics like immigration and abandonment (The Leavers), family
communication and cultural issues (Pachinko), slavery and death (Lincoln in the
Bardo), and issues related to motherhood and the meaning of family love (Little
Fires Everywhere.) Though all these books have been excellent, and the topics
generated great discussions, we craved a laugh or at least a more lighthearted
selection. Less came to our attention when it won the
2018 Pulitzer Prize. It sounded like a perfect selection for a
club in need of a bit of fun.
Things aren't going well for Arthur Less. He is turning 50
and feels like he is the only homosexual who has ever gotten old. His
writing career, which was never the most illustrious thing, has gone downhill
so that now if he sits next to someone on a plane, they won't know of him or
his books. A friend once told him that all he did was write the gay Ulysses
story. In addition, his x-boyfriend is getting married and has invited him to
the wedding. He doesn't want to go but must figure out a solid reason to not
attend the ceremony. (Read on...)
2017
This past month my husband and I listened to the audiobook
of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Underground Railroad by
Colson Whitehead. Neither of us knew much about the book but assumed it was
about the Underground Railroad which was credited for saving many hundreds of slaves’
lives in the 1840s and 1850s. Well, that is partially true. Let me explain.
In an interview with John Burnham Schwartz from the Wall
Street Journal, Colson Whitehead explained that he had been playing around with
two "science fictiony" questions for several years before he wrote
this book. “WHAT IF the underground railroad was a literal railroad?
And what if each state, as a runaway slave was going north, was a different
state of American possibility, an alternative America?” (WSJ)
Whoa. That sounds different. The Underground Railroad as a
real railroad and each state as an alternative America? This book no longer
sounds like it is the book we were expecting. (Read
on…)
2016
In a nutshell The Sympathizer is about a
nameless captain in the South Vietnam army who is really a double agent and
sympathizer of the North. The book begins during the Fall of Saigon, moves to refugee
camps, to the USA, and eventually back to Vietnam. The captain, our narrator,
is writing the book as a confession.
As I was preparing for the club discussion on the book, I went looking
discussion for questions and was surprised that all the sources I looked at
only had the same four questions. They are good ones, however, and I decided to
use them if I needed them. Next I went searching for a good review of the book.
My favorite was written by PhilipCaputo for the New York Times. I highly recommend you read his review
if you also are charged with the job of leading a discussion on this book. I
took notes as I read and from those notes, I had my talking points and was able
to formulate some questions of my own. (Read on…)
2015
Back in 2015 I listened to the audiobook of All the
Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr. It was a book club selection for
one of my two clubs. I adored it from the first moment of listening. Here is
what I said in that first review, written on August 7, 2015:
"All the Light We Cannot See is one of the best
books I've read in 2015. I was mesmerized by it from the first moment. I lived
and breathed the book for days. If I wasn't reading it, I was thinking about
it. If I was reading something else, I would wish I was reading this book
instead. The last book I remember feeling this way was The Goldfinch by
Donna Tartt. Both books have been highly decorated with awards from the
Pulitzer Prize, Andrew Carnegie Medal winners, and as National Book Award
finalists."
When my second book club selected All the Light We
Cannot See for the August 2018 club meeting I decided to
read/listen to the book again for two reasons: One, because it is hard to hang
onto details over time and I wanted to participate in the club discussion
fully, remembering details to add to the repartee; Two, because I loved the
book so much the first time I wanted to experience it again. It did not
disappoint me the second time around. (Read 1st review here.) (Read
2nd review here.)
2014
Back in 2014 my favorite book was The Goldfinch by
Donna Tartt. It wasn't just my favorite book, it was everyone's favorite, even
winning the coveted Pulitzer Prize for literature that year.
Oddly, considering how much I loved the book, I never
reviewed it at the time of my reading. That omission has been a sore spot for
me ever since then. So today, a little over seven years later, I will attempt
to rectify that situation by writing a review of sorts. In an effort to refresh
my memory I read through several reviews on-line and have decided to allow
those reviews to give me an assist.
To begin with, every review I read about The
Goldfinch (but I didn't need their help on this one) mentioned its
length, 771 pages. Stephen King, reviewing the book for the NYT, began his review by quoting Jack Beatty and his famous
critique of James A. Michener’s Chesapeake which is 865 pages
long: “My best advice is don’t read it; my second best is don’t drop it on your
foot.” He goes on to remark about the commitment Tartt made in writing such a
long book and at great personal risk to herself. What if no one liked her book
after spending almost ten years writing it? Now there is an interesting
perspective from one writer about another. I suppose King's comment comes from
a place of knowing since he is also known for writing long books. (Read on…)
2013
I'll tell you what, reading The Orphan Master's Son is
like riding on a harrowing roller-coaster. Be prepared to hang on for dear life
until the ride is over and then wipe your brow while you try to process what
just happened.
Although the book is fiction, Johnson writes in the reader’s
guide at the end of his novel, “I have a rationale for every artistic decision
I made in the book, but … the shocking aspects in my book are sourced from the
real world: the loudspeakers, the gulags, the famine, the kidnappings … I had
to tone down much of the real darkness of North Korea.”
Now I know this doesn't sound funny, but in many instances
the book is laugh-out-loud funny. As you hear in the opening line of this
Pulitzer Prize winner. The story is told from three different perspectives. One
is the proclamations made through the loudspeaker, which are pervasive around
the country and in every home. The second perspective is told in the
third-person narration about the protagonist, Jun Do. And the last is a
first-person narrative of the interrogator for the State. (Read on…)
2012 - No award given
2012, finalist
Back in 2012 the Pulitzer Prize committee did not select a
winner from the three finalists. It sent shock waves among the whole national
book community. How dare they not select a book? Book sellers were counting on
the increased sales that come when a winner is announced. The Pulitzer Jury
members were outraged. They had been reading books all year and were solidly
behind the three finalists, believing any of them would make a tremendous
choice. The Pulitzer Prize committee doesn't tell what process they use to
select their books, how the voting went, or, in this case, why they opted to
not select any of the books. It wasn't the first time the Pulitzer Committee
decided to NOT name a winner, but it was the first time in over forty years,
harkening back to the 1970s, which made it all the more shocking. After reading
this article, "Do Book Prizes Owe Us a Winner Every Year? A Deep Dive into the
Pulitzer Prize Controversy of 2012?" (Supposedly Fun) I decided I would read one of the
finalists to fill out my reading of the 21st Century winners…
The Wikipedia summary for Train Dreams captures
it pretty perfectly: “The novella details the life of Robert Grainier, an
American railroad laborer, who lives a life of hermitage until he marries and
has a daughter, only to lose both wife and child in a forest fire, and sink
into isolation again.” A booktuber described the book, weighing in at only 116
pages, as a "short sharp shock." (Read on…)
2011
A Visit from the Goon Squad is the fifth
Pulitzer Prize winner I've read so far this year. I'm on a quest to read as
many of the past winners as possible and I find it next to impossible not to
compare them to each other. Why, I ask myself, did A Visit from the
Goon Squad win the 2011 Pulitzer? What makes it more special than
other books written that year? Well, I answer for myself, for one thing part of
the story was told through PowerPoint slides and another part is crowded with
abbreviated text messages (which I confess I have a hard time understanding).
It certainly utilized a variety of styles and tones. If one wins an award for
uniqueness, then Goon Squad deserved it. Though it was
published just over ten years ago, technology has evolved a lot in that decade.
I'm sure that the references to the technology of texting and email, etc. were
much more novel back then, worthy of at least passing nod from the selection
committee, don't you think? (Read on…)
2010
I selected this read because it was the 2010 Pulitzer Prize
winner for literature. Unfortunately, that was the best thing it had going for
it. The shifts in focus from man to parent to grandparent and back were
completely confusing. It was impossible to like or even root for any of the
characters because they were held so far at arm’s length away. Goodreads
reviewers who liked the book speak of the writing as ethereal, other-worldly.
Here is a quote from someone's review: "Tinkers often reads
more like a poem than a novel, holding extended passages describing nature or
recollection in huge, meandering sentences that carry meaning and feeling like
a swollen river delivers silt. It is not an easy read." The only
thing I would agree with this reviewer about is the last sentence: it is not an
easy read. Occasionally, I would get the feeling that I knew what the author
was doing--reminding us that the process of dying a dislodging of us from the
present. (Read on…)
2009
Back in 2009 one of my book clubs read Olive Kitteridge
after it won the Pulitzer Prize. In my memory most of our conversation centered
around whether we liked Olive or not. She is blunt, opinionated, a busybody,
and abrupt yet she is also capable of great kindness and making intuitive
comments. In Olive, Again we meet Olive after the death of her
husband Harry. She is lonely and yet finds time to visit people in the nursing
home and is the only person to continually drop by and visit a woman who thinks
she is dying from cancer when none of her good friends even call her. At one
point in their conversation Olive confesses that she fears she was unkind to
her husband and is trying to be a better person now. Strout seems to really
understand people and can bring them to life on the pages of her books. (Read more,
from my review for the sequel Olive Again.)
2009, finalist
The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich ... Where I finally finish the Justice Trilogy by reading this, the first book, last.
2008
I've been thinking about the title of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize winning book The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz. Well, to be honest, I have been thinking about the term "wondrous" in context to the book. "Brief" and "life" speak so plainly to us. Before we even start reading we know that Oscar Wao has a short life or a fleeting existence. We expect his early death. But "wondrous?" Now there is a word not often used. Its placement in the title sets the reader on a mission---to find those moments of wonder and beauty among all the humdrum, day-to-day doings of life. (Read on…)
2007
My husband read The Road soon after it was
published in 2006 and has been making veiled comments about it ever since. I
wasn't sure I wanted to rush to read it since there is so much depressing news
in our lives already. Why would I want to read a book about what life might end
up being like in our future -- bleak and hopeless. What I didn't expect was the
love and the power of that love to overcome the tragedy of the end times. While
other survivors roamed around in packs looking with menace on their minds this
unlikely team stuck together and make their way through the dark and cold with
dignity and resolve. The father does his best to shield his son from the
horrors of their reality and tries to find moments and small things to delight
him, like the time they found a bottle of coke and the boy gets to taste it's
syrupy sweetness for the first time in his life. Or the time the man enters a
barn looking to see if there was anything inside, they could use and instead he
finds three dead people hanging from the rafters. The boy wants to enter
anyway, just in case there is food inside. But the father blocks his entry
saying, “Just remember that the things you put into your head are
there forever. You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you
want to forget.” He tries to protect his son from the potential of horrible
memories that will haunt him forever. In a world which has completely fallen
apart that is an impossible task, but a worthy one. (Read on…)
2006
Geraldine Brooks has become a favorite author since reading this Pulitzer Prize winner. March tells the story of the father of the March Girls, from Little Women, and his experiences during the Civil War. It was a book club selection, read before I became a book blogger. It was a popular choice. (Read a recap of March and my recollections...)
2005
Robinson is unapologetic for her own faith and beliefs and
readers will find in Gilead a book that reads like a
meditation or a handbook on Christian thought. For an unbeliever the book will
likely be plodding and plotless, for a believer, a solace and a reminder of how
one can grapple with their own life of faith. If there is a plot to be had it
runs along two veins. First, how will his young wife and child cope once he is
gone. He loves them both so much and wishes he had many. many more years to be
with them. At one point in the text he writes to his son, "I imagine your
child-self finding me in heaven and jumping into my arms, and there is great
joy in that thought." The afterlife is never in question in Gilead.
(Read more…)
2004
The Known World tells the story of Henry Townsend, a black farmer and former slave in antebellum Virginia. His former owner, William Robbins, in the most powerful man in Manchester County and he brings Henry under his tutelage. By the time his parents, free Blacks, secured his freedom, Henry is determined to own slaves himself, against the wishes his father, Augustus. But why would a former slave want to enslave men? This uncomfortable question pervades the whole text. Why? (Read on...)
2003
This book hasn't left me since I read it fourteen years ago. It is a mashup of three disparate stories which actually do have a connection: the Armenian Genocide; the Detroit Riots of 1968; and a transgender boy. I had the benefit of listening to the book on audio. Others who didn't listen had a hard time enjoying the book as much as I did. (Read a recap of Middlesex and my recollections ...)
2002
Even though I have very little memory of the book. I remember liking the main character, Miles Roby, and that the book was set in a down-and-out community. I realize that is not very helpful to anyone wanting to know more about the bookl. As a high school librarian I would often converse with teachers about their favorite books and Empire Falls was the absolute favorite of a Social Studies teacher. In fact, he liked it so much, no other book could get anywhere near it so he was living in a constant state of disappointment about other books thanks to this one. I'm thinking this book deserves a reread. (Read my recap...)
2001
In preparing myself to write this review, I asked the
Internet why The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay won
the the Pulitzer Prize for Literature the year after it was published in 2000.
The reward of my search was finding this essay by Gail Caldwell, "An
ode to the golden age of comic books heroics." The book, she says,
"is full of pizzazz and testosterone and street smarts, with a moral
center that tethers its intelligence. Like the writing of Dave Eggers and David
Foster Wallace, the novel is big and blustery and self-assured, and its reach
and dynamism speak well to the future of the form. This is boy fiction in the
purest sense: like a young colty quarterback running on an autumn night, for
the love of the game."
One of the duties of Pulitzer committee is to select the
best American novel of the past year, one which tells an American story. That
thought kept running through my head as I listened to all 24+ hours of the
audiobook version: I am reading an American story. While the
world was consumed with war and rumors of war abroad, American children (and
some adults), were completely enthralled with comic books here at home. When
Josef Kavalier, a young Jewish teen, escapes from Prague by the skin of teeth
and arrives at the doorstep of his aunt in Brooklyn in 1939 he is not so quick
to shake off his past. In fact, he creates his first superhero, The Escapist,
as a hero who fights and beats the Nazis. Others in the comic book industry
urge him to take a lighter touch, after all America is not involved in that
awful war in Europe. The Nazis weren't our enemies (at that
time.) (Read on…)
2000
This 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winner is a collection
of nine stories set in India or whose characters are Indian but living in the
US. Each story finds the characters seeking love and acceptance yet are often
misunderstood or maligned.
I've decided that I really like to read short stories, or,
more specifically, well-written short stories of which this book is full. The
thing about short stories that captivates me is how fast the reader has to jump
into the action. There is no time for long descriptions, introductions, or
frivolous details. For example, in the first story, "A Temporary
Matter", the reader learns within the first few pages that a young couple
have lost their way together after the stillborn death of their first child.
Will their time together each night in the dark due to the power outage save or
destroy their marriage? (Read on…)
Going forward I plan to read the winner each year and hope to continue reading past Pulitzers from the 20th Century, as I see fit. I do not intend to read them all --just the ones that strike my fancy
20th Century winners I've reviewed
1986 Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
1981 A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
1975 The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara
1969 A House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday
1961 To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
1958 A Death In the Family by James Agee
1953 The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
1948 Tales of the South Pacific by James A. Michener
1945 A Bell for Adano by John Hershey
1939 The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
1928 The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder
1925 So Big by Edna Ferber
1923 One of Ours by Willa Cather
1921 The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
No comments:
Post a Comment
I look forward to your comments and interactions! Join in the conversation.