Eighteen books were recognized as winners or finalists for the Pulitzer Prize on Monday, in the categories of general history, biography, poetry, general nonfiction and fiction, which — in a surprise — had two winners.
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FICTION
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“Demon Copperhead” by Barbara Kingsolver
Kingsolver’s story is a retelling of Charles Dickens’ “David Copperfield,” with Appalachia at the center. It follows a young man named Demon as he battles poverty and addiction in his rural community, yet also tracks the development of his artistic consciousness. Reviewer Molly Young wrote that “Demon blossoms into an authentic artist and reaps all the rewards associated with that calling in modern-day America: obscurity, instability, compensation best measured in units of peanut.” (Harper)
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“Trust” by Hernan Diaz
This thrilling novel follows the history of a 20th-century fortune, focusing on the marriage between a reclusive financier and his eccentric, brilliant wife. Each of the book’s four sections subverts everything readers think they know about the story, posing questions about the human costs of wealth. Diaz’s debut novel, “In the Distance,” was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in 2018. (Riverhead)
FICTION FINALIST
“The Immortal King Rao” by Vauhini Vara
This debut novel takes on climate change, capitalism (a corporation has replaced the United States government) and family bonds, centering on the relationship between Athena and her aging father, who injected her with a genetic code granting her to access to his memories. The New York Times’ reviewer called the book “beautiful and brilliant, heartbreaking and wise, but also pitiless, which may be controversial to list among its virtues but is in fact essential to its success.” (Norton)
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HISTORY
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“Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power” by Jefferson Cowie
This compelling book revisits four notable periods in a generations-long conflict between white Alabamians and the federal government. These periods, which include the Jim Crow era and the attempts of Gov. George Wallace and others to nullify the civil rights reforms of the 1950s and ’60s, allow Cowie to explore how the invocation of liberty was often linked to the politics of white supremacy. As Jeff Shesol wrote in his review, “It is essential reading for anyone who hopes to understand the unholy union, more than 200 years strong, between racism and the rabid loathing of government.” (Basic Books)
HISTORY FINALISTS
“Watergate: A New History” by Garrett M. Graff
Graff offers a thorough account of the scandal that has fascinated America for 50 years. Reviewer Douglas Brinkley praised this “thrilling” history, noting that “with granular detail, Graff writes about the white-collar criminals, hatchet men and rogues who populated the outer circles of Nixon’s covert operations.” (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster)
“Seeing Red: Indigenous Land, American Expansion, and the Political Economy of Plunder in North America” by Michael John Witgen
Witgen, a historian at Columbia University, tells the story of the Anishinaabeg, who resisted Colonial advances on their land (in present-day Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin) and leveraged cultural and political savvy to help protect their members. (William & Mary and Colonial Williamsburg’s Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture/University of North Carolina Press)
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BIOGRAPHY
“G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century” by Beverly Gage
The first major study of Hoover in decades complicates his legacy, urging readers to see the former longtime FBI director in greater focus. “This is a humanizing biography,” reviewer Jennifer Szalai wrote, “an acknowledgment of the complexities that made Hoover who he was, while also charting the turbulent currents that eventually swept him aside.” (Viking)
BIOGRAPHY FINALISTS
“His Name is George Floyd” by Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa
Two Washington Post journalists offer a thoughtful and nuanced study of Floyd’s life and of his killing by police in 2020. Reviewer E. Peniel Joseph wrote, “Throughout, we get the portrait of a flawed man trying to come to terms with diminished dreams, one whose muscular physical exterior hid a gentle soul who battled pain, anxiety, claustrophobia and depression.” (This title won the Pulitzer Prize this year for nonfiction.) (Viking)
“Mr. B: George Balanchine’s 20th Century” by Jennifer Homans
This book is a sensitive portrait of George Balanchine, the Russian-born choreographer whose profound influence on ballet is still felt today. Reviewer Dwight Garner said the book was “a serious act of cultural retrieval, by a writer who knows when to expand and when to collapse, who makes unexpected connections, and who knows when her subject pinches, borrows or steals.” (Random House)
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MEMOIR
“Stay True” by Hua Hsu
“Stay True” is about an intense college friendship between Hsu, the son of Taiwanese immigrants, and Ken, a Japanese American whose family had been in the United States for generations. In her review, Jennifer Szalai called it a “quietly wrenching” memoir, adding, “To say that this book is about grief or coming-of-age doesn’t quite do it justice.” (Doubleday)
MEMOIR FINALISTS
“The Man Who Could Move Clouds” by Ingrid Rojas Contreras
In what Miguel Salazar, who reviewed the book for the Times, called a “spellbinding and genre-defying ancestral history” that reads like something from a Gabriel García Márquez novel, Rojas Contreras draws on oral histories to tell her family’s story. The tale involves a grandfather who was a revered shaman, a fortune-telling aunt, abuse and alcoholism, and violent encounters with Colombia paramilitary forces. (Doubleday)
“Easy Beauty” by Chloé Cooper Jones
Born with sacral agenesis, a physical condition, Jones is excluded from “easy beauty,” Kate Tuttle wrote in the Times. “In rejecting the dismissive gaze of others, Jones stands in the light of her own extremely able self.” (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster)
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POETRY
“Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007-2020″ by Carl Phillips
The collection includes a selection of Phillips’ work from previous years, along with a lyric prose memoir, “Among the Trees,” and a chapbook, “Star Map with Action Figures.”
From his poem, “In a Field, at Sunset”:
“When he asked if I still loved him, I didn’t / answer; / but of course, I loved him. / He’d become, by then, like the rhyme between lost / and most.”
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
POETRY FINALISTS
“Still Life” by Jay Hopler
After receiving a terminal cancer diagnosis, Hopler put together this heartbreaking and darkly funny collection. He died in June 2022. (McSweeney’s)
“Blood Snow” by dg nanouk okpik
Okpik, an Alaskan Native poet, writes about a homeland being erased by rising temperatures. (Wave Books)
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GENERAL NONFICTION
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“His Name is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice” by Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa
Samuels and Olorunnipa, journalists for The Washington Post, conducted hundreds of interviews to piece together the life and family history of George Perry Floyd Jr., who was killed by police in Minneapolis in 2020, setting off protests and a national reckoning over structural racism and police violence. In their biography, they produce a nuanced portrait of a shy, good-natured and troubled man who dreamed of becoming an athlete but had to contend with “the cruel reality of growing up Black and poor.” (Also a finalist in history this year.) (Viking)
Weekend Scoop
GENERAL NONFICTION FINALISTS
“Sounds Wild and Broken: Sonic Marvels, Evolution’s Creativity, and the Crisis of Sensory Extinction” by David George Haskell
Haskell explores the evolution of animal communication and birdsong, and delves into human language and music, and how civilization is now threatening to destroy rich sonic landscapes, with noise pollution in oceans and destruction of animal ecosystems. (Viking)
“Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern” by Jing Tsu
Tsu, a cultural historian and literary scholar of modern China, examines how language shaped China’s evolution into a global superpower. The book follows linguistic pioneers who helped modernize the Chinese script and language, including a Chinese Muslim poet, a computer engineer and an exiled political reformer. (Riverhead)
“Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of Our Nation” by Linda Villarosa
In “Under the Skin,” Villarosa, a journalism professor at the City University of New York and a contributing writer for The New York Times magazine, investigates racial bias and disparities in America’s health care, and looks at the ways in which the medical system’s inferior treatment of Black patients stems from structural and environmental racism. (Doubleday)