Eighteen books were recognized as winners or finalists for the Pulitzer Prize on Monday, in the categories of history, memoir, poetry, general nonfiction, fiction and biography, which had two winners.
FICTION
A story about a mother and daughter set in the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in Weston, W.Va., after the Civil War. “Night Watch,” which was also longlisted for the National Book Award, is about surviving war and its aftermath. “I consider Phillips to be among the greatest and most intuitive of American writers,” wrote our critic Dwight Garner.
Knopf
Wednesday’s Child: Stories, by Yiyun Li
A short story collection written over the course of a decade that examines aging and loss. The stories touch on a woman who makes a spreadsheet of every person she’s lost, a middle-aged practitioner of Eastern medicine and an 88-year-old biologist.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Same Bed Different Dreams, by Ed Park
An imagined alternate history of Korea that includes assassins, slasher films and the dangers of social media. In a review in The Times, the critic Hamilton Cain called the book “wonderfully suspenseful, like watching a circus performer juggle a dozen torches; will one slip his agile hands?”
Random House
Jones, a historian and a two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, examines the hypocrisy of Boston before the Civil War. The city was known for its antislavery rhetoric and as the center of abolitionism, but Black residents endured “casual cruelty” in the work force and were condemned to lives of poverty without the chance for equal employment.
Basic Books
Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion, by Elliott West
This is an examination of the American West and its physical and cultural transformation in the 19th century. The book covers the 1840s, when the West was home to various Native cultures, and moves through the next three decades, when the area was organized into states and territories and connected by railroads and telegraph wires.
University of Nebraska Press
American Anarchy: The Epic Struggle Between Immigrant Radicals and the U.S. Government at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century, by Michael Willrich
This book is a history of the American anarchist movement in the early 20th century. While many working class immigrants saw it as heroic, others considered it a frightening foreign ideology.
Basic Books
This major study of the civil rights icon draws on a landslide of recently released White House telephone transcripts, F.B.I. documents, letters, oral histories and other material. Eig shows a masterly command of his research, showing King in intimate moments, and arguing that his nonviolence has been mistaken for passivity. Put simply, our critic Dwight Garner wrote, “Eig’s book is worthy of its subject.”
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
In 1848, William and Ellen Craft, an enslaved couple, disguised themselves as a sick, wealthy white man traveling with his male slave and headed north. Woo tells the story of their stunning, perilous journey in novelistic detail, tracing their path through the United States and eventual passage to England, where they wrote a popular book about their escape.
Simon & Schuster
Biography finalist: “Larry McMurtry: A Life,” by Tracy Daugherty
This is the first comprehensive biography of McMurtry, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Lonesome Dove” and “The Last Picture Show,” among other novels. Daugherty has also written biographies of Joseph Heller and Joan Didion, and his latest “reads a bit like one of McMurtry’s novels,” our critic Dwight Garner wrote in his review. “Elegy and humor bleed into each other.”
St. Martin’s Press
In 1990, Rivera Garza’s 20-year-old sister was killed, and the case is a jumping-off point for this searching, personal examination of femicide in Mexico. The book is “one of the most effective resurrections of a murder victim I have ever read,” our reviewer, Katherine Dykstra, wrote. “Rivera Garza draws her sister, then complicates that drawing and then complicates the complication, creating layer upon layer of nuance.”
Hogarth
Memoir finalist: The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight, by Andrew Leland
The author, a longtime editor and podcaster, details his life with retinitis pigmentosa, a disease that is gradually causing him to lose his vision. His writing is “jazzy and intelligent,” our critic Alexandra Jacobs said, “with licks of understated humor.” Yet Leland also “rigorously explores the disability’s most troubling corners,” resulting in an affecting study of vision and its limits.
Penguin Press
Memoir finalist: The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions, by Jonathan Rosen
In this account of his friendship with Michael Laudor, who came to prominence as a Yale student trying to publicly destigmatize mental illness and later was convicted of stabbing his pregnant girlfriend to death, Rosen offers a look at the boundaries between brilliance and insanity. Our critic Alexandra Jacobs called it “an act of tremendous compassion and a literary triumph.”
Penguin Press
This book tells the story of a deadly bus crash outside Jerusalem through the eyes of a Palestinian father whose 5-year-old died in the accident. The father’s agony is compounded by the physical and legal restrictions that shape the lives of Palestinians in East Jerusalem. Thrall also examines the political, bureaucratic and personal decisions that contributed to the crash, and “vignettes of individual guilt come up against stark political realities,” our reviewer Rozina Ali wrote.
Metropolitan Books
General nonfiction finalist: Fire Weather: A True Story From a Hotter World, by John Vaillant
In 2016, wildfires tore through Fort McMurray, in the Canadian province of Alberta. Vaillant details how the fire began, how it traveled and the wreckage it left behind, weaving a story of a warming climate, a massive oil reserve and the apocalyptic fallout. The heart of the story, of course, is the fire itself: “Vaillant anthropomorphizes fire,” our reviewer David Enrich wrote. “Not only does it grow and breathe and search for food; it strategizes. It hunts. It lays in wait for months, even years.”
Knopf
General nonfiction finalist: Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives, by Siddharth Kara
Cobalt is an essential mineral used in the lithium-ion rechargeable batteries that power devices from smartphones to electric vehicle. This book, from an academic who has studied modern slavery, examines the horrors of cobalt mining, particularly the hazardous conditions and subsistence pay that workers face.
St. Martin’s Press
POETRY
Tripas: Poems, by Brandon Som
In this collection, Som celebrates his multicultural heritage and family memories, writing about his grandmother, who was Chicana and worked nights on an assembly line at a Motorola factory, and his Chinese American father and grandparents, who ran a corner store.
Georgia Review Books
Information Desk: An Epic, by Robyn Schiff
Schiff chronicles her five years working at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s information desk, where she answered mostly one question. As she writes in “Information Desk,” the “catechism/commences: Where’s the bathroom?/Where’s/the bathroom? Can you direct me to a/men’s room?” Writing about the book for The Times, Maggie Lange called it “a searing yet reverent book-length poem, containing as many jokes as it does social critiques.”
Penguin Poets
To 2040, by Jorie Graham
Graham’s 15th poetry collection is narrated by a speaker looking toward the future while reflecting on her own mortality. The collection begins with questions stated as fact: “Are we / extinct yet. Who owns / the map.”
Copper Canyon Press
