The 2013 Pulitzer Prize winners have just been announced.  Adam Johnson's The Orphan Master's Son, about life under totalitarian rule in North Korea, won the fiction prize.  Fredrik Logevall took the history prize for Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam, about the French Indochina War that preceded and paved the way for America's Vietnam tragedy.  Tom Reiss's The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo, winner of the biography prize, presents the life of Alexandre Dumas's father, whose real-life exploits and adventures served as the basis for Dumas's celebrated novel The Count of Monte Cristo.  Sharon Olds, a well-known American poet who has been publishing since the early 1980s, won the poetry prize for her collection Stag's Leap.  The nonfiction prize went to Gilbert King's Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America, about a landmark early case in the civil-rights career of the future Supreme Court justice.  Check out all these titles, as well as the other finalists in each category, from the Richland Library.

The ever prolific Nora Roberts has just released her latest novel Whiskey Beach, which promises to be another bestseller.  Her books are always a wonderful blend of romance and suspense.

A great starting point for students or casual readers looking for a introduction to the themes and discussions on F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel, The Great Gatsby.

Masterplots analyzes the most important works in all genres—long fiction, short fiction, poetry, drama, and nonfiction—throughout history and around the world, helping to define and critique the literary canon. Masterplots, Fourth Edition, in twelve volumes, retains the original purpose of the Masterplotsconcept: providing fundamental reference data, plot synopses where applicable, and critical evaluations of a comprehensive selection of English-language and world literature that has been translated into English. The essays are in alphabetical order by title, and each includes an annotated bibliography to aid readers in further study.

Mary Roach, a science writer who has a way of making science funny, is out with her new book Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal.  She has written four previous books, including Stiff and Packing for Mars, and also writes for such magazines as National Geographic, New Scientist, Wired and the New York Times Magazine.  The publisher’s blurb for Gulp states that “the alimentary canal is classic Mary Roach terrain: the questions explored in Gulp are as taboo, in their way, as the cadavers in Stiff and every bit as surreal as the universe of zero gravity explored in Packing for Mars.” 

Pulitzer Prize−winning author Elizabeth Strout has released a new novel titled The Burgess Boys.  A Booklist review describes this latest work as a story “in which the fabric of family, loyalty, and difficult choices is revealed in layer after artful layer.”