Staff Picks
#BroaderBookshelf 2024 - Pulitzer Prize in Fiction
- Sara M.
- Thursday, February 01
Collection
Check out a book from this list to fulfill the 2024 Broader Bookshelf prompt "Read a book by a Pulitzer or Nobel Prize winning author". These books were all awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction or Novel.
This list is part of the #BroaderBookshelf 2024 Reading Challenge. Find more lists here.
The Netanyahus
An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family
Published in 2021
"Corbin College, not-quite-upstate New York, winter 1959-1960: Ruben Blum, a Jewish historian--but not an historian of the Jews--is co-opted onto a hiring committee to review the application of an exiled Israeli scholar specializing in the Spanish Inquisition. When Benzion Netanyahu shows up for an interview, family unexpectedly in tow, Blum plays the reluctant host, to guests who proceed to lay waste to his American complacencies. Mixing fiction with non-fiction, the campus novel with the lecture, The Netanyahus is a wildly inventive, genre-bending comedy of blending, identity, and politics"--
Trust
Published in 2022
"An award-winning writer of absorbing, sophisticated fiction delivers a stylish and propulsive novel rooted in early 20th century New York, about wealth and talent, trust and intimacy, truth and perception. In glamorous 1920s New York City, two characters of sophisticated taste come together. One is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; the other, the brilliant daughter of penniless aristocrats. Steeped in affluence and grandeur, their marriage excites gossip and allows a continued ascent--all at a moment when the country is undergoing a great transformation. This is the story at the center of Harold Vanner's novel Bonds, which everyone in 1938 New York seems to have read. But it isn't the only version. Provocative, propulsive, and repeatedly surprising, Hernan Diaz's TRUST puts the story of these characters into conversation with the "the truth"--and in tension with the life and perspective of an outsider immersed in the mystery of a competing account. The result is an overarching novel that becomes more exhilarating and profound with each new layer and revelation, engaging the reader in a treasure hunt for the truth that confronts the reality-warping gravitational pull of money, and how power often manipulates facts"-- Provided by publisher.
All the Light We Cannot See
A Novel
Published in 2014
"From the highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning Anthony Doerr, a stunningly ambitious and beautiful novel about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II. Marie Laure lives with her father in Paris within walking distance of the Museum of Natural History where he works as the master of the locks (there are thousands of locks in the museum). When she is six, she goes blind, and her father builds her a model of their neighborhood, every house, every manhole, so she can memorize it with her fingers and navigate the real streets with her feet and cane. When the Germans occupy Paris, father and daughter flee to Saint-Malo on the Brittany coast, where Marie-Laure's agoraphobic great uncle lives in a tall, narrow house by the sea wall. In another world in Germany, an orphan boy, Werner, grows up with his younger sister, Jutta, both enchanted by a crude radio Werner finds. He becomes a master at building and fixing radios, a talent that wins him a place at an elite and brutal military academy and, ultimately, makes him a highly specialized tracker of the Resistance. Werner travels through the heart of Hitler Youth to the far-flung outskirts of Russia, and finally into Saint-Malo, where his path converges with Marie-Laure. Doerr's gorgeous combination of soaring imagination with observation is electric. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, Doerr illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another. Ten years in the writing, All the Light We Cannot See is his most ambitious and dazzling work"-- Provided by publisher.
A Visit from the Goon Squad
Published in 2010
Bennie Salazar, an aging former punk rocker and record executive, and Sasha, the passionate, troubled young woman he employs confront their pasts in this powerful story about how rebellion ages, influence corrupts, habits turn to addictions, lifelong friendships fluctuate and turn, and how art and music have the power to redeem.
The Night Watchman
A Novel
Published in 2020
It is 1953. Thomas Wazhushk is the night watchman at the first factory to open near the Turtle Mountain Reservation in rural North Dakota. He is also a prominent Chippewa Council member, trying to understand a new bill that is soon to be put before Congress. The US Government calls it an 'emancipation' bill; but it isn't about freedom - it threatens the rights of Native Americans to their land, their very identity. How can he fight this betrayal? Unlike most of the girls on the reservation, Pixie - 'Patrice' - Paranteau has no desire to wear herself down on a husband and kids. She works at the factory, earning barely enough to support her mother and brother, let alone her alcoholic father who sometimes returns home to bully her for money. But Patrice needs every penny to get if she's ever going to get to Minnesota to find her missing sister Vera. In The Night Watchman multi-award winning author Louise Erdrich weaves together a story of past and future generations, of preservation and progress. She grapples with the worst and best impulses of human nature, illuminating the loves and lives, desires and ambitions of her characters with compassion, wit and intelligence.
Middlesex
Published in 2002
So begins the breathtaking story of Calliope Stephanides and three generations of the Greek-American Stephanides family who travel from a tiny village overlooking Mount Olympus in Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit, witnessing its glory days as the Motor City, and the race riots of l967, before they move out to the tree-lined streets of suburban Grosse Pointe, Michigan. To understand why Calliope is not like other girls, she has to uncover a guilty family secret and the astonishing genetic history that turns Callie into Cal, one of the most audacious and wondrous narrators in contemporary fiction. Lyrical and thrilling, Middlesex is an exhilarating reinvention of the American epic. Middlesex is the winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
The Old Man and the Sea
Published in 1952
Santiago is a Cuban fisherman who encounters a giant marlin in the Gulf Stream and the battle for his catch becomes one of survival against a band of marauding sharks.
The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love
Published in 2015
It's 1949, the era of the mambo, and two young Cuban musicians make their way from Havana to New York. The Castillo brothers, workers by day, become, by night, stars of the dance halls, where their orchestra plays the sensuous, pulsing music that earns them the title of the Mambo Kings.
The Orphan Master's Son
A Novel
Published in 2012
The son of an influential father who runs an orphan work camp, Pak Jun Do rises to prominence using instinctive talents and eventually becomes a professional kidnapper and romantic rival to Kim Jong Il.
Demon Copperhead
A Novel
Published in 2022
The teenage son of an Appalachian single mother who dies when he is eleven uses his good looks, wit, and instincts to survive foster care, child labor, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses.
Interpreter of Maladies
Stories
Published in 2019
"Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, this stunning debut collection unerring charts the emotional journeys of characters seeking love beyond the barriers of nations and generations. In stories that travel from India to America and back again, Lahiri speaks with universal eloquence to everyone who has ever felt like a foreigner." -- Provided by publisher
The Executioner's Song
Published in 2012
In what is arguably his greatest book--written in 1979 and reissued here in trade paperback--America's most heroically ambitious writer follows the short, blighted career of Gary Gilmore, an intractably violent product of America's prisons who---after robbing two men and killing them in cold blood--insisted on dying for his crime.
The Fixer
Published in 2004
In Tsarist Russia, Yakov is accused of a ritual murder he did not commit.
Lonesome Dove
Published in 2000
Chronicles a cattle drive in the nineteenth century from Texas to Montana, and follows the lives of Gus and Call, the cowboys heading the drive, Gus's woman, Lorena, and Blue Duck, a sinister Indian renegade.
Martin Dressler
Published in 1997
The American Dream is a theme so compelling it resonates throughout our culture. In Martin Dressler, Steven Millhauser creates a young man who, in dedicating his life to it, becomes a symbol of that dream. Powerful, lyrical, finely crafted, this best-selling book won the Pulitzer Prize, was a National Book Award finalist, and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Martin Dressler, son of an immigrant cigar maker, believes he can achieve anything if he works hard enough. At the turn of the century, he rises from the shadows of his father's shop in New York City to become a powerful entrepreneur and builder of hotels. But, as he contemplates this land of almost limitless opportunity, his plans grow impossibly grand. Through the curve of Martin's spectacular rise and eventual downfall in the business world, his tale remains a uniquely American one. Martin may not always control an empire, but he will always be able to dream. Narrator George Guidall voices Martin's industry and optimism while his performance captures the literary power of Millhauser's style.
Gone with the Wind
Published in 2011
The turbulent romance of Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler is shaped by the ravages of the Civil War and Reconstruction.
Beloved
Published in 2004
Sethe, an escaped slave living in post-Civil War Ohio with her daughter and mother-in-law, is persistently haunted by the ghost of her dead baby girl.
The Overstory
A Novel
Published in 2018
A novel of activism and natural-world power presents interlocking fables about nine remarkable strangers who are summoned in different ways by trees for an ultimate, brutal stand to save the continent's few remaining acres of virgin forest.
The Yearling
Published in 1999
A young boy living in the Florida backwoods is forced to decide the fate of a fawn he has lovingly raised as a pet.
The Town
Published in 2018
The story of a pioneer family and the transition they have to make as urban areas begin to spread in the 1800s.
American Pastoral
Published in 1998
This novel follows Seymour "Swede" Levov, a successful Jewish American businessman and former high school star athlete from Newark, New Jersey. Levov's happy and conventional upper middle class life is ruined by the domestic social and political turmoil of the 1960s during the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson, which in the novel is described as a manifestation of the "indigenous American berserk"; the author investigates the century's most divisive and explosive of decades, the 1960s. As the Swede grows older and America grows crazier, history sweeps his family inexorably into its grip: His own daughter, Merry, commits an unpardonable act of "protest" against the Vietnam war that ultimately severs the Swede from any hope of happiness, family, or spiritual coherence.
The Killer Angels
A Novel
Published in 1996
Portraits of Lee, Longstreet, and other Civil War leaders are interwoven with historical detail to provide a fictional re-creation of the bloody battle at Gettysburg. A superb re-creation of the Battle of Gettysburg, but its real importance is its insight into what the war was about, and what it meant. In the four most bloody and courageous days of our nation's history, two armies fought for two dreams. One dreamed of freedom, the other of a way of life. Far more than rifles and bullets were carried into battle. There were memories. There were promises. There was love. And far more than men fell on those Pennsylvania fields. Shattered futures, forgotten innocence, and crippled beauty were also the casualties of war.
The Stone Diaries
Published in 1994
The story of a woman, written to resemble a biography, complete with family photos. The chapter-headings tell the story: "Birth, 1905;" "Childhood, 1916;""Marriage, 1927;" "Love, 1936;" "Motherhood, 1947;""Illness and Decline, 1985;" and, finally, "Death."
Angle of Repose
Published in 2014
This Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is the story of four generations in the life of an American family. A disabled retired historian embarks on a monumental quest: to come to know his grandparents, now long dead. The unfolding drama of the story of the American West sets the tone for this revealing novel.
The Confessions of Nat Turner
Published in 1992
In the late summer of 1831, in a remote section of southeastern Virginia, there took place the only effective, sustained revolt in the annals of American Negro slavery. The revolt was led by a remarkable Negro preacher named Nat Turner, an educated slave who felt himself divinely ordained to annihilate all the white people in the region. This story is narrated by Nat himself as he lingers in jail through the cold autumnal days before his execution. The compelling story ranges over the whole of Nat's life, reaching its inevitable and shattering climax that bloody day in August.
The Goldfinch
Published in 2013
"The author of the classic bestsellers The Secret History and The Little Friend returns with a brilliant, highly anticipated new novel. A young boy in New York City, Theo Decker, miraculously survives an accident that takes the life of his mother. Alone and abandoned by his father, Theo is taken in by a friend's family and struggles to make sense of his new life. In the years that follow, he becomes entranced by one of the few things that reminds him of his mother: a small, mysteriously captivating painting that ultimately draws Theo into the art underworld. Composed with the skills of a master, The Goldfinch is a haunted odyssey through present-day America, and a drama of almost unbearable acuity and power. It is a story of loss and obsession, survival and self-invention, and the enormous power of art"-- Provided by publisher.
A Summons to Memphis
Published in 1986
When Phillip Carver is asked by his sisters to help avert their widower father's impending marriage to a younger women, he is forced to confront his domineering siblings, a controlling patriarch, and a flood of memories from his deeply troubled past.
Breathing Lessons
A Novel
Published in 2005
When a short road trip turns into a crazy adventure, Ira and Maggie Moran have a chance to review their lives, renew their love, and reaffirm a marriage that has room enough for realists and dreamers.
Rabbit is Rich
Published in 2010
John Updike continues to probe the yearning, frustration and pain of suburban America in this third encounter with the Angstroms, Harry (Rabbit), Janice, and their son, Nelson.
The Color Purple
Published in 2006
The lives of two sisters--Nettie, a missionary in Africa, and Celie, a Southern woman married to a man she hates--are revealed in a series of letters exchanged over thirty years.
The Underground Railroad
A Novel
Published in 2016
A magnificent tour de force chronicling a young slave's adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South.
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
Published in 2014
When Lima's most famous bridge suddenly and mysteriously collapses, plunging five people to their certain deaths, one man discovers his mission. He was the only apparent eyewitness and nothing will stop him from unearthing the truth.
The Caine Mutiny
A Novel of World War II
Published in 1992
Developments on board an American naval destroyer during World War II compel the crew members to relieve the captain of his command