2026 Pulitzer Prize Winners

"A stunningly revelatory narrative history of one of the most momentous events in modern times, the jaw-dropping stupidity of the American government, and the dawn of the age of religious nationalism"-- Provided by publisher.

"A young historian's superlative debut . . . this excellent book delivers the truth about 'the burning years." --Kirkus Reviews (starred review) "[R]iveting . . . an outstanding expose of the predatory capitalist machinations behind the 'Bronx is burning' saga."--Publishers Weekly (starred review) The explosive account of the arson wave that hit the Bronx and other American cities in the 1970s--and its legacy today.

"After the dissolution of her marriage, a writer is transformed into a "clam" via typo after her mother keeps texting her to "clam down." The funny if unhelpful command forces her to ask what it means to "clam down" during crises-to retreat, hide, close up, and stay silent. Idiomatically, we are said to "clam up" when we can't speak, and to "come out of our shell" when we reemerge, transformed. In order to understand her path, the clam digs into examples of others who have also "succumbed to shellfish" to embrace lives of reclusiveness and extremity. This is a story that radiates outward from the kernel of selfhood to family, society, and ecosystem. Finally, the writer must confront her own "clam genealogy" to interview her dad who disappeared for a decade to write a mysterious accounting software called Shell Computing. In learning about his past to better understand his decisions, she learns not only how to forgive him, but also how to move on from her own wounds of abandonment and insecurity. Using examples from art, literature, and natural history, she unfolds a complex story of interspecies connectedness, in which humans learn lessons of adaptation and survival from their mollusk kin. While it makes sense in certain situations to retreat behind fortified walls, the choice to do so also exacts a price. What is the price of building up walls? How can one take them back down when they are no longer necessary?"-- Provided by publisher.

"Have you ever read a book and felt so gutted by it that you knew you'd never recover? That it made you sit differently in your own skin? A book that complicated everything you believed in and changed the way you read the world around you forever? This is what Sarah Chihaya calls a "Life Ruiner". Sarah's Life Ruiner was The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison. When she read it in her high school English class, she could no longer pretend not to notice how alien she felt as a Japanese American in a predominantly White suburb of Cleveland. Shaken, she set out on a quest-for the book that would show her who she was and how to live in an inhospitable world. There were lots of scripts available, and she tried to follow them-skinny athlete, angsty artist, ambitious academic. But a lifelong struggle with depression thwarted the resolution to every plot, and when she was hospitalized for a nervous breakdown, the world became an unreadable blank page. In the aftermath, she was faced with a question: can we ever truly rewrite the stories that govern our lives? Alternately searing and laugh-out-loud funny, Bibliophobia is a deft combination of memoir and criticism in the vein of Geoff Dyer and Olivia Laing. Through a series of books, including The Bluest Eye, Anne of Green Gables, Possession, A Tale for the Time Being, and The Last Samurai, Sarah Chihaya interrogates her cultural identity, her relationship with depression, and the necessary and painful ways that books can push back on the readers who love them"-- Provided by publisher.

"The epic, true story of the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, grandmothers who fought to find their stolen grandchildren during Argentina's brutal dictatorship"-- Provided by publisher.

"Through the unforgettable stories of five Atlanta families, this landmark work of journalism exposes a new and troubling trend-the dramatic rise of the "working homeless" in cities across America"-- Provided by publisher.

"One woman, the performance of a lifetime. Or two. A mesmerizing Mobius strip of a novel that asks who we are to the people we love. Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She's an elegant and accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He's attractive, troubling, and young-young enough to be her son. Who is he to her - and who is she to him? In this compulsively readable, brilliantly constructed novel, two competing narratives unspool, rewriting our understanding of the roles we play every day - partner, parent, creator, muse - and the truths every performance masks, especially from those who think they know us best. Taut, hypnotic, Audition is Katie Kitamura at her virtuosic best"-- Provided by publisher.

"The critically acclaimed author of the "crazily enjoyable" (The New York Times) Whalefall returns with an immersive, cinematic novel about five World War I soldiers who stumble upon a fallen angel that could hold the key to ending the war. Private Cyril Bagger has managed to survive the unspeakable horrors of the Great War through his wits and deception, swindling fellow soldiers at every opportunity. But his survival instincts are put to the ultimate test when he and four other grunts are given a deadly mission: venture into the perilous No Man's Land to euthanize a wounded comrade. What they find amid the ruined battlefield, however, is not a man in need of mercy but a fallen angel, seemingly struck down by artillery fire. This celestial being may hold the key to ending the brutal conflict, but only if the soldiers can suppress their individual desires and work together. As jealousy, greed, and paranoia take hold, the group is torn apart by their inner demons, threatening to turn their angelic encounter into a descent into hell. Angel Down plunges you into the heart of World War I and weaves a polyphonic tale of survival, supernatural wonder, and moral conflict"-- Provided by publisher.

The U.S. Constitution is among the oldest constitutions in the world but also one of the most difficult to amend. Jill Lepore, Harvard professor of history and law, explains why in We the People, the most original history of the Constitution in decades--and an essential companion to her landmark history of the United States, These Truths. Published on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the nation's founding--the anniversary, too, of the first state constitutions--We the People offers a wholly new history of the Constitution.

"Yiyun Li's remarkable, defiant work of radical acceptance as she considers the loss of her son James"-- Provided by publisher.

"In Stag Dance, the titular novel, a group of restless lumberjacks working in an illegal winter logging outfit plan a dance that some of them will volunteer to attend as women. When the broadest, strongest, plainest of the axmen announces his intention to dance as a woman, he finds himself caught in a strange rivalry with a pretty young jack, provoking a cascade of obsession, jealousy, and betrayal that will culminate on the big night in an astonishing vision of gender and transition. Three startling stories surround Stag Dance: "Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones" imagines a gender apocalypse brought about by an unstable ex-girlfriend. In "The Chaser," a secret romance between roommates at a Quaker boarding school brings out intrigue and cruelty. In the last story, "The Masker," a party weekend on the Las Vegas strip turns dark when a young crossdresser must choose between two guides: a handsome mystery man who objectifies her in thrilling ways, or a cynical veteran trans woman offering unglamorous sisterhood"-- Provided by publisher.

Peter Matthiessen (1927-2014), a visionary writer and thinker, was a person of myriad contradictions. After his teenage demand that his name be removed from the Social Register, Matthiessen nonetheless attended Yale and cut his teeth in postwar Paris, working for the CIA and founding the now famous literary magazine The Paris Review with George Plimpton; he then made his living as a fisherman on Long Island while becoming a writer, whose promising early fiction (garnering him invitations to drinks with top New York editors) soon existed alongside such works as his now-classic Wildlife in America (1959), arguably the first significant "environmental writing," before that movement and category even existed (with its damning of white colonizers, too, before that was the norm). His pursuit of spiritual and cultural understandings took him to the far-flung and diverse horizons, from his famous "Snow Leopard" journey in the Himalayas to his travels with biologists in the Serengeti, his canoeing through rapids in the Amazon in search of a Miocene-epoch fossil, his embedding with the Hadza people in Tanzania, his lifelong battle to get justice for the wrongly accused Native American prisoner Leonard Peltier. Meanwhile, Matthiessen, a sensitive champion of people's rights, was a philanderer and an inattentive father; he was an ever unsatisfied seeker yet a devoted practitioner and teacher of Zen. Episodes in this amazing life are given page-turning immediacy by the brilliant Lance Richardson, who reveals throughout the ways that Matthiessen's uncanny gifts and drive toward his subject matter allowed him to discover deeper connections between ecological decline, racism, and labor exploitation, between the Vietnam war and political corruption-to see clearly, so far ahead of his time and ours, that "in a damaged human habitat, all problems merge.

"A sweeping history of one of the nation's most important African American churches and a profound story of grace and perseverance amidst the fight for racial justice-from Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Kevin Sack"-- Provided by publisher.

Angelica and Elizabeth Schuyler, born to wealth and privilege in New York's Hudson Valley during the latter half of the eighteenth century, were raised to make good marriages and supervise substantial households. Instead they became embroiled in the turmoil of America's insurrection against Great Britain--and rebelled themselves, in ways as different as each was from the other, against the destiny mapped out for them. Glamorous Angelica, who sought fulfillment through attachments to powerful men, eloped at twenty with a war profiteer and led a luxurious life, first in Paris, then in London, charming Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and the Prince of Wales. Eliza, one year her junior, too candid for flirtation and uninterested in influence or intrigue, married a penniless illegitimate outsider, Alexander Hamilton, and devoted herself to his career. But after his appointment as America's first Treasury Secretary, she was challenged by the controversies in which he became involved, not the least of which was the attraction that grew between him and her adored sister. When tragedy followed, everything changed for both women: one deprived of her animating spirit, the other improbably gaining a new, self-determined life. "You would not have suffered if you had married into a family less near the sun," wrote Angelica to Eliza, "but then [you would have missed] the pride, the pleasure, the nameless satisfactions." Drawing on deep archival research, including never-published records and letters, Amanda Vaill interweaves this family drama with its historical context, creating a narrative with the sweep and intimacy of a nineteenth-century novel. Full of battles and dinner parties, murky politics and transparent frocks, fierce loyalty and betrayals both public and personal, Pride and Pleasure brings two extraordinary American heroines to life.