(excerpt from nyt 13 may 2023 article)
Nineteen 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.
FICTION
Kingsolver’s story is a retelling of Charles Dickens’s “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. As our critic Molly Young wrote, “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.”
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.
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. Our 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.”
HISTORY
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.”
History finalist: “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.
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, our critic 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.”
NON FICTION
General nonfiction finalist: “Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern,” by Jing Tsu
Riverhead
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.
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