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From NY Times: Fifteen books were recognized as winners or finalists for the Pulitzer Prize on Monday, in the categories of fiction, general history, biography, poetry and general nonfiction.
‘The Netanyahus,’ by Joshua Cohen (New York Review Books): Winner in Fiction
“Absorbing, delightful, hilarious, breathtaking and the best and most relevant novel I’ve read in what feels like forever.” —Taffy Brodesser-Akner, The New York Times Book Review
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 nonfiction, the campus novel with the lecture, The Netanyahus is a wildly inventive, genre-bending comedy of blending, identity, and politics that finds Joshua Cohen at the height of his powers.
Finalist: “Monkey Boy,” by Francisco Goldman (Grove)
Frankie Goldberg is the protagonist of Goldman’s semi-autobiographical novel. He’s a middle-aged writer visiting his Guatemalan mother in a Boston nursing home, where he recalls his tormented and abusive father, his estranged sister and his days as a bullied high school student. In The New Yorker, James Wood wrote: “Frankie’s account is full of rebellious comedy and vitality. Goldman is a natural storyteller — funny, intimate, sarcastic, all-noticing.”
Finalist: “Palmares,” by Gayl Jones (Beacon Press)
Jones’s fifth novel was her first in 22 years. It’s set in Brazil in the late 1600s, and it’s both an odyssey about one woman’s search — for a place and a person — and the story of the brutal enslavement and degradation of various African peoples who were kidnapped by the warring factions of Europe. Robert Jones Jr. wrote in the Book Review: “Mercy, this story shimmers. Shakes. Wails. Moves to rhythms long forgotten. Chants in incantations highly forbidden. It is a story woven with extraordinary complexity, depth and skill; in many ways: holy.”
‘Covered With Night: A Story of Murder and Indigenous Justice in Early America,’ by Nicole Eustace (Liveright) Winner in Nonfiction
Also a finalist for the National Book Award, this account shows the lasting consequences of the 1722 killing of an Indigenous hunter in Pennsylvania by two white traders. Eustace, a professor at New York University, explores how the case’s immediate aftermath ushered in a fierce debate about justice, contrasting the Indigenous perspective and its focus on reconciliation and forgiveness with that of the white colonists, who often favored retribution. Ultimately, the episode — and the ensuing cross-cultural negotiation between Indigenous communities and white colonists — helped pave the way for a treaty still recognized today.
See full list of winners here: https://www.pulitzer.org/prize-winners-by-year/2022