LibGuides: Pulitzer Prize: Fiction (1948- )

The Pulitzer Prize in Fiction
1948-present

2020s

Winner

The Nickel Boys by Colton Whitehead

The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead
Call Number: FIC WHITE COL NI (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780385537070
Publication Date: 2019-07-16
As the Civil Rights movement begins to reach the black enclave of Frenchtown in segregated Tallahassee, Elwood Curtis takes the words of Dr. Martin Luther King to heart: He is "as good as anyone." Abandoned by his parents, but kept on the straight and narrow by his grandmother, Elwood is about to enroll in the local black college. But for a black boy in the Jim Crow South of the early 1960s, one innocent mistake is enough to destroy the future. Elwood is sentenced to a juvenile reformatory called the Nickel Academy, whose mission statement says it provides "physical, intellectual and moral training" so the delinquent boys in their charge can become "honorable and honest men." In reality, the Nickel Academy is a grotesque chamber of horrors where the sadistic staff beats and sexually abuses the students, corrupt officials and locals steal food and supplies, and any boy who resists is likely to disappear "out back." Stunned to find himself in such a vicious environment, Elwood tries to hold onto Dr. King's ringing assertion "Throw us in jail and we will still love you."

Finalists

The Dutch House by Ann Patchett
The Topeka School by Ben Lerner

The Dutch House by Ann Patchett
Call Number: Fiction P294d (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780062963673
Publication Date: 2019-09-24
At the end of the Second World War, Cyril Conroy combines luck and a single canny investment to begin an enormous real estate empire, propelling his family from poverty to enormous wealth. His first order of business is to buy the Dutch House, a lavish estate in the suburbs outside of Philadelphia. Meant as a surprise for his wife, the house sets in motion the undoing of everyone he loves. Cyril's son Danny and his older sister Maeve are exiled from the house where they grew up by their stepmother. The two wealthy siblings are thrown back into the poverty their parents had escaped from and find that all they have to count on is one another.
The Topeka School [E-Book] by Ben Lerner
Call Number: FIC LERNE BEN TO Ebook (OverDrive)
ISBN: 9780374721183
Publication Date: 2019-10-01
Adam Gordon is a senior at Topeka High School, class of ’97. His mother, Jane, is a famous feminist author; his father, Jonathan, is an expert at getting “lost boys” to open up. They both work at a psychiatric clinic that has attracted staff and patients from around the world. Adam is a renowned debater, expected to win a national championship before he heads to college. He is one of the cool kids, ready to fight or, better, freestyle about fighting if it keeps his peers from thinking of him as weak. Adam is also one of the seniors who bring the loner Darren Eberheart—who is, unbeknownst to Adam, his father’s patient—into the social scene, to disastrous effect. Deftly shifting perspectives and time periods, The Topeka School is the story of a family, its struggles and its strengths: Jane’s reckoning with the legacy of an abusive father, Jonathan’s marital transgressions, the challenge of raising a good son in a culture of toxic masculinity. It is also a riveting prehistory of the present: the collapse of public speech, the trolls and tyrants of the New Right, and the ongoing crisis of identity among white men.

Winner

The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich

The Night Watchman by Erdrich, Louise
Call Number: Fiction E66n (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780062671189
Publication Date: 2020-03-03
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.
The Night Watchman [E-Book] by Louise Erdrich
Call Number: OverDrive E-Books
ISBN: 9780062671202
Publication Date: 2020-03-03
The Night Watchman [Streaming audiobook] by Louise Erdrich (Read by)
Call Number: OverDrive Audiobooks
ISBN: 9780062983893
Publication Date: 2020-03-03

Finalists

A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth by Daniel Mason
Telephone by Percival Everett

A Registry of My Passage upon the Earth : stories by Daniel Mason
Call Number: FIC MASON DAN RE (Adult fiction)
ISBN: 9780316477635
Publication Date: 2020-05-05

Telephone : a novel by Percival Everett
Call Number: FIC EVERE PER TE (Adult fiction)
ISBN: 9781644450222
Publication Date: 2020-05-05

Winner

The Netanyahus: an account of a minor and ultimately even negligible episode in the history of a very famous family by Joshua Cohen

Finalists

Monkey Boy by Francisco Goldman
Palmares by Gayl Jones

Winners

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

Trust by Hernan Diaz

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
Call Number: FIC KINGS BAR DE (Adult fiction)
ISBN: 9780063251922
Publication Date: 2022-10-18
Trust by Hernan Diaz
Call Number: FIC DIAZ HER TR (Adult fiction)
ISBN: 9780593420317
Publication Date: 2022-05-03

Finalist

The Immortal King Rao by Vauhini Vara

The Immortal King Rao by Vauhini Vara
Call Number: FIC VARA VAU IM (Adult fiction)
ISBN: 9780393541755
Publication Date: 2022-05-03

2010s

Winner

Tinkers, by Paul Harding

Finalists

In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, Daniyal Mueenuddin
Love in Infant Monkeys, by Lydia Millet

In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin
Call Number: Fictin M945i (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780393068009
Publication Date: 2009-02-01
CONTENTS: Nawabdin electrician -- Saleema -- Provide, provide -- About a burning girl -- In other rooms, other wonders -- Our Lady of Paris -- Lily -- A spoiled man.

Winner

A Visit from the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan

A Visit from the Goon Squad [Kindle] by Jennifer Egan
Call Number: FIC EGAN JEN VI Kindle (Request at circulation desk)
ISBN: 9780792771753
Publication Date: 2012-05-25
Bennie Salazar, an aging punk rocker and record executive, and the beautiful Sasha, the troubled young woman he employs, never discover each other's pasts, but the reader does, in intimate detail, along with the secret lives of a host of other people whose paths intersect with theirs in the course of nearly fifty years and in a handful of countries. A Visit from the Goon Squad is about time, about survival, about our private terrors, and what happens when we fail to rebound ...
A Visit from the Goon Squad [OverDrive E-Book] by Jennifer Egan
Call Number: OverDrive E-Book
ISBN: 9780307593627
Publication Date: 2010-06-08

Finalists

The Privileges, by Jonathan Dee
The Surrendered, by Chang-rae Lee

The Surrendered [Kindle] by Chang-rae Lee
Call Number: Kindle-716
ISBN: 9781594485015
Publication Date: 2011-03-01
Korean born June Han has forged a life thousands of miles from her birthplace: she has built a business in New York, survived a husband, borne a child. But her past holds more secrets than she has ever been able to tell, and thirty years after her escape from war-ravaged Korea, the time has come for her to confront them.

Winner

No award given

Finalists

Swamplandia!, by Karen Russell
The Pale King, by David Foster Wallace
Train Dreams, by Denis Johnson

Swamplandia! by Karen Russell
Call Number: Fiction R964s (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780307263995
Publication Date: 2011-02-01
Thirteen-year-old Ava Bigtree has lived her entire life at Swamplandia!, her family’s island home and gator-wrestling theme park in the Florida Everglades. But when illness fells Ava’s mother, the park’s indomitable headliner, the family is plunged into chaos; her father withdraws, her sister falls in love with a spooky character known as the Dredgeman, and her brilliant big brother, Kiwi, defects to a rival park called The World of Darkness. As Ava sets out on a mission through the magical swamps to save them all, we are drawn into a lush and bravely imagined debut that takes us to the shimmering edge of reality.

The Pale King by David Foster Wallace
Call Number: Fiction W188p (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780316074230
Publication Date: 2011-04-15
The agents at the IRS Regional Examination Center in Peoria, Illinois, appear ordinary enough to newly arrived trainee David Foster Wallace. But as he immerses himself in a routine so tedious and repetitive that new employees receive boredom-survival training, he learns of the extraordinary variety of personalities drawn to this strange calling. And he has arrived at a moment when forces within the IRS are plotting to eliminate even what little humanity and dignity the work still has.

Train Dreams [Kindle] by Denis Johnson
Call Number: Kindle-670
ISBN: 9781429995207
Publication Date: 2011-08-30
Presents the story of early twentieth-century day laborer Robert Grainer, who endures the harrowing loss of his family while struggling for survival in the American West against a backdrop of radical historical changes.

Winner

The Orphan Master's Son, by Adam Johnson

The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson
Call Number: FIC JOHNS ADA OR (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780812992793
Publication Date: 2012-01-10
Pak Jun Do is the haunted son of a lost mother—a singer “stolen” to Pyongyang—and an influential father who runs a work camp for orphans. Superiors in the North Korean state soon recognize the boy’s loyalty and keen instincts. Considering himself “a humble citizen of the greatest nation in the world,” Jun Do rises in the ranks. He becomes a professional kidnapper who must navigate the shifting rules, arbitrary violence, and baffling demands of his overlords in order to stay alive. Driven to the absolute limit of what any human being could endure, he boldly takes on the treacherous role of rival to Kim Jong Il in an attempt to save the woman he loves, Sun Moon, a legendary actress “so pure, she didn’t know what starving people looked like.”
The Orphan Master's Son [E-Book] by Adam Johnson
Call Number: FIC JOHNS ADA OR Ebook (OverDrive)
ISBN: 9780679643999
Publication Date: 2012

Finalists

The Snow Child, by Eowyn Ivey
What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, by Nathan Englander

The Snow Child : a novel by Eowyn Ivey
Call Number: Fiction I955s (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780316175678
Publication Date: 2012-02-01
Alaska, 1920: a brutal place to homestead, and especially tough for recent arrivals Jack and Mabel. Childless, they are drifting apart--he breaking under the weight of the work of the farm; she crumbling from loneliness and despair. In a moment of levity during the season's first snowfall, they build a child out of snow. The next morning the snow child is gone--but they glimpse a young, blonde-haired girl running through the trees. This little girl, who calls herself Faina, seems to be a child of the woods. She hunts with a red fox at her side, skims lightly across the snow, and somehow survives alone in the Alaskan wilderness. As Jack and Mabel struggle to understand this child who could have stepped from the pages of a fairy tale, they come to love her as their own daughter. But in this beautiful, violent place things are rarely as they appear, and what they eventually learn about Faina will transform all of them.

What We Talk about When We Talk about Anne Frank by Nathan Englander
Call Number: Fiction E58w (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780307958709
Publication Date: 2012-02-07
The author of the sensational national best seller For the Relief of Unbearable Urges returns with a commanding new collection of short stories: What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank establishes Nathan Englander beyond all doubt as the heir to Roth, Malamud, and Babel. A tour de force. The title story, inspired by Carver's masterpiece, is a comic classic, a provocative portrait of two marriages in which the holocaust is played out as a devastating parlor game. "Camp Sundown" is an outlandishly dark story of vigilante justice undertaken by a troop of geriatric campers in a bucolic summer enclave who recognize a fellow vacationer as a former Nazi guard. "Free Fruit for Young Widows" is a small, sharp study in evil. "Sister Hills" chronicles the history of the Israeli settlements from the eve of the Yom Kippur war through the present, a political story constructed around the tale of two mothers who strike a terrible bargain to save a child.

Winner

The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
Call Number: FIC TARTT DON GO (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780316055437
Publication Date: 2013-10-22
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.
The Goldfinch [E-Book] by Donna Tartt
Call Number: FIC TARTT DON GO Ebook (OverDrive)
ISBN: 9780316248624
Publication Date: 2013
The Goldfinch [Streaming audiobook] by Donna Tartt
Call Number: FIC TARTT DON GO Audiobk (OverDrive)
ISBN: 9781478980490
Publication Date: 2013

Finalists

The Son, by Philipp Meyer
The Woman Who Lost Her Soul, by Bob Shacochis

The Son : a novel by Philipp Meyer
Call Number: Fiction M6132s (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780062120397
Publication Date: 2013-05-28
Comanche Indian captive Eli McCullough must carve a place for himself in a world in which he does not fully belong -- a journey of adventure, tragedy, hardship, grit, and luck that reverberates in the lives of his progeny.
The Son {CD} : a novel by Philipp Meyer; Clifton Collins (Read by); Kate Mulgrew (Read by); Will Patton (Read by); Scott Shepherd (Read by)
Call Number: CD Fiction ME (Adult Audiobook CD)
ISBN: 9780062280954
Publication Date: 2013-05-28
The Son [OverDrive Audiobook] : a novel by Philipp Meyer; Will Patton (Read by); Kate Mulgrew (Read by); Scott Shepherd (Read by); Clifton Collins (Read by)
Call Number: OverDrive Audiobook
ISBN: 9780062263353
Publication Date: 2013-05-28

Winner

All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr

All the Light We Cannot See : a novel by Anthony Doerr
Call Number: Ficton D651b (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9781476746586
Publication Date: 2014-05-06
Marie-Laure lives with her father in Paris near the Museum of Natural History, where he works as the master of its thousands of locks. When she is six, Marie-Laure goes blind and her father builds a perfect miniature of their neighborhood so she can memorize it by touch and navigate her way home. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure’s reclusive great-uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum’s most valuable and dangerous jewel. In a mining town in Germany, the orphan Werner grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments, a talent that wins him a place at a brutal academy for Hitler Youth, then a special assignment to track the resistance. More and more aware of the human cost of his intelligence, Werner travels through the heart of the war and, finally, into Saint-Malo, where his story and Marie-Laure’s converge.
All the Light We Cannot See [Kindle] by Anthony Doerr
Call Number: Kindle-258 (Get at Circulation Desk)
ISBN: 9781476746593
Publication Date: 2030-12-31
All the Light We Cannot See [OverDrive Audiobook] by Anthony Doerr
Call Number: OverDrive Audiobook
ISBN: 9781442378735
Publication Date: 2014

Finalists

Let Me Be Frank With You, by Richard Ford
Lovely, Dark, Deep, by Joyce Carol Oates
The Moor's Account, by Laila Lalami

Let Me Be Frank with You by Richard Ford
Call Number: Fiction F7116L (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780061692062
Publication Date: 2014-11-04
In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, Frank Bascombe travels to the site of his former home on the shore, visits his ex-wife, who is suffering with Parkinson's, and meets a dying former friend.

Lovely, Dark, Deep by Joyce Carol Oates
Call Number: Fiction O11Lg (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780062356949
Publication Date: 2014-09-09
A collection of thirteen spellbinding stories that maps the eerie darkness within us all.

Winner

The Sympathizer, by Viet Thanh Nguyen

Finalists

Get in Trouble : stories, by Kelly Link
Maud's Line, by Margaret Verble

Winner

The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
Call Number: Fiction W592u (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780385542364
Publication Date: 2016-08-02
Cora is a young slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. An outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is on the cusp of womanhood—where greater pain awaits. And so when Caesar, a slave who has recently arrived from Virginia, urges her to join him on the Underground Railroad, she seizes the opportunity and escapes with him. In Colson Whitehead's ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor: engineers and conductors operate a secret network of actual tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora embarks on a harrowing flight from one state to the next, encountering, like Gulliver, strange yet familiar iterations of her own world at each stop. As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the terrors of the antebellum era, he weaves in the saga of our nation, from the brutal abduction of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is both the gripping tale of one woman's will to escape the horrors of bondage—and a powerful meditation on the history we all share.
The Underground Railroad [CD] by Colson Whitehead; Bahni Turpin (Read by)
Call Number: FIC WHITE COL UN CD (Adult CD Audiobooks)
ISBN: 9781524736255
Publication Date: 2016-08-02
The Underground Railroad [E-Book] by Colson Whitehead
Call Number: FIC WHITE COL UN Ebook (OverDrive)
ISBN: 9780385537049
Publication Date: 2016-08-02
The Underground Railroad [Streaming audiobook] by Colson Whitehead
Call Number: FIC WHITE COL UN Audiobk (OverDrive)
ISBN: 9781524736286
Publication Date: 2016

Finalists

Imagine Me Gone, by Adam Haslett
The Sport of Kings, by C. E. Morgan

Imagine Me Gone by Adam Haslett
Call Number: Fiction H352i (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780316261357
Publication Date: 2016-05-03
When Margaret's fiancé, John, is hospitalized for depression, she faces a choice: carry on with their plans, or back away from the suffering it may bring her. She decides to marry him. What follows is the unforgettable story of what unfolds from this act of love and faith. At the heart of it is their eldest son, Michael, a brilliant, anxious music fanatic, and the story of how, over the span of decades, his younger siblings-the responsible Celia and the tightly controlled Alec-struggle along with their mother to care for Michael's increasingly troubled existence.

The Sport of Kings by C. E. Morgan
Call Number: Fiction M847s (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780374281083
Publication Date: 2016-05-03
Hellsmouth, a willful thoroughbred filly with the blood of Triple Crown winners flowing through her veins, has the legacy of the Forges riding on her. One of the oldest and proudest families in Kentucky, the Forge family is as mythic as the history of the South itself. Descended from one of the first settlers to brave the Gap, Henry Forge, through an act of naked ambition, is attempting to blaze a new path, breeding horses on the family's crop farm. His daughter, Henrietta, becomes his partner in the endeavor, although she has desires of her own. Their conflict escalates when Allmon Shaughnessy, a black man fresh from prison, comes to work in the stables, and the ugliness of the farm's past and the exigencies of appetite become evident. Together, the three stubbornly try to create a new future through sheer will--one that isn't written in their very fabric--while they mold Hellsmouth into a champion.

Winner

Less, by Andrew Sean Greer

Less by Andrew Sean Greer
Call Number: Fiction G793L (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780316316125
Publication Date: 2017-07-18
Who says you can't run away from your problems? You are a failed novelist about to turn fifty. A wedding invitation arrives in the mail: your boyfriend of the past nine years is engaged to someone else. You can't say yes--it would be too awkward--and you can't say no--it would look like defeat. On your desk are a series of invitations to half-baked literary events around the world. QUESTION: How do you arrange to skip town? ANSWER: You accept them all. What would possibly go wrong? Arthur Less will almost fall in love in Paris, almost fall to his death in Berlin, barely escape to a Moroccan ski chalet from a Saharan sandstorm, accidentally book himself as the (only) writer-in-residence at a Christian Retreat Center in Southern India, and encounter, on a desert island in the Arabian Sea, the last person on Earth he wants to face. Somewhere in there: he will turn fifty. Through it all, there is his first love. And there is his last.

Finalists

In the Distance, by Hernan Diaz
The Idiot, by Elif Batuman

The Idiot by Elif Batuman
Call Number: Fiction B328i (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9781594205613
Publication Date: 2017-03-14
A portrait of the artist as a young woman. A novel about not just discovering but inventing oneself. The year is 1995, and email is new. Selin, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, arrives for her freshman year at Harvard. She signs up for classes in subjects she has never heard of, befriends her charismatic and worldly Serbian classmate, Svetlana, and, almost by accident, begins corresponding with Ivan, an older mathematics student from Hungary. Selin may have barely spoken to Ivan, but with each email they exchange, the act of writing seems to take on new and increasingly mysterious meanings. At the end of the school year, Ivan goes to Budapest for the summer, and Selin heads to the Hungarian countryside, to teach English in a program run by one of Ivan's friends. On the way, she spends two weeks visiting Paris with Svetlana. Selin's summer in Europe does not resonate with anything she has previously heard about the typical experiences of American college students, or indeed of any other kinds of people. For Selin, this is a journey further inside herself: a coming to grips with the ineffable and exhilarating confusion of first love, and with the growing consciousness that she is doomed to become a writer.

Winner

The Overstory, by Richard Powers

Finalists

The Great Believers, by Rebecca Makkai
There, There, by Tommy Orange

The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai
Call Number: FIC MAKKA REB GR (Adult fiction)
ISBN: 9780735223523
Publication Date: 2018-06-19
In 1985, Yale Tishman, the development director for an art gallery in Chicago, is about to pull off an amazing coup, bringing in an extraordinary collection of 1920s paintings as a gift to the gallery. Yet as his career begins to flourish, the carnage of the AIDS epidemic grows around him. One by one, his friends are dying and after his friend Nico's funeral, the virus circles closer and closer to Yale himself. Soon the only person he has left is Fiona, Nico's little sister. Thirty years later, Fiona is in Paris tracking down her estranged daughter who disappeared into a cult. While staying with an old friend, a famous photographer who documented the Chicago crisis, she finds herself finally grappling with the devastating ways AIDS affected her life and her relationship with her daughter. The two intertwining stories take us through the heartbreak of the eighties and the chaos of the modern world, as both Yale and Fiona struggle to find goodness in the midst of disaster.

There There by Tommy Orange
Call Number: FIC ORANG TOM TH (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780525520375
Publication Date: 2018-06-05
Twelve Native Americans came to the Big Oakland Powwow for different reasons. Jacquie Red Feather is newly sober and trying to make it back to the family she left behind in shame. Dene Oxendene is pulling his life together after his uncle's death and has come to work the powwow and to honor his uncle's memory. Edwin Frank has come to find his true father. Bobby Big Medicine has come to drum the Grand Entry. Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield has come to watch her nephew Orvil Red Feather. Orvil has taught himself Indian dance through YouTube videos, and he has come to the powwow to dance in public for the very first time. Tony Loneman is a young Native American boy whose future seems destined to be as bleak as his past, and he has come to the Powwow with darker intentions -- intentions that will destroy the lives of everyone in his path.
There There [E-Book] by Tommy Orange
Call Number: FIC ORANG TOM TH Ebook (OverDrive)
ISBN: 9780525520382
Publication Date: 2018-06-05

2000s

Winner

Interpreter of Maladies, by Jhumpa Lahiri

Finalists

Close Range : Wyoming stories, by Annie Proulx
Waiting, by Ha Jin

Close Range : Wyoming stories by Annie Proulx; William Matthews (Illustrator)
Call Number: Fiction P968w v.1 (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780684852218
Publication Date: 1999-05-10
CONTENTS: The half-skinned steer -- The mud below -- Job history -- The blood bay -- People in hell just want a drink of water -- The bunchgrass edge of the world -- Pair of spurs -- A lonely coast -- The governors of Wyoming -- 55 miles to the gas pump -- Brokeback Mountain.

Winner

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, by Michael Chabon

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
Call Number: FIC CHAGO MIC AM (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780679450047
Publication Date: 2000-09-19
A young escape artist and budding magician named Joe Kavalier arrives on the doorstep of his cousin, Sammy Clay. While the long shadow of Hitler falls across Europe, America is happily in thrall to the Golden Age of comic books, and in a distant corner of Brooklyn, Sammy is looking for a way to cash in on the craze. He finds the ideal partner in the aloof, artistically gifted Joe, and together they embark on an adventure that takes them deep into the heart of Manhattan, and the heart of old-fashioned American ambition. From the shared fears, dreams, and desires of two teenage boys, they spin comic book tales of the heroic, fascist-fighting Escapist and the beautiful, mysterious Luna Moth, otherworldly mistress of the night. Climbing from the streets of Brooklyn to the top of the Empire State Building, Joe and Sammy carve out lives, and careers, as vivid as cyan and magenta ink. Spanning continents and eras, this superb book by one of America’s finest writers remains one of the defining novels of our modern American age.

Finalists

Blonde, by Joyce Carol Oates
The Quick and the Dead, by Joy Williams

Blonde : a novel by Joyce Carol Oates; Elaine Showalter (Introduction by)
Call Number: Fiction O11bL (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780060196073
Publication Date: 2000-04-05
In this ambitious book, Joyce Carol Oates boldly reimagines the inner, poetic, and spiritual life of Norma Jeane Baker—the child, the woman, the fated celebrity and idolized blonde the world came to know as Marilyn Monroe. In a voice startling, intimate, and rich, Norma Jeane tells her own story, that of an emblematic American artist—intensely conflicted and driven—who has lost her way. A powerful portrait of Hollywood’s myth and an extraordinary woman’s heartbreaking reality, Blonde is a sweeping epic that pays tribute to the elusive magic and devastation behind the creation of the great twentieth-century American star.

Winner

Empire Falls, by Richard Russo

Empire Falls [Kindle] by Richard Russo
Call Number: Kindle-902
ISBN: 9780307809889
Publication Date: 2002
Milo Roby tries to hold his family together while working at the Empire Grill in the once-successful logging town of Empire Falls, Maine, with his partner, Mrs. Whiting, who is the heir to a faded logging and textile legacy.

Finalists

John Henry Days, by Colson Whitehead
The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
Call Number: FIC FRANZ JON CO (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780374100124
Publication Date: 2001-09-01
A bold, comic, tragic, deeply moving family drama that stretches from the Midwest at mid-century to Wall Street and Eastern Europe in the age of greed and globalism. Franzen brings an old-time America of freight trains and civic duty, of Cub Scouts and Christmas cookies and sexual inhibitions, into brilliant collision with the modern absurdities of brain science, home surveillance, hands-off parenting, do-it-yourself mental healthcare, and the anti-gravity New Economy.

Winner

Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides

Finalists

Servants of the Map : stories, by Andrea Barrett
You Are Not a Stranger Here, by Adam Haslett

Winner

The Known World, by Edward P. Jones

The Known World by Edward P. Jones
Call Number: FIC JONES EDWP KN (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780060557546
Publication Date: 2003-08-14
The Known World tells the story of Henry Townsend, a black farmer and former slave who falls under the tutelage of William Robbins, the most powerful man in Manchester County, Virginia. Making certain he never circumvents the law, Townsend runs his affairs with unusual discipline. But when death takes him unexpectedly, his widow, Caldonia, can't uphold the estate's order, and chaos ensues.

Finalists

American Woman, by Susan Choi
Evidence of Things Unknown, by Marianne Wiggins

Winner

Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson

Gilead [Kindle] by Marilynne Robinson
Call Number: FIC ROBIN MAR G1 Kindle (Request at circulation desk)
Publication Date: 2005
An intimate tale of three generations, from the Civil War to the 20th century: a story about fathers and sons and the spiritual battles that still rage at America's heart.

Finalists

An Unfinished Season, by Ward Just
War Trash, by Ha Jin

An Unfinished Season [Kindle] by Ward Just
Call Number: Kindle-674
ISBN: 9780786130641
Publication Date: 2006-01-01
"The winter of the year my father carried a gun for his own protection was the coldest on record in Chicago." So begins Ward Just's An Unfinished Season, the winter in question a postwar moment of the 1950s when the modern world lay just over the horizon, a time of rabid anticommunism, worker unrest, and government corruption. Even the small-town family could not escape the nationwide suspicion and dread of "the enemy within." In rural Quarterday, on the margins of Chicago's North Shore, nineteen-year-old Wilson Ravan watches as his father's life unravels. Teddy Ravan -- gruff, unapproachable, secure in his knowledge of the world -- is confronting a strike and even death threats from union members who work at his printing business. Wilson, in the summer before college, finds himself straddling three worlds when he takes a job at a newspaper: the newsroom where working-class reporters find class struggle at the heart of every issue, the glittering North Shore debutante parties where he spends his nights, and the growing cold war between his parents at home. These worlds collide when he falls in love with the headstrong daughter of a renowned psychiatrist with a frightful past in World War II. Tragedy strikes her family, and the revelation of secrets calls into question everything Wilson once believed.

Winner

March, by Geraldine Brooks

March by Geraldine Brooks
Call Number: Fiction B87295m (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780670033355
Publication Date: 2005-03-03
From Louisa May Alcott's beloved classic Little Women, Geraldine Brooks has animated the character of the absent father, March, and crafted a story "filled with the ache of love and marriage and with the power of war upon the mind and heart of one unforgettable man" (Sue Monk Kidd). With "pitch-perfect writing" (USA Today), Brooks follows March as he leaves behind his family to aid the Union cause in the Civil War. His experiences will utterly change his marriage and challenge his most ardently held beliefs. A lushly written, wholly original tale steeped in the details of another time, March secures Geraldine Brooks's place as a renowned author of historical fiction.

Finalists

The Bright Forever, by Lee Martin
The March, by E. L. Doctorow

The Bright Forever by Lee Martin
Call Number: Fiction M3815b (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9781400097913
Publication Date: 2005-05-03
On an evening like any other, nine-year-old Katie Mackey, daughter of the most affluent family in a small town on the plains of Indiana, sets out on her bicycle to return some library books. This simple act is at the heart of The Bright Forever, a deeply affecting novel about the choices people make that change their lives forever. Fact, speculation, and contradiction play off one another as the details about Katie's disappearance--and about the townspeople--unfold, creating a fast-paced story that is as gripping as it is richly human. A nuanced portrayal of the complicated give and take among people struggling to maintain their humanity in the shadow of a loss, The Bright Forever is a compelling and emotional tale about the human need to know even the hardest truth.

The March by E. L. Doctorow
Call Number: FIC DOCTOR EL MA (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780375506710
Publication Date: 2005-09-20
In 1864, Union general William Tecumseh Sherman marched his sixty thousand troops through Georgia to the sea, and then up into the Carolinas. The army fought off Confederate forces, demolished cities, and accumulated a borne-along population of freed blacks and white refugees until all that remained was the dangerous transient life of the dispossessed and the triumphant.
The March [E-Book] by E. L. Doctorow
Call Number: FIC DOCTO EL MA Ebook (OverDrive)
ISBN: 9781588365095
Publication Date: 2005-09-20

Winner

The Road, by Cormac McCarthy

The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Call Number: FIC MCART CO RO (Adult fiction)
ISBN: 9780307265432
Publication Date: 2006-09-26
America is a barren landscape of smoldering ashes, devoid of life except for those people still struggling to scratch out some type of existence. Amidst the destruction, a father and his young son walk, always toward the coast, but with no real understanding that circumstances will improve once they arrive. Still they persevere, and their relationship comes to represent goodness in a world that is utterly devastated.
The Road [CD] by Cormac McCarthy; Tom Stechschulte (Narrated by)
Call Number: CD Fiction MC (Adult Audiobook CD)
ISBN: 9781428112780
Publication Date: 2006-08-28
The Road [E-Book] by Cormac McCarthy
Call Number: FIC MCART CO RO Ebook (OverDrive)
ISBN: 9780307267450
Publication Date: 2007

Finalists

After This, by Alice McDermott
The Echo Maker, by Richard Powers

After This [CD] by Alice McDermott; Martha Plimpton (Read by)
Call Number: CD Fiction MC (Adult Audiobook CD)
ISBN: 9781593979676
Publication Date: 2006-09-05
A portrait of the social, spiritual, and political turmoil during the middle decades of the twentieth century, as seen through the experiences of a middle-class couple and their children.

Winner

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao [E-Book] by Junot Diaz
Call Number: FIC DIAZ JUN BR Ebook (OverDrive)
ISBN: 9781101147306
Publication Date: 2007
Oscar is a sweet but disastrously overweight ghetto nerd who—from the New Jersey home he shares with his old world mother and rebellious sister—dreams of becoming the Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien and, most of all, finding love. But Oscar may never get what he wants. Blame the fukú—a curse that has haunted Oscar’s family for generations, following them on their epic journey from Santo Domingo to the USA. Encapsulating Dominican-American history, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao opens our eyes to an astonishing vision of the contemporary American experience and explores the endless human capacity to persevere—and risk it all—in the name of love.

Finalists

Shakespeare's Kitchen, by Lore Segal
Tree of Smoke, by Denis Johnson

Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson
Call Number: Fiction J664t (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780374279127
Publication Date: 2007-09-04
This is the story of Skip Sands—spy-in-training, engaged in Psychological Operations against the Vietcong—and the disasters that befall him thanks to his famous uncle, a war hero known in intelligence circles simply as the Colonel. This is also the story of the Houston brothers, Bill and James, young men who drift out of the Arizona desert into a war in which the line between disinformation and delusion has blurred away. In its vision of human folly, and its gritty, sympathetic portraits of men and women desperate for an end to their loneliness, whether in sex or death or by the grace of God, this is a story like nothing in our literature.

Winner

Olive Kitteridge, by Elizabeth Strout

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
Call Number: Fiction S927o (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9781400062089
Publication Date: 2008-03-25
At the edge of the continent, in the small town of Crosby, Maine, lives Olive Kitteridge, a retired schoolteacher who deplores the changes in her town and in the world at large but doesn't always recognize the changes in those around her.
Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
Call Number: OverDrive E-Book
ISBN: 9781588366887
Publication Date: 2008

Finalists

All Souls, by Christine Schutt
The Plague of Doves, by Louise Erdrich

1990s

Winner

The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, by Oscar Hijuelos

The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love by Óscar Hijuelos
Call Number: FIC HIJUE OSCA MA (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780060955458
Publication Date: 2003-12-23
Brothers Nestor and Cesar Camillo arrive from Cuba in 1949 with dreams of becoming famous mambo musicians. This memorable novel traces the arc of the two brothers’ lives—one charismatic and macho, the other soulful and sensitive—from Havana to New York, from East Coast clubs and dance halls to the heights of musical fame.

Finalist

Billy Bathgate, by E. L. Doctorow

Billy Bathgate by E. L. Doctorow
Call Number: FIC DOCTO EL BI (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780394575131
Publication Date: 1989-04-26
The story of Billy Bathgate, a boy who has insinuated himself into the inner circle of the notorious Dutch Schultz gang to become apprentice and protege to one of the great murdering gangsters.

Winner

Rabbit At Rest, by John Updike

Finalists

Mean Spirit, by Linda Hogan
The Things They Carried, by Tim O'Brien

The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien
Call Number: FIC OBRIE TIM TH (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780395515983
Publication Date: 1990-03-01
Related short stories with recurring characters and an interwoven plot and theme as told by a foot soldier recreating his Vietnam War experience.

Winner

A Thousand Acres, by Jane Smiley

A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley
Call Number: FIC SMILE JAN TH (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780394577739
Publication Date: 1991-10-23
Brothers Nestor and Cesar Camillo arrive from Cuba in 1949 with dreams of becoming famous mambo musicians. This memorable novel traces the arc of the two brothers’ lives—one charismatic and macho, the other soulful and sensitive—from Havana to New York, from East Coast clubs and dance halls to the heights of musical fame.

Finalists

Jernigan, by David Gates
Lila: An Inquiry into Morals, by Robert M Pirsig
Mao II, by Don DeLillo

Winner

A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, by Robert Olen Butler

Finalists

At Weddings and Wakes, by Alice McDermott
Black Water, by Joyce Carol Oates

Black Water by Joyce Carol Oates
Call Number: FIC OATES JOYC BW (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780452269866
Publication Date: 1993-05-01
Kelly Kelleher is an idealistic, twenty-six-year-old “good girl” when she meets the Senator at a Fourth of July party. In a brilliantly woven narrative, we enter her past and her present, her mind and her body as she is fatally attracted to this older man, this hero, this soon-to-be-lover. Kelly becomes the very embodiment of the vulnerable, romantic dreams of bright and brave women—drawn to the power that certain men command—at a party that takes on the quality of a surreal nightmare.

Winner

The Shipping News, by Annie Proulx

The Shipping News by Annie Proulx; B. Grossman (Editor)
Call Number: FIC PROUL ANN SH (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780684193373
Publication Date: 1993-03-02
Quoyle, a third-rate newspaper hack, with a “head shaped like a crenshaw, no neck, reddish hair...features as bunched as kissed fingertips,” is wrenched violently out of his workaday life when his two-timing wife meets her just desserts. An aunt convinces Quoyle and his two emotionally disturbed daughters to return with her to the starkly beautiful coastal landscape of their ancestral home in Newfoundland. Here, on desolate Quoyle’s Point, in a house empty except for a few mementos of the family’s unsavory past, the battered members of three generations try to cobble up new lives.

Finalists

Operation Shylock : a confession, by Philip Roth
The Collected Stories, by Reynolds Price

Winner

The Stone Diaries, by Carol Shields

The Stone Diaries [Kindle] by Carol Shields; Penelope Lively (Introduction by)
Call Number: FIC SHIEL CAR ST Kindle (Request at the circulation desk)
ISBN: 9780143105503
Publication Date: 2008-09-30
One of the most successful and acclaimed novels of our time, this fictionalized autobiography of Daisy Goodwill Flett is a subtle but affecting portrait of an everywoman reflecting on an unconventional life. What transforms this seemingly ordinary tale is the richness of Daisy's vividly described inner life--from her earliest memories of her adoptive mother to her awareness of impending death.

Finalists

The Collected Stories, by Grace Paley
What I Lived For, by Joyce Carol Oates

The Collected Stories [Kindle] by Grace Paley
Call Number: Kindle-830
ISBN: 9781466884014
Publication Date: 2014-10-07
This reissue of Grace Paley's classic collection'a finalist for the National Book Award'demonstrates her rich use of language as well as her extraordinary insight into and compassion for her characters, moving from the hilarious to the tragic and back again. Whether writing about the love (and conflict) between parents and children or between husband and wife, or about the struggles of aging single mothers or disheartened political organizers to make sense of the world, she brings the same unerring ear for the rhythm of life as it is actually lived. The Collected Stories is a 1994 National Book Award Finalist for Fiction.

Winner

Independence Day, by Richard Ford

Independence Day by Richard Ford
Call Number: FIC FORD RIC IN (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780679492658
Publication Date: 1995-06-13
Frank Bascombe, in the aftermath of his divorce and the ruin of his career, has entered an "Existence Period," selling real estate in Haddam, New Jersey, and mastering the high-wire act of normalcy. But over one Fourth of July weekend, Frank is called into sudden, bewildering engagement with life.

Finalists

Mr. Ives' Christmas, by Oscar Hijuelos
Sabbath's Theater, by Philip Roth

Sabbath's Theater by Philip Roth
Call Number: Fiction R845s (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780395739822
Publication Date: 1995-09-12
He is relentlessly defiant. He is exceedingly libidinous. His appetite for the outrageous is insatiable. He is Mickey Sabbath, the aging, raging powerhouse whose savage effrontery and mocking audacity are at the heart of Philip Roth's astonishing new novel. Sabbath's Theater tells Mickey's story in the wake of the death of his mistress, an erotic free spirit whose adulterous daring exceeds even his own. Once a scandalously inventive puppeteer, Mickey is now in his mid-sixties and besieged by ghosts - of his mother, his beloved brother, his vanished first wife, his mistress of thirteen years. Bereft and grieving, he embarks on a turbulent journey back into his past, one that brings him to the brink of madness and extinction. But no matter how ardently he courts death, he is too exuberantly alive to succeed at dying. Sabbath's Theater is a comic creation of epic proportions, and Mickey Sabbath is its gargantuan hero.

Winner

Martin Dressler : the tale of an American dreamer, by Steven Millhauser

Martin Dressler : the tale of an American dreamer by Steven Millhauser
Call Number: Fiction M654m (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780679781271
Publication Date: 1997-03-25
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award Finalist. Young Martin Dressler begins his career as an industrious helper in his father's cigar store. In the course of his restless young manhood, he makes a swift and eventful rise to the top, accompanied by two sisters--one a dreamlike shadow, the other a worldly business partner. As the eponymous Martin's vision becomes bolder and bolder he walks a haunted line between fantasy and reality, madness and ambition, art and industry, a sense of doom builds piece-by-hypnotic piece until this mesmerizing journey into the heart of an American dreamer reaches its bitter-sweet conclusion.

Finalists

The Manikin, by Joanna Scott
Unlocking the Air and Other Stories, by Ursula K. LeGuin

Winner

American Pastoral, by Philip Roth

American Pastoral by Philip Roth
Call Number: FIC ROTH PHI AM (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780395860212
Publication Date: 1997-05-12
American Pastoral is the story of a fortunate American's rise and fall—of a strong, confident master of social equilibrium overwhelmed by the forces of social disorder. Seymour "Swede" Levov—a legendary high school athlete, a devoted family man, a hard worker, the prosperous inheritor of his father's Newark glove factory—comes of age in thriving, triumphant postwar America. But everything he loves is lost when the country begins to run amok in the turbulent 1960s. Not even the most private, well-intentioned citizen, it seems, gets to sidestep the sweep of history. With vigorous realism, Roth takes us back to the conflicts and violent transitions of the 1960s. This is a book about loving—and hating—America. It's a book about wanting to belong—and refusing to belong—to America. It sets the desire for an American pastoral—a respectable life of space, calm, order, optimism, and achievement—against the indigenous American Berserk.

Finalists

Bear and His Daughter : stories, by Robert Stone
Underworld, by Don DeLillo

Underworld by Don DeLillo
Call Number: FIC DELIL DON UN (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780684842691
Publication Date: 1997-10-03
Underworld is about the second half of the twentieth century in America and about two people, an artist and an executive, whose lives intertwine in New York in the fifties and again in the nineties. With cameo appearances by Lenny Bruce, J. Edgar Hoover, Bobby Thompson, Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason and Toots Shor.

Winner

The Hours, by Michael Cunningham

The Hours : a novel by Michael Cunningham
Call Number: Fiction C9736h (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780374172893
Publication Date: 1998-11-11
The Hours tells the story of three women: Virginia Woolf, beginning to write Mrs. Dalloway as she recuperates in a London suburb with her husband in 1923; Clarissa Vaughan, beloved friend of an acclaimed poet dying from AIDS, who in modern-day New York is planning a party in his honor; and Laura Brown, in a 1949 Los Angeles suburb, who slowly begins to feel the constraints of a perfect family and home. By the end of the novel, these three stories intertwine in remarkable ways, and finally come together in an act of subtle and haunting grace.

Finalists

Cloudsplitter, by Russell Banks
The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
Call Number: Fiction K556po (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780060175405
Publication Date: 1998-10-07
The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it—from garden seeds to Scripture—is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of one family's tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa.

1980s

Winner

The Executioner's Song, by Norman Mailer

The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer
Call Number: Fiction M219e (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780316544177
Publication Date: 1979-10-01
Re-creates the crime, trial and events leading to the execution of convicted murderer Gary Gilmore, who requested the death sentence.

Finalists

Birdy, by William Wharton
The Ghost Writer, by Philip Roth

Birdy by William Wharton
Call Number: Fiction W554b
ISBN: 9780679734123
Publication Date: 1978
While growing up in Philadelphia in the 1930s, a boy becomes obsessed with a longing to fly and a fascination with birds.

Winner

A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
Call Number: Fiction T671c (Adult Fiction)
Publication Date: 1985, c1980
A Confederacy of Dunces... Winner of the Pulitzer Prize... John Kennedy Toole's work is a masterwork nothing less than a grand comic fugue.
A Confederacy of Dunces [OverDrive E-Book] by John Kennedy Toole; Walker Percy (Foreword by)
Call Number: OverDrive E-Book
ISBN: 9780802197627
Publication Date: 2007-12-01

Finalists

Godric, by Frederick Buechner
So Long, See You Tomorrow, by William Maxwell

Winner

Rabbit is Rich, by John Updike

Finalists

A Flag for Sunrise, by Robert Stone
Housekeeping, by Marilynne Robinson

Winner

The Color Purple, by Alice Walker

The Color Purple by Alice Walker
Call Number: FIC WALKE ALI CO (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780151191543
Publication Date: 1992-05-22
Celie has grown up poor in rural Georgia, despised by the society around her and abused by her own family. She strives to protect her sister, Nettie, from a similar fate, and while Nettie escapes to a new life as a missionary in Africa, Celie is left behind without her best friend and confidante, married off to an older suitor, and sentenced to a life alone with a harsh and brutal husband. In an attempt to transcend a life that often seems too much to bear, Celie begins writing letters directly to God. The letters, spanning twenty years, record a journey of self-discovery and empowerment guided by the light of a few strong women. She meets Shug Avery, her husband’s mistress and a jazz singer with a zest for life, and her stepson’s wife, Sophia, who challenges her to fight for independence. And though the many letters from Celie’s sister are hidden by her husband, Nettie’s unwavering support will prove to be the most breathtaking of all.
The Color Purple Collection [OverDrive E-Book] by Alice Walker
Call Number: FIC WALKE ALI COP Ebook (OverDrive)
ISBN: 9781453276433
Publication Date: 2012-09-11
CONTENTS: The Color purple -- The Temple of my familiar -- Possessing the secret of joy.

Finalists

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, by Anne Tyler
Rabbis and Wives, by Chaim Grade

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler
Call Number: Fiction T981d (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780099916406
Publication Date: 1982
Cody, Jenny, and Ezra, who were deserted by their father and raised by their angry mother, go their separate ways but meet again for their mother's funeral.

Winner

Ironweed, by William Kennedy

Ironweed : a novel by William Kennedy
Call Number: Fiction K366i (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780670401765
Publication Date: 1983-01-01
Chronicles the final wanderings of a one-time ballplayer turned down-and-out murderer.

Finalists

Cathedral, by Raymond Carver
The Feud, by Thomas Berger

Winner

Foreign Affairs, by Alison Lurie

Foreign Affairs by Alison Lurie
Call Number: Fiction L967f (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780394540764
Publication Date: 1984-08-12
Relates in alternating chapters, the affairs Vinnie Miner and Fred Turner have while they live in London.

Finalists

I Wish This War Were Over, by Diana O'Hehir
Leaving the Land, by Douglas Unger

Winner

Lonesome Dove, by Larry McMurtry

Lonesome Dove (Lonesome Dove #1) by Larry McMurtry
Call Number: FIC MMURT LAR L1 (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780671504205
Publication Date: 1985-06-01
Tells of a cattle drive from Texas to Montana and shows how one man's dream to create an empire affects others.

Finalists

Continental Drift, by Russell Banks
The Accidental Tourist, by Anne Tyler

The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler
Call Number: FIC TYLER ANN AC (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780345452009
Publication Date: 2002-04-09
An author of guidebooks for travelling businessmen goes through life "accidently". It is an accident tinged with purpose when he gets involved with the astonishing Muriel and her talent for finding adventure.

Winner

A Summons to Memphis, by Peter Taylor

Finalists

Paradise by Donald Barthelme
Whites, by Norman Rush

Winner

Beloved, by Toni Morrison

Beloved by Toni Morrison
Call Number: FIC MORRI TON BE (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780394535975
Publication Date: 1987-08-12
Sethe, an escaped slave who now lives in post-Civil War Ohio, has borne the unthinkable and works hard at "beating back the past." She struggles to keep Beloved, an intruder, from gaining possession of her present while throwing off the legacy of her past.
Beloved [E-Book] by Toni Morrison
Call Number: FIC MORRI TON BE Ebook (OverDrive)
ISBN: 9780307388629
Publication Date: 2007

Finalists

Persian Nights, by Diane Johnson
That Night, by Alice McDermott

That Night [Kindle] : a novel by Alice McDermott
Call Number: Kindle-767
ISBN: 9780385333306
Publication Date: 1999-01-12
The emotionally powerful story of young love set in suburban Long Island in the 60s.

Winner

Breathing Lessons, by Anne Tyler

Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler
Call Number: Fiction T981b (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780394572345
Publication Date: 1988-08-12
While driving to the funeral of a friend, a couple married twenty-eight years examine the expectations and disappointments of their marriage.

Finalist

Where I'm Calling From, by Raymond Carver

1970s

Winner

Collected Stories, by Jean Stafford

Winner

No award given

Winner

Angle of Repose, by Wallace Stegner

Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner
Call Number: Fiction S817an (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9781101872765
Publication Date: 2014-11-04
Lyman Ward is a retired professor of history, recently confined to a wheelchair by a crippling bone disease and dependant on others for his every need. Amid the chaos of 1970s counterculture he retreats to his ancestral home of Grass Valley, California, to write the biography of his grandmother: an elegant and headstrong artist and pioneer who, together with her engineer husband, made her own journey through the hardscrabble West nearly a hundred years before. In discovering her story he excavates his own, probing the shadows of his experience and the America that has come of age around him.

Winner

The Optimist's Daughter, by Eudora Welty

The Optimist's Daughter by Eudora Welty
Call Number: Fiction W464o (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780394480176
Publication Date: 1972-04-12
Laurel McKelva Hand, a young woman who has left the South and returns, years later, to New Orleans, where her father is dying. After his death, she and her silly young stepmother go back still farther, to the small Mississippi town where she grew up. Along in the old house, Laurel finally comes to an understanding of the past, herself, and her parents.

Winner

No award given

Winner

The Killer Angels, by Michael Shaara

The Killer Angels : a novel by Michael Shaara
Call Number: Fiction S5235c v.1 (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780679643241
Publication Date: 2004-11-02
A fictional account of four days in July, 1863 at the Battle of Gettysburg discussing tactics, plans and preparations for battle from both the Northern and Southern points of view.
The Killer Angels [CD] by Michael Shaara; Jeff Shaara (Introduction by); Stephen Hoye (Read by)
Call Number: CD Fiction SH (Adult Audiobook CD)
ISBN: 9780739309056
Publication Date: 2004-05-11

Winner

Humboldt's Gift, by Saul Bellow

Novels, 1970-1982 by Saul Bellow; James Wood (Editor)
ISBN: 9781598530797
Publication Date: 2010-09-30
CONTENTS: Mr. Sammler's planet -- Humboldt's gift -- The dean's December.

Winner

No award given

Winner

Elbow Room, by James Alan McPherson

Winner

The Stories of John Cheever, by John Cheever

The Stories of John Cheever by John Cheever
Call Number: YA F CHE-J (Young adult fiction)
ISBN: 9780394500874
Publication Date: 1978-10-12
A collection of sixty-one of Cheever's short stories, including four that have never been published in book form.

1960s

Winner

Advise and Consent, by Allen Drury

Advise and Consent by Allen Drury
Call Number: Fiction D796ad (Adult Fiction)
Publication Date: 1959
Probes the drama and maneuvering surrounding the choice of an American Secretary of State.

Winner

To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (Foreword by)
Call Number: FIC LEE HAR TO (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780060173227
Publication Date: 1995-09-01
Voted America's Best-Loved Novel in PBS's The Great American Read. Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning masterwork of honor and injustice in the deep South—and the heroism of one man in the face of blind and violent hatred. One of the most cherished stories of all time, To Kill a Mockingbird has been translated into more than forty languages, sold more than forty million copies worldwide, served as the basis for an enormously popular motion picture, and was voted one of the best novels of the twentieth century by librarians across the country. A gripping, heart-wrenching, and wholly remarkable tale of coming-of-age in a South poisoned by virulent prejudice, it views a world of great beauty and savage inequities through the eyes of a young girl, as her father—a crusading local lawyer—risks everything to defend a black man unjustly accused of a terrible crime.
To Kill a Mockingbird [CD] by Harper Lee; Sissy Spacek (Read by)
Call Number: CD Fiction LE (Adult Audiobook CD)
ISBN: 9780060888695
Publication Date: 2006-08-22
To Kill a Mockingbird [Streaming audiobook] by Harper Lee; Sissy Spacek (Read by)
Call Number: FIC LEE HAR TO Audiobk (OverDrive)
ISBN: 9780062368690
Publication Date: 2014-07-08

Winner

The Edge of Sadness, by Edwin O'Connor

Winner

The Reivers, by William Faulkner

Novels, 1957-1962 by William Faulkner; Noel Polk (Editor); Joseph Blotner (Foreword by)
Call Number: 810 L697fa v.5 (Adult Nonfiction)
ISBN: 9781883011697
Publication Date: 1999-10-01
Contents: The Town--The Mansion--The Reivers.

Winner

No award given

Winner

The Keepers of the House, by Shirley Ann Grau

The Keepers of the House by Shirley Ann Grau
Call Number: Fiction G774k (Adult Fiction)
Publication Date: 1964
Abigail was the last keeper of the house and the last to know the Howland family's secrets. Now in the name of her family, she must take bitter revenge on the small-minded Southern town that shamed them but could not destroy them.

Winner

Collected Stories, by Katherine Anne Porter

The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter by Katherine Anne Porter
Call Number: Fiction P846c (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780156188760
Publication Date: 1985
Porter’s reputation as one of americanca’s most distinguished writers rests chiefly on her superb short stories. This volume includes the collections Flowering Judas; Pale Horse, Pale Rider; and The Leaning Tower as well as four stories not available elsewhere in book form. Winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

Winner

The Fixer, by Bernard Malamud

The Fixer by Bernard Malamud
Call Number: Fiction M236f (Adult Fiction)
Publication Date: 1966
Set in Kiev in 1911 during a period of heightened anti-Semitism, the novel tells the story of Yakov Bok, a Jewish handyman blamed for the brutal murder of a young Russian boy. Bok leaves his village to try his luck in Kiev, and after denying his Jewish identity, finds himself working for a member of the anti-Semitic Black Hundreds Society. When the boy is found nearly drained of blood in a cave, the Black Hundreds accuse the Jews of ritual murder. Arrested and imprisoned, Bok refuses to confess to a crime that he did not commit.

Winner

The Confessions of Nat Turner, by William Styron

The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron
Call Number: Fiction S938c (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780375508035
Publication Date: 2002-03-05
Tells the story of the short-lived, bloody rebellion of slaves in Southhampton, Virginia, in August, 1831, as seen through the eyes of the instigator, Nat Turner.

Winner

House Made of Dawn, by N. Scott Momaday

House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday
Call Number: Fiction M732h (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780060916336
Publication Date: 1989-10-01
A young Native American, Abel has come home from war to find himself caught between two worlds. The first is the world of his grandfather’s, wedding him to the rhythm of the seasons, the harsh beauty of the land, and the ancient rites and traditions of his people. But the other world—modern, industrial America—pulls at Abel, demanding his loyalty, claiming his soul, and goading him into a destructive, compulsive cycle of depravity and disgust.

1950s

Winner

The Way West, by A. B. Guthrie

The Way West by A. B. Guthrie; A. B. Guthrie
Call Number: Fiction G984w (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780618154623
Publication Date: 1949
An enormously entertaining classic, THE WAY WEST brings to life the adventure of the western passage and the pioneer spirit. The sequel to THE BIG SKY, this celebrated novel charts a frontiersman's return to the untamed West in 1846. Dick Summers, as pilot of a wagon train, guides a group of settlers on the difficult journey from Missouri to Oregon. In sensitive but unsentimental prose, Guthrie illuminates the harsh trials and resounding triumphs of pioneer life. With THE WAY WEST, he pays homage to the grandeur of the western wilderness, its stark and beautiful scenery, and its extraordinary people.

Winner

The Town, by Conrad Richter

Winner

The Caine Mutiny, by Herman Wouk

The Caine Mutiny : a novel of World War II by Herman Wouk
Call Number: Fiction W938c (Adult Fiction)
Publication Date: 1951
The Caine Mutiny is the 1951 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Herman Wouk. The novel grew out of Wouk's personal experiences aboard a destroyer-minesweeper in the Pacific Theater in World War II. It deals with, among other things, the moral and ethical decisions made at sea by the captains of ships.

Winner

The Old Man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway

The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
Call Number: FIC HEMIN ERN OL (Adult fiction)
ISBN: 9781781396810
Publication Date: 2016-08-24
The last novel Ernest Hemingway saw published, The Old Man and the Sea has proved itself to be one of the enduring works of American fiction. It is the story of an old Cuban fisherman and his supreme ordeal: a relentless, agonizing battle with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream. Using the simple, powerful language of a fable, Hemingway takes the timeless themes of courage in the face of defeat and personal triumph won from loss and transforms them into a magnificent twentieth-century classic.
The Old Man and the Sea [CD] by Ernest Hemingway; Donald Sutherland (Read by)
Call Number: CD Fiction HE (Adult Audiobook CD)
ISBN: 9780743564366
Publication Date: 2006-05-01
The story of an old Cuban fisherman, down on his luck, and his supreme ordeal, a relentless, agonizing battle with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream.

Winner

No winner

Winner

A Fable, by William Faulkner

Winner

Andersonville, by MacKinlay Kantor

Andersonville by MacKinlay Kantor
Call Number: Fiction K164a (Adult Fiction)
Publication Date: 1955
The 1955 Pulitzer Prize-winning story of the Andersonville Fortress and its use as a concentration camp-like prison by the South during the Civil War.

Winner

No winner

Winner

A Death in the Family, by James Agee

A Death in the Family [Kindle] by James Agee
Call Number: Kindle-378
Publication Date: 1967, 1957
The novel is based on the events that occurred to Agee in 1915 when his father went out of town to see his own father, who had suffered a heart attack. During the return trip, Agee's father was killed in a car accident. The novel provides a portrait of life in Knoxville, Tennessee, showing how such a loss affects the young widow, her two children, her atheist father and the dead man's alcoholic brother.

Pulitzer Prize

2020s

Winner

The Nickel Boys by Colton Whitehead

Finalists

The Dutch House by Ann Patchett

The Topeka School by Ben Lerner

Winner

The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich

Finalists

A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth by Daniel Mason

Telephone by Percival Everett

Winner

The Netanyahus: an account of a minor and ultimately even negligible episode in the history of a very famous family by Joshua Cohen

Finalists

Monkey Boy by Francisco Goldman

Palmares by Gayl Jones

Winners

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

Trust by Hernan Diaz

Finalist

The Immortal King Rao by Vauhini Vara

2010s

Winner

Tinkers, by Paul Harding

Finalists

In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, Daniyal Mueenuddin

Love in Infant Monkeys, by Lydia Millet

Winner

A Visit from the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan

Finalists

The Privileges, by Jonathan Dee

The Surrendered, by Chang-rae Lee

Winner

No award given

Finalists

Swamplandia!, by Karen Russell

The Pale King, by David Foster Wallace

Train Dreams, by Denis Johnson

Winner

The Orphan Master's Son, by Adam Johnson

Finalists

The Snow Child, by Eowyn Ivey

What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, by Nathan Englander

Winner

The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt

Finalists

The Son, by Philipp Meyer

The Woman Who Lost Her Soul, by Bob Shacochis

Winner

All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr

Finalists

Let Me Be Frank With You, by Richard Ford

Lovely, Dark, Deep, by Joyce Carol Oates

The Moor's Account, by Laila Lalami

Winner

The Sympathizer, by Viet Thanh Nguyen

Finalists

Get in Trouble : stories, by Kelly Link

Maud's Line, by Margaret Verble

Winner

The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead

Finalists

Imagine Me Gone, by Adam Haslett

The Sport of Kings, by C. E. Morgan

Winner

Less, by Andrew Sean Greer

Finalists

In the Distance, by Hernan Diaz

The Idiot, by Elif Batuman

Winner

The Overstory, by Richard Powers

Finalists

The Great Believers, by Rebecca Makkai

There, There, by Tommy Orange

2000s

Winner

Interpreter of Maladies, by Jhumpa Lahiri

Finalists

Close Range : Wyoming stories, by Annie Proulx