Leisure Reading

2020 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 2018
A New York Times Notable Book of 2017
A Washington Post Top Ten Book of 2017
A San Francisco Chronicle Top Ten Book of 2017
Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence, the Lambda Award, and the California Book Award.

Pulitzer Prize Winner, 2017
National Book Award for Fiction, 2016
Goodreads Choice Awards Best Historical Fiction, 2016

Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction
Center for Fiction First Novel Prize
Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 2016
Edgar Award for Best First Novel by an American Author, Mystery Writers of America, 2016

2015 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. An imaginative and intricate novel inspired by the horrors of World War II and written in short, elegant chapters that explore human nature and the contradictory power of technology.

2014 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

An exquisitely crafted novel that carries the reader on an adventuresome journey into the depths of totalitarian North Korea and into the most intimate spaces of the human heart.

2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
An inventive investigation of growing up and growing old in the digital age, displaying a big-hearted curiosity about cultural change at warp speed.

2021 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction

Ever since this nation's founding, the idea of an open and ever-expanding frontier has been central to American identity. Symbolizing a future of endless promise, the frontier made possible the United States' belief in itself as an exceptional nation -- democratic, individualistic, forward-looking. Today, though, the country has a new symbol: the border wall. In [this book], acclaimed historian Greg Grandin explores the effect that constant, relentless expansion had on America's domestic politics, examining the full sweep of U.S. history -- from the American Revolution to the Spanish-American War, the New Deal to the election of 2016. For centuries, he shows, the ability to move outward -- fighting wars and opening markets -- provided America with a "gate of escape," helping to deflect domestic political and economic conflicts. But this deflection meant that the country's problems, from racism to inequality, were never confronted directly. And now, the combined catastrophes of the 2008 financial meltdown, our unwinnable wars in the Middle East, and a deepening ecological crisis have slammed this gate shut, bringing political passions that had long been directed elsewhere back home. It is this new reality, Grandin says, that explains the rise of reactionary populism and racist nationalism, the extreme anger and polarization that catapulted Trump to the presidency. The border wall may or may not be built, but it will survive as a rallying point, an allegorical tombstone marking the end of American exceptionalism."--Dust jacket flap.

When Boyer was diagnosed with highly aggressive triple-negative breast cancer, the illness was both a crisis and an initiation into new ideas about mortality and the gendered politics of illness. Here she explores the experience of illness as mediated by digital screens, weaving in ancient Roman dream diarists, cancer hoaxers and fetishists, cancer vloggers, corporate lies, John Donne, the ecological costs of chemotherapy, and the many little murders of capitalism. She will break your heart, make you angry enough to spit, and show you contemporary America as a thing both desperately ill and occasionally perversely glorious. -- adapted from jacket.

2014 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction
A book that deftly combines investigative reporting and historical research to probe a New Jersey seashore town's cluster of childhood cancers linked to water and air pollution.

2013 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction

2011 Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction
An elegant inquiry, at once clinical and personal, into the long history of an insidious disease that, despite treatment breakthroughs, still bedevils medical science.