Tartt Wins Pulitzer
Capping a string of best books of the year picks, Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch (Hachette/Little, Brown; Hachette Audio) won the Pulitzer Prize, announced yesterday.
The Pulitzers could be termed the Newbery/Caldecotts of adult book awards, having an immediate, and lasting effect on sales. All the winners moved up Amazon’s sales rankings, most stunningly, the poetry winner which rose from # 821,844 to #337. Even the fiction winner, which had already been high on the list, rose from #35 to #4.
The other winners in the books categories are:
History
Alan Taylor, The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832. (W. W. Norton) — also a National Book Award finalist. The author won a Pulitzer in 1996 for William Cooper’s Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early Republic.
Biography
Megan Marshall, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life. (HMH) — chosen as one of 100 notable books of the year by the NYT Book Review and on NYT daily critic Dwight Garner‘s list of his 10 favorite books of the year. A trade paperback edition was released in March (HMH/Mariner).
General Nonfiction
Dan Fagin, Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation, (RH/Bantam; BOT) — on NPR’s best books list, it was also picked by Kirkus.
Poetry
Vijay Seshadri, 3 Sections, (Graywolf Press) — The nonprofit Graywolf Press, which has published an impressive number of award winners, is now in its 40th year. The woman who heads the company is profiled here (via Publishers Marketplace).