Biblio File

Read These Newly Minted Pulitzer Prize Winners by Carrie McBride, CommunicationsJune 11, 2021

The 2021 Pulitzer Prizes were awarded today. In addition to multiple prizes for journalism, the awards each year recognize outstanding books in the categories of fiction, biography, poetry, history, and general nonfiction. The weekend is beginning—get started on one of these remarkable books!

Fiction

The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich

Based on the extraordinary life of National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrichs's grandfather who worked as a night watchman and carried the fight against Native dispossession from rural North Dakota all the way to Washington, D.C., this powerful novel explores themes of love and death with lightness and gravity and unfolds with the elegant prose, sly humor, and depth of feeling of a master craftsman.

Biography

The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X by Les Payne and Tamara Payne

An epic biography of Malcolm X finally emerges, drawing on hundreds of hours of the author's interviews, rewriting much of the known narrative. Les Payne, the renowned Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist, embarked in 1990 on a nearly thirty-year-long quest to interview anyone he could find who had actually known Malcolm X—all living siblings of the Malcolm Little family, classmates, street friends, cellmates, Nation of Islam figures, FBI moles and cops, and political leaders around the world. His goal was ambitious: to transform what would become over a hundred hours of interviews into an unprecedented portrait of Malcolm X, one that would separate fact from fiction. Introduced by Payne's daughter and primary researcher, Tamara Payne, who, following her father's death, heroically completed the biography, The Dead Are Arising is a penetrating and riveting work that affirms the centrality of Malcolm X to the African American freedom struggle.

Poetry

Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz

Postcolonial Love Poem is an anthem of desire against erasure. Natalie Diaz’s brilliant second collection demands that every body carried in its pages—bodies of language, land, rivers, suffering brothers, enemies, and lovers—be touched and held as beloveds. Through these poems, the wounds inflicted by America onto an indigenous people are allowed to bloom pleasure and tenderness: “Let me call my anxiety, desire, then. / Let me call it, a garden.” In this new lyrical landscape, the bodies of indigenous, Latinx, black, and brown women are simultaneously the body politic and the body ecstatic. In claiming this autonomy of desire, language is pushed to its dark edges, the astonishing dunefields and forests where pleasure and love are both grief and joy, violence and sensuality.

History

Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America by Marcia Chatelain

From civil rights to Ferguson, Franchise reveals the untold history of how fast food became one of the greatest generators of Black wealth in America. Often blamed for the rising rates of obesity and diabetes among Black Americans, fast food restaurants like McDonald's have long symbolized capitalism's villainous effects on our nation's most vulnerable communities. But how did fast food restaurants so thoroughly saturate Black neighborhoods in the first place? In Franchise, acclaimed historian Marcia Chatelain uncovers a surprising history of cooperation among fast food companies, Black capitalists, and civil rights leaders, who—in the troubled years after King's assassination—believed they found an economic answer to the problem of racial inequality. Synthesizing years of research, Franchise tells a troubling success story of an industry that blossomed the very moment a freedom movement began to whither.

General Nonfiction

Wilmington’s Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy by David Zucchino

By 1898 Wilmington, North Carolina, was a shining example of a mixed-race community—a bustling port city with a thriving African American middle class and a government made up of Republicans and Populists, including Black alderman, police officers, and magistrates. But across the state—and the South—white supremacist Democrats were working to reverse the advances made by former slaves and their progeny. They were plotting to take back the state legislature in the November 8th election and then use a controversial editorial published by Black newspaper editor Alexander Manly to trigger a "race riot" to overthrow the elected government in Wilmington. With a coordinated campaign of intimidation and violence, the Democrats sharply curtailed the Black vote and stuffed ballot boxes to steal the 1898 mid-term election. Two days later, more than 2,000 heavily armed white nightriders known as Red Shirts swarmed through Wilmington, terrorizing women and children and shooting at least sixty Black men dead in the streets. The rebels forced city officials and leading Black citizens to flee at gun point while hundreds of local African Americans took refuge in nearby swamps and forests. This brutal insurrection is the only violent overthrow of an elected government in U.S. history. It halted gains made by Blacks and restored racism as official government policy, cementing white rule for another seventy years.

Note: Katori Hall's play The Hot Wing King was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama but is not yet in NYPL's collection. You can find other work by hall at NYPL here.

Have trouble reading standard print? Many of these titles are available in formats for patrons with print disabilities.

Summaries provided via NYPL’s catalog, which draws from multiple sources. Click through to each book’s title for more.

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