This week, the Genre Reading Group met to discuss award
winning books!
In the latter years of the 19th century, Joseph
Pulitzer stood out as the very embodiment of American journalism. Hungarian-born,
an intense indomitable figure, Pulitzer was the most skillful of newspaper
publishers, a passionate crusader against dishonest government, a fierce,
hawk-like competitor who did not shrink from sensationalism in circulation
struggles, and a visionary who richly endowed his profession.
His innovative New York World and St. Louis
Post-Dispatch reshaped newspaper journalism. Pulitzer was the first to
call for the training of journalists at the university level in a school of
journalism. And certainly, the lasting influence of the Pulitzer Prizes on
journalism, literature, music, and drama is to be attributed to his visionary
acumen.
In writing his 1904 will, which made provision for the
establishment of the Pulitzer Prizes as an incentive to excellence, Pulitzer
specified solely four awards in journalism, four in letters and drama, one for
education, and five traveling scholarships.
Less by Andrew Sean Greer
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE
National Bestseller
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
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. Because, despite all these mishaps,
missteps, misunderstandings and mistakes, Less is, above all, a love
story.
A scintillating satire of the American abroad, a rumination on time and the
human heart, a bittersweet romance of chances lost, by an author The New
York Times has hailed as "inspired, lyrical,"
"elegiac," "ingenious," as well as "too sappy by
half," Less shows a writer at the peak of his talents raising
the curtain on our shared human comedy.
In the four most bloody days of our nation’s history, two
armies fought for two conflicting dreams. One dreamed of freedom, the other of
a way of life. Far more than rifles and bullets were carried into battle. There
were memories. There were promises. There was love. And far more than men fell
on those Pennsylvania fields. Bright futures, untested innocence, and pristine
beauty were also the casualties of war. Michael Shaara’s Pulitzer Prize–winning
masterpiece is unique, sweeping, unforgettable—the dramatic story of the
battleground for America’s destiny.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Killer Angels by
Michael Shaara becomes this sprawling historical epic. As in Shaara's novel,
director Ronald Maxwell focuses on a handful of major players to dramatize the
events of July 1863, when the armies of the Union and Confederacy clash at the
small Pennsylvania town of the title. Among them are Martin Sheen as General
Robert E. Lee, who disagrees with his top advisor, General James Longstreet
(Tom Berenger) over battle strategy, and Jeff Daniels as Colonel Joshua
Lawrence Chamberlain, a college professor whose unorthodox techniques save the
day (and possibly the war) for his beleaguered army. Other cast standouts
include Richard Jordan in his final film appearance as the ill-fated General
Lewis Armistead, and cameo roles for Civil War buff Ken Burns and media mogul
producer Ted Turner. Filmed on-location at Gettysburg National Military Park,
Gettysburg was shot as a television miniseries for Turner's TNT cable channel,
but earned a limited theatrical release. ~ Karl Williams, Rovi
FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD • WINNER OF THE DAYTON LITERARY PEACE PRIZE
Named ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR by more than a dozen publications, including The Washington Post • Entertainment Weekly • The Wall Street Journal • Los Angeles Times • San Francisco Chronicle
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.”
Part breathless thriller, part story of innocence lost, part story of romantic
love,
The Orphan Master’s Son is also a riveting portrait of a world
heretofore hidden from view: a North Korea rife with hunger, corruption, and
casual cruelty but also camaraderie, stolen moments of beauty, and love.
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.
Each year, the Mystery Writers of America the Edgar Allan
Poe Awards, honoring the best in mystery fiction, non-fiction, and television.
When it comes to law and order, East Texas plays by its own
rules--a fact that Darren Mathews, a black Texas Ranger, knows all too well.
Deeply ambivalent about growing up black in the lone star state, he was the
first in his family to get as far away from Texas as he could. Until duty
called him home.
When his allegiance to his roots puts his job in jeopardy,
he travels up Highway 59 to the small town of Lark, where two murders--a black
lawyer from Chicago and a local white woman--have stirred up a hornet's nest of
resentment. Darren must solve the crimes--and save himself in the
process--before Lark's long-simmering racial fault lines erupt. From a writer
and producer of the Emmy winning Fox TV show Empire, Bluebird, Bluebird is
a rural noir suffused with the unique music, color, and nuance of East Texas.
The Bocas Lit Fest is a registered non-profit company
incorporated in Trinidad and Tobago. We are a year-round writing and literary
arts development organization, with numerous initiatives forging links and
opportunities between writers, readers, publishers and others. We run the
annual NGC Bocas Lit Fest, Trinidad and Tobago’s annual literary festival
(named as one of the world’s best literary festivals), and administer
major regional writing prizes which provide crucial support for Caribbean
writers, including the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature and The CODE
Burt Award for Caribbean Young Adult Literature.
11 April 1982: a smell is coming down John Golding Road
right alongside the boy-child, something attached to him, like a spirit but not
quite. Ma Taffy is growing worried. She knows that something is going to
happen. Something terrible is going to pour out into the world. But if she can
hold it off for just a little bit longer, she will. So she asks a question that
surprises herself even as she asks it, "Kaia, I ever tell you bout the
flying preacherman?"
Set in the backlands of Jamaica, Augustown is a magical and haunting
novel of one woman’s struggle to rise above the brutal vicissitudes of history,
race, class, collective memory, violence, and myth.
The Man Booker Prize for Fiction (formerly known
as the Booker–McConnell Prize and commonly known simply as the Booker
Prize) is a literary prize awarded each year for the best original
novel written in the English language and published in the UK.
To mark the 50th anniversary in 2018, The Booker Prize Foundation launched the Golden Man Booker Prize- a special one-off award that crowned the best work of fiction from the last five decades of prize, as chosen by five judges and then voted for by the public.
The Golden Man Booker put all 51 winners – all of which are still in print – back under the spotlight, to discover which of them has stood the test of time, remaining relevant to readers today, and The English Patient won that award as well.
The final curtain is closing on the Second World War, and
Hana, a nurse, stays behind in an abandoned Italian villa to tend to her only
remaining patient. Rescued by Bedouins from a burning plane, he is English,
anonymous, damaged beyond recognition and haunted by his memories of passion
and betrayal. The only clue Hana has to his past is the one thing he clung on
to through the fire - a copy of
The Histories by Herodotus, covered with
hand-written notes describing a painful and ultimately tragic love affair.
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