PULITZER WINNERS ANNOUNCED

PULITZER WINNERS ANNOUNCED

Anthony Doerr’s novel All the Light We Cannot See and Elizabeth Kolbert’s nonfiction work The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History were among the books awarded 2015 Pulitzer Prizes, April 20 at Columbia University.

Inspired by the “horrors of World War II,” Doerr’s novel was awarded the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The Pulitzer jury described All The Light We Cannot See as a novel written in “short elegant chapters that explore human nature and the contradictory power of technology.” In addition to a being critical success, All the Light was one of 2014’s top-selling books and continues to sell well with a total of 1.6 million print and digital copies now in circulation.

Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, was awarded the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. The jury described the book as “an exploration of nature that forces readers to consider the threat posed by human behavior to a world of astonishing diversity.”

David I. Kertzer’s The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe was awarded the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for biography for its “engrossing” look at the lives of “two men who exercised nearly absolute power over their realms.”

Gregory Pardlo’s Digest was awarded the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for poetry, for a collection of “clear-voiced poems,” that are “rich with thought, ideas and histories public and private.”

Elizabeth A. Fenn’s Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People was awarded the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for history.

Pulitzer Prize winners will receive $10,000 and a Pulitzer Prize certificate.

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“The Goldfinch” Headed To The Big Screen

THE GOLDFINCH HEADED TO THE BIG SCREEN
Donna Tartt’s third novel, “The Goldfinch,” has attracted a string of award nominations and a Pulitzer Prize. Its success continues with news that Warner Bros has acquired the film rights to the book, and that a feature film production is in the works.

Brett Ratner, who directed “Rush Hour” and “Red Dragon,” will co-produce with Brad Simpson and Nina Jacobson, the producer of “The Hunger Games.” Ratner’s most recent directorial effort is the summer blockbuster “Hercules.”

Tartt’s novel is 784 pages long and follows a grieving 13-year-old boy, whose fate becomes intertwined with a mysterious 17th-century painting at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Announcing The New Poet Laureate of the United States

ANNOUNCING THE NEW POET LAUREATE OF THE U.S.

The Library of Congress has announced the next U.S. poet laureate will be Charles Wright, the author of nearly two dozen collections of verse that fuse the legacy of European modernism with mystical evocations of the landscape of the American South. Wright, 78, a retired professor at the University of Virginia, has won nearly every other honor in the poetry world, including the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

Wright was born in Pickwick Dam, Tenn., and succeeds another Southerner, Natasha Trethewey. But Wright’s work — meditations on “language, landscape and the idea of God,” could not be more different from Trethewey’s evocations of the forgotten African-American lives, or from the Whitmanesque poems about working-class Detroit by the previous laureate, Philip Levine.

Dana Gioia, a poet and former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, commented “This is a poet who has spent a lifetime refining language to create poetry of tremendous evocative power.” Explaining his choice, James Billington, the Librarian of Congress, said that as he read through the work of a dozen or so finalists, he kept coming back to Wright’s haunting poems, many of them gathered in a Dante-esque cycle of three trilogies known informally as “The Appalachian Book of the Dead.” His “combination of literary elegance and genuine humility — it’s just the rare alchemy of a great poet,” Billington said.

Wright did not seem destined to a life of poetry. In high school, he devoured all the books of William Faulkner —  his mother had once dated one of Faulkner’s brothers. As a student at Davidson College in North Carolina, he tried to write fiction, only to discover that he was, as he later put it, the rare Southerner who couldn’t tell a story. As a young G.I. stationed in Italy in the late 1950s, he picked up the New Directions edition of Ezra Pound’s “Selected Poems.” From then on, he recalled, “I was enveloped by the fog of poetry.” A degree at the Iowa Writers Workshop followed, along with a Fulbright fellowship in Italy. His first few books received respectful notices, but it wasn’t until the poem “Homage to Paul Cézanne,” included in his fifth collection, “Southern Cross” (1981), that he found his footing.

That poem, inspired by discarded paper glimpsed in a field one night, depicts a landscape layered with mystical images that language can’t quite capture:

At night, in the fish-light of the moon, the dead wear our white shirts
To stay warm, and litter the fields.
We pick them up in the mornings, dewy pieces of paper and scraps of cloth.
Like us, they refract themselves. Like us,
They keep on saying the same thing, trying to get it right.

If he’s the rare Southerner who can’t tell a story, he can tell a poetic joke, sometimes at the his own expense, as in “Ancient of Days,” from his latest collection, “Caribou.”

This is an old man’s poetry, written by someone who’s spent his life
Looking  for one truth.
Sorry, pal, there isn’t one.

2014 PULITZER PRIZE WINNERS

Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch and Dan Fagin’s Toms River were among the winners of the 2014 Pulitzer Prizes, announced at Columbia University on April 14. The winner of each letters category took home a $10,000 cash prize.

Tartt’s novel, described by the Pulitzer jury as a “beautifully written coming-of-age novel” with “exquisitely drawn” characters, beat out fellow fiction finalists Phillipp Meyer (The Son) and Bob Shacochis (The Woman Who Lost Her Soul).

Fagin took home the general nonfiction award for his exposé of toxic waste dumping that was billed by the judges as “deftly” combining investigative reporting and historical research. Gary J. Bass (The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger and a Forgotten Genocide) and Fred Kaplan (The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War) were named as finalists in the category.

Other winners included The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832 by Alan Taylor (history); Margaret Fuller: A New American Life by Megan Marshall (biography or autobiography); and 3 Sections by Vijay Seshadri (poetry).

Foodies and Oenophiles ~ Show March 29 & 30th

FEATURED BOOKS PREVIEWED

“Sous Chef: 24 Hours on the Line” by Michael Gibney

“Lobsters Scream When You Boil Them” by Bruce Weinstein and Mark Scarborough

“No Experience Necessary” by Norman Van Aken

“From Scratch: Inside the Food Network” by Allen Salkin

“Provence 1970” by Luke Barr

“Roast Mortem” by Cleo Coyle

“A Man and His Mountain: The Everyman Who Created Kendall Jackson and Became America’s Greatest Wine Entrepreneur” by Edward Humes

“The Juice: Vinous Veritas” by Jay McInerney

INTERVIEW

Michael Moss, Author

TUNE INTO THE PROGRAM FOR

Elaine serves up a smorgasbord of new titles on foodies and oenophiles. Our guest is Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist Michael Moss whose “Salt, Sugar, Fat” is a scorching indictment of America’s food giants.

MacArthur “genius” fellows

Announced, authors Karen Russell and Donald Antrim have been selected as two of the 24 MacArthur “genius” fellows . The foundation wrote Antrim’s “fiction and nonfiction are marked by a contrast between elegant, concise language and disorienting chaos. Russell, whose novel Swamplandia! was a finalist for the Pulitzer, writes “haunting yet comic tales [that] blend fantastical elements with psychological realism. Each receives a $625,000 grant…, with no strings attached

Russell told The Washington Post the award could NOT have come at a better time: She shares, “The day after I learned about this, I had to get an emergency root canal, and I don’t have dental insurance.”

For more award winning news, check my website, http://www.bookreportradio.com.