Gear Up for a Great Read: Pulitzer-Winning Books of 2022
The Pulitzer Prize winners were announced today recognizing excellence in journalism, books, drama, and music across 22 categories. Among the winners were Ada Ferrer and her book Cuba: An American History, which she researched while in residence at the Library's Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers and Andrea Elliott's Invisible Child, which recently received the Library's Helen Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism.
Fiction
The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family
by Joshua Cohen
Mixing fiction with non-fiction, this wildly inventive, genre-bending comedy of blending, identity and politics follows a Jewish historian (but not an historian of the Jews) as he plays the reluctant host to an exiled Israeli scholar specializing in the Spanish Inquisition and his family.
History
Covered with Night: A Story of Murder and Indigenous Justice in Early America
by Nicole Eustace
On the eve of a major treaty conference between Iroquois leaders and European colonists in the distant summer of 1722, two white fur traders attacked an Indigenous hunter and left him for dead near Conestoga, Pennsylvania. Though virtually forgotten today, this act of brutality set into motion a remarkable series of criminal investigations and cross-cultural negotiations that challenged the definition of justice in early America.
Cuba: An American History
by Ada Ferrer
Spanning more than five centuries, Cuba: An American History provides us with a front-row seat as we witness the evolution of the modern nation, with its dramatic record of conquest and colonization, of slavery and freedom, of independence and revolutions made and unmade.
Biography
Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist's Memoir of the Jim Crow South
by Winfred Rembert, as told to Erin I. Kelly
The late celebrated artist tells his life story of growing up in the segregated south, joining the civil rights movement and surviving a near-lynching through a series of drawings and paintings.
Poetry
Frank: Sonnets
by Diane Seuss
These poems tell the story of a life at risk of spilling over the edge of the page, from Seuss’s working-class childhood in rural Michigan to the dangerous allures of New York City and back again.
General Nonfiction
Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City
by Andrea Elliott
A reporter follows eight years in the life of a young girl in Brooklyn as her family navigates the world of homeless shelters, violence and addiction, as well as her eventual enrollment in a Pennsylvania boarding school.
Summaries provided via NYPL’s catalog, which draws from multiple sources. Click through to each book’s title for more.