Culture
Pulitzer Prizes 2025: A Guide to the Winning Books and Finalists
Nineteen books were recognized as winners or finalists for the Pulitzer Prize on Monday, in the categories of memoir, poetry, general nonfiction, fiction, biography and history, which had two winners.
Fiction
Winner
James, by Percival Everett
Everett’s reimagining of “Huckleberry Finn” is a subversive homage to Mark Twain’s classic novel, as narrated by the enslaved man who accompanies Huck down the Mississippi. In “James,” Everett endows his title character (known as Jim in Twain’s book) with a rich intellectual life, deep curiosity and world-weariness that comes from trying to stay alive in the South. There are episodes of soul-deadening brutality, absurd satire and even philosophical treatises, but “James” reads with the fleetness of an adventure story. One of the most decorated releases of 2024, it also won the National Book Award for fiction and earned a place on the Book Review’s 10 Best Books of the year list.
Doubleday
Finalist: Headshot, by Rita Bullwinkel
This debut novel zeros in on eight female boxing contestants who converge in Reno, Nev., for a teenage national championship. Bullwinkel follows them well after the events of the tournament, tracing the eventual course of their lives. Our critic Dwight Garner made clear his admiration for the author, writing in his review: “Make room, American fiction, for a meaningful new voice.”
Viking
Finalist: Mice, 1961, by Stacey Levine
The story of two orphaned sisters in Cold-War-era America, Jody and Mice (nicknamed so for her unusual appearance and mannerisms), is told by their housekeeper, as their neighborhood prepares for an all-out bash.
Verse Chorus Press
Finalist: The Unicorn Woman, by Gayl Jones
A World War II veteran falls helplessly in love with a Black woman he spies at a carnival, where she is among the sideshow attractions owing to the regal, spiraled horn sprouting from her forehead. Jones is among the most influential Black authors writing today, whose work helps reframe questions of identity, race and sexuality. Her 2021 novel “Palmares” — her first in 22 years — was also a finalist for the Pulitzer.
Beacon Press
History
Winner
Native Nations: A Millennium in North America, by Kathleen DuVal
The author, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, draws on oral and written records to tell the stories of hundreds of Indigenous nations that live in what is now the United States. “Native Nations” also received the Bancroft Prize, among the most distinguished awards for works examining American history.
Random House
Winner
Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War, by Edda L. Fields-Black
In her account of the Combahee River Raid, Fields-Black examines a lesser-known chapter of Harriet Tubman’s life, as a leader in a military operation that liberated some 730 enslaved people from plantations in 1863. Fields-Black — a descendant of a formerly enslaved man who fought in the raid — draws on extensive documents, among them Tubman’s U.S. Civil War pension file, to reveal how Tubman commanded a group of scouts and spies to lead military expeditions during the war.
Oxford University Press
Finalist: Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery, by Seth Rockman
The concept of the agrarian South and industrialist North is an oversimplification, argues Rockman, a historian at Brown University. Looking at the objects integral to the practice of slavery — whips, shoes, shovels, hats — that were manufactured in the North before making their way to the South, he examines how the American economy was organized around enslavement.
University of Chicago Press
In his sweeping narrative of intellectual and scientific rivalry, Roberts explores the intertwined legacies of Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish biologist and physician who is known as the founding father of taxonomy, and Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, an aristocratic French naturalist, mathematician, and cosmologist. Both men set out to catalog and define life on earth, but had wildly different approaches and philosophies. Roberts makes the case that Buffon, while less well-known than Linnaeus, had greater and more lasting insights, among them his beliefs that racial differences are superficial and that living creatures are shaped by their environments.
Random House
Finalist: John Lewis: A Life, by David Greenberg
Greenberg, a professor of history at Rutgers University, traces the life of the Civil Rights icon John Lewis from his childhood in rural Alabama to his ascent to the halls of Congress, where he became a powerful advocate for racial and economic equality. Greenberg draws on extensive interviews with 275 people who knew Lewis, as well as previously unseen documents, including F.B.I. files, to create what a New York Times review called a “panoramic and richly insightful biography.”
Simon & Schuster
Finalist: The World She Edited: Katharine S. White at The New Yorker, by Amy Reading
In her meticulously researched biography, Reading paints a portrait of the influential and trailblazing New Yorker editor Katharine White. She joined the magazine in 1925 and helped transform it during her 36 years at the publication, cultivating the careers of women writers like Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Bishop, Jean Stafford and Nadine Gordimer.
Mariner Books
Winner
Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir, by Tessa Hulls
To better understand three generations of women in her Chinese American family, the author embarked on a book project despite never having drawn comics and not speaking Chinese. As Hulls dove into the lives of her grandmother — a journalist who fled Shanghai for Hong Kong and wrote a best-selling memoir Hulls couldn’t read — and her mother, who attended boarding school in Hong Kong before coming to the United States in 1970, she could appreciate both her immense curiosity and feelings of alienation.
MCD Books
Finalist: Fi: A Memoir of My Son, by Alexandra Fuller
This devastating account details the death of Fuller’s 21-year-old son, named Fi, and the grief that sent her into a tailspin. Despite its frankness about the heartbreak of mourning an adult child, a vivid picture of a “smart, hilarious, earnest, self-aware” young man emerges.
Grove Press
Finalist: I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition, by Lucy Sante
In her 60s, the author, a longtime cultural critic and writer, decided to transition genders: an attempt to seize the “parallel life” she feared was passing her by. As she recounts her story, the book doubles as a study of a bygone 1970s New York. The Book Review named this memoir one of the 10 Best Books of 2024.
Penguin Press
General Nonfiction
To write this exhaustive account based on two decades of research, Nathans, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania, combed through K.G.B. case files, unpublished diaries and private correspondence. While many have dated the dissolution of Soviet totalitarianism to the 1980s, he makes the case that opposition to Soviet oppression began decades earlier.
Princeton University Press
Finalist: Until I Find You: Disappeared Children and Coercive Adoptions in Guatemala, by Rachel Nolan
Over several decades, tens of thousands of Guatemalan children were forcefully and illegally taken from their families and put up for adoption. Many of those children were from Indigenous families and many of them ended up in the United States. Nolan, a professor at Boston University, digs deep into a tragic outgrowth of the almost 40-year Guatemalan civil war.
Harvard University Press
Finalist: I Am on the Hit List: A Journalist’s Murder and the Rise of Autocracy in India, by Rollo Romig
In 2017, Gauri Lankesh, a journalist and outspoken critic of India’s Hindu nationalist ruling party, was assassinated outside her home in Bangalore. Romig, who wrote about the crime for The New York Times Magazine in 2019, has expanded the story into a book that, among other things, “paints a full picture of the social and professional world that convulsed in the wake of Gauri’s death,” according to our reviewer.
Penguin Books
Poetry
Winner
New and Selected Poems, by Marie Howe
Culling work from Howe’s four earlier books into a generous selection of 111 poems, this career retrospective highlights her gift, from her 1987 debut all the way through to the new material here, for mixing the mundane and the transcendent. In “What the Living Do,” addressed to a dead brother, the speaker recites a litany of everyday hassles — a clogged sink, a dropped bag of groceries — and connects it to “What you called that yearning./What you finally gave up.” Even the numerous biblically themed poems are grounded in concrete detail: “Magdalene — The Seen Devils,” for instance, combines a checklist of common gripes (“The laundry was never finally done”) with the devastating losses we daily bear: “the way my mother looked when she was dying/the sound she made.” This overview seems sure to seal Howe’s reputation as one of the major poets of her generation.
Norton
Finalist: Bluff, by Danez Smith
Smith’s poetry balances a delight in the possibilities of language with an innate skepticism about its use in the world; here is a poet who nurses the tension between art and action and exhorts readers to acknowledge injustice while appreciating the chaotic nature of human existence. “In these searching, stunning poems,” our reviewer wrote, “Smith metaphorizes city into body politic, showing us the interstate running through all our hearts; demonstrating that we all contain protest and police, cowardice and commitment, money and kindness, looting and food drives.”
Graywolf Press
An Authentic Life, by Jennifer Chang
True to her title, Chang uses the poems in “An Authentic Life” to hold her experiences against various received wisdoms, as a way to challenge convention and insist on authenticity. The topics range widely — war, religion, patriarchy, literary criticism — but the methods are the same: Chang cites some snippet she has learned or heard (“my father turns philosophical again/which is to say wandering away from any self”), then wanders freely to debunk it, deploying her arguments with flashes of brilliant wit, flights of vivid imagery and rigorous self-questioning.
Copper Canyon Press
PERMANENCE, by Sophie Mackintosh
Sophie Mackintosh’s novels are always speculative in some way, with either the author or her characters forging a world governed by its own logic and rules. In their boldness and their ability to convey the violence of patriarchy, they recall the work of Jacqueline Harpman — not only the cherished “I Who Have Never Known Men,” but also “Orlanda,” her wild riff on Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando.”
Like Harpman, Mackintosh has a spare and confident hand. Her work is sometimes described as dreamlike; certainly, its contours are sketched with rapidity and confidence and relatively little detail. Her prose operates according to the same principle, at once lyrical and precise, like this from her second novel, “Blue Ticket”: “On the ground was a dead rabbit, disemboweled. Still fresh, the dark loops of its insides glistening like jam.”
When Mackintosh writes about masculine power, she does so in a way that articulates both its seductions and its terrors. Her newest novel, “Permanence,” is less explicitly concerned with the structure of patriarchy, but it has the same erotic charge as her earlier work, the same preoccupation with social prohibitions and the thrill that comes from breaking them.
Like “Blue Ticket,” “Permanence” turns on a highly pronounced binary. In “Blue Ticket,” adolescent girls are issued either a blue or white ticket on the day of their first period. A white ticket denotes a future of marriage and children, a blue ticket one of work — even, it seems, a career. The divide is stark and self-evidently faulty, its coarseness an expression of the brutalizing regime the characters are trapped in.
“Permanence” features a similar opposition, neatly delineated. Clara and Francis are conducting an illicit affair. One morning, they wake up in an alternate reality where they are openly living together. The novel shuttles between these two worlds, one ordinary and familiar, the other a curdled paradise for adulterers.
The thinness of this “city of impermanence” — “fluid, cohesive and yet disparate” — emerges at once. The sky is “uncannily blue,” the newspaper bears no date, the edge of the city is marked by “a slick ring of water, as far as the eye could see.”
Still, a boundary cannot keep the other world from seeping in. Initially, elegantly, this is a problem in the structure of desire. Having been provided the life they dreamed of, in which their longing for each other is fully met, Clara and Francis begin to experience, to their uneasy surprise, boredom and discontent.
Without absence, the intensity of their desire for each other wanes. They even begin, or at least Francis does, to long for the relief of their ordinary life: “Another day ahead of them of petting, giggling, lying around. It seemed insubstantial suddenly, though only the day before he had felt he could do it forever.”
Soon enough, it becomes clear that the problem between Francis and Clara doesn’t lie in the outside impediments of the world they live in, but in their relationship itself. Francis remains troublingly himself — a married father of a small child, reluctant to leave his family, however much he is in love with Clara: “He did love her, and he did want to be with her. … But he already had reality elsewhere, reality which he sometimes felt trapped by, he would admit, but which he could not truly imagine cutting loose.”
“Permanence” might seem like an outlier in the current array of articles and books about open marriages and polyamory, and at first glance the line of distinction between the two worlds, much like the division between blue and white tickets, seems almost old-fashioned. But as Mackintosh persuasively illustrates, the familiar emotions of jealousy, infatuation and eventually indifference — these persist and can flourish in any relationship, however free of prohibition.
“You want this,” Clara tells herself, and then, “You no longer want this,” as it occurs to her that “maybe it was in absence that they loved each other best, and most honestly.”
In her work, Mackintosh devises scenarios that are bold and almost aggressively simplified. But her terrain is complexity and contradiction, and in her hands these oppositions twist and turn in on themselves.
It’s hardly a surprise when the central character in “Blue Ticket” decides to eschew her designation and have a child, declaring, “True and false were no longer opposing binaries. My body was speaking to me in a language I had not heard before.” Nor is it especially startling when discontent chases Clara and Francis from one world to the other, unraveling their relationship.
What is more disquieting is the surreptitious ease with which Mackintosh’s speculative worlds start to align with our own, allowing the reader to see how so many of the old prohibitions and conventions — around choice, around marriage — remain, somehow, firmly in place.
That moment of recognition, in a landscape that is startlingly alien, is the source of Mackintosh’s power as a writer.
PERMANENCE | By Sophie Mackintosh | Avid Reader Press | 240 pp. | $28
Maybe you woke up this morning haunted by the first four lines of W.H. Auden’s “The More Loving One” — or tickled by its tongue-in-cheek handling of existential dread. (Not ringing any bells? Click here to begin the Poetry Challenge).
This is a love poem. Perhaps that seems like an obvious thing to say about a poem with “Loving” in its title, but there isn’t much romance in the opening stanza.
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
Ada Limón, poet
Nonetheless, the poem soon makes clear that love is very much on its mind.
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
David Sedaris, writer
The polished informality gives the impression of a decidedly cerebral speaker — someone who’s looking at love philosophically, thinking about how it works and what it means.
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Reginald Dwayne Betts, poet
Musing this way — arguing in this fashion — he stands in a long line of playful, thoughtful poetic lovers going back at least to the 16th century. He sounds a bit like Christopher Marlowe’s passionate shepherd:
Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove,
That Valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods, or steepy mountain yields.
Auden’s poem, like Marlowe’s, is written in four-beat lines:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Josh Radnor, actor
And it features strong end rhymes:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Samantha Harvey, writer
These tetrameter couplets represent a long-established poetic love language. Not too serious or sappy, but with room for both earnestness and whimsy. And even for professions of the opposite of love, as in this nursery rhyme, adapted from a 17th-century epigram:
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell
The reason why I cannot tell.
But this I know and know full well
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell.
There is some of this anti-love spirit in Auden’s poem too, but it mainly follows a general rule of love poetry: The person speaking is usually the more loving one.
This makes sense. To write a poem requires effort, art, inspiration. To speak in verse is to tease, to cajole, to seduce, all actions that suggest an excess of desire. That’s why it’s conventional to refer to the “I” in a poem like this as the Lover and the “you” as the Beloved. The line “Let the more loving one be me” could summarize a lot of the love poetry of the last few thousand years.
But who, in this case, is the beloved? This isn’t a poem to the stars, but about them. Or maybe a poem that uses the stars as a conceit and our complicated feelings about them as a screen for other difficult emotions.
What the stars have to do with love is a tricky question. The answer may just be that the poem assumes a relationship and then plays with the implications of its assumption.
This kind of play also has a long history. Since love is both abstract and susceptible to cliché, poets are eager to liken it to everything else under the sun: birds, bees, planets, stars, the movement of the tides and the cycle of the seasons. Andrew Marvell’s “Definition of Love,” from the 1600s, wraps its ardor in math:
As lines, so loves oblique may well
Themselves in every angle greet;
But ours so truly parallel,
Though infinite, can never meet.
The literary term for this is wit. The formidable 18th-century English wordsmith Samuel Johnson defined a type of wit as “a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike.” “The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together,” he wrote; that kind of conceptual discord defines “The More Loving One.”
The second stanza is, when you think about it, a perfect non sequitur. A hypothetical, general question is asked:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Mary Roach, writer
The answer is a personal declaration that is moving because it doesn’t seem to apply only or primarily to stars:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Tim Egan, writer
Does this disjunction make it easier or harder to remember? Either way, these couplets start to reveal just how curious this poem is. We might find ourselves curious about who wrote them, and whom he might have loved. Tomorrow we’ll get to know Auden and his work a little better.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.
Your task today: Learn the second stanza!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
Literature
Oedipa Maas from ‘The Crying of Lot 49’ (1966) by Thomas Pynchon
“The unforgettable, cartoonish protagonist of this unusually short novel is a California housewife accidentally turned private investigator and literary interpreter, and the mystery she’s attempting to solve — or, more specifically, the conspiracy she stumbles upon — is nothing less than capitalism itself,” says Ngai, 54. “As Oedipa traces connections between various crackpots, the novel highlights the peculiarly asocial sociality of postwar U.S. society, which gets figured as a network of alienations.”
Sula Peace from ‘Sula’ (1973) by Toni Morrison
“Sula arguably begins to disappear as soon as she’s introduced — despite the fact that the novel bears her name. Other characters die quickly, or are noticeably flat. This raises the politically charged question of who gets to ‘develop’ or be a protagonist in American novels and who doesn’t. The novel’s unusual character system is part of its meditation on anti-Black racism and historical violence.”
The speaker of ‘Lunch Poems’ (1964) by Frank O’Hara
“Lyric poems are fundamentally different from narrative fiction in part because they have speakers as opposed to narrators. Perhaps it’s a stretch to nominate the speaker of ‘Lunch Poems’ as a main character, but this book changed things by highlighting the centrality of queer counterpublics to U.S. culture as a whole, and by exploring the joys and risks of everyday intimacy with strangers therein.”
This interview has been edited and condensed.
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