Meet Paul Harding, this year's Pulitzer Prize winner in fiction
Tax day is tomorrow, and, if you find yourself getting a refund, you may want to head to the bookstore after reading today’s news. The 2010 Pulitzer Prize winners may be getting all the attention, but we mention some other books worth reading, as well.
- On Monday the 2010 Pulitzer Prize winners were announced, with Tinkers by Paul Harding taking the prize in fiction and Versed by Rae Armentrout winning in poetry. While Armentrout is well known in the poetry world, Tinkers was Harding’s debut novel, and it was published by the tiny, independent Bellevue Literary Press. Affiliated with New York University’s school of medicine, Bellevue Literary Press is only 5 years old, so its victory is drawing a lot of attention (the last time a small press won the Pulitzer for fiction was 1981). The Guardian has more about the novel’s upset, and PaperCuts spends time discussing both Tinkers and Versed. For a peek at what didn’t win, check out Omnivoracious.
- This week at The Elegant Variation, author Marisa Silver celebrates the release of her new story collection, Alone With You, by posting a series of guest blogs about writing. Her discussion on character is particularly interesting, as she tries to answer the impossible question, “How is it that fictional characters made of words typed on paper become real in a reader’s mind?” Silver say she learns about her characters bit by bit, the same way she would get to know someone in real life: “I start off with a tiny shred of a thing about a character – the texture of her hair, the way she walks across a street, a sense in my mind of how her voice might sound. Then I start writing scenes and I give her words to say.” Easy, right?
- Experiencing someone else’s point of view is one of the joys of reading, and in this week’s “Word Play” column, Sonja Bolle highlights several children’s books with protagonists on the autism spectrum. Both young adult and young reader titles are represented, including Gennifer Choldenko’s Al Capone Shines My Shoes and Francisco Stork’s Marcelo in the Real World. Bolle assures readers that these “novels are worth reading just because they have fascinating characters,” but she suspects they will also inspire kids “to take a new look at some of their classmates.”
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