Adam Johnson won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel The Orphan Master’s Son. The book is set in North Korea and follows the life of Jun Do, son of the Orphan Master, as he rises through the ranks. He eventually becomes one of Kim Jong-il’s greatest threats and must risk his life to try to help his wife and stepchildren escape the nation.

Johnson is the author of two previous works: the novel Parasites Like Us and the short story collection Emporium. The Orphan Master’s Son is Johnson’s first book in nearly nine years and was a finalist for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award.

The finalists for this year were Nathan Englander’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, a collection of short stories dealing with Jewish life, and The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey, a novel about a couple living in Alaska.

Both Englander and Johnson’s book were discussed previously as potential Pulitzer Prize winners by Toonari Post, and the list that was used for the Pulitzer Prize predictions had The Orphan Master’s Son ranked as the fourth most likely book to win.

Controversially, no award for Fiction was given last year because the judges decided that none of the finalists were deserving of the award.

The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction is the most prestigious American literary prize. Past winners include Ernest Hemingway, Saul Bellow John Steinbeck, Junot Diaz and Jennifer Egan. Only one American author, William Faulkner, has won the Nobel Prize for Literature, the most prestigious literary prize in the world, without first winning the Pulitzer. However, Faulkner went on to win two Pulitzers.

Winners must be U.S. citizens, and the winner of the history category must have written a book about American history. The other winners this year were Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam by Fredrik Logevall for history, Stag’s Leap by Sharon Olds for poetry, The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo by Tom Reiss for the biography or autobiography, and Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys by Gilbert King for general nonfiction.

The Pulitzer Prizes are awarded for achievements in journalism, literature, and music. They were established in 1917 and are managed by Columbia University. The full list of winners is available here.

Winners receive a certificate and $10,000. Fiction prizewinners usually go on to become bestsellers after the announcement. The prizes will be presented at Columbia University on May 30.

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Who will win this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction? One website has created an algorithm designed to predict who will win and successfully predicted Jennifer Egan’s win in 2011 for her book, A Visit From the Goon Squad. In the weeks leading up to the award’s announcement (April 15), Toonari Post will be reviewing several of the more discussed books from last year and try to see which book, above all others, deserves the award.

Two of the most discussed books this year were The Round House by Louise Erdrich and The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson, and it is not hard to see why. Both are phenomenal novels, and very likely one of these authors will come away with the award.

The Round House is the story of a rape and the subsequent trial of a Native American woman living on a reservation. Narrated through the eyes of her adolescent son, the novel deals primarily with racial injustice. It is comparable to Harper Lee’s masterpiece, To Kill a Mockingbird, and has become a favorite with the general public.

Ironically, the book’s big success could spell its doom for the Pulitzer: late last year it won the National Book Award, and although it is not unprecedented, books rarely win both awards. The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx, published in 1993, was the last book to accomplish this feat. Could the literary strength of The Round House help it break a 20-year curse? It is more than possible.

The Orphan Master’s Son is the about the life of the fictional Jun Do, an orphan in North Korea who slowly rises through the ranks to become one of the most powerful men in the country. It is a brilliant achievement and a break out book for author Adam Johnson, who has previously published a collection of short stories entitled Emporium and the novel Parasites Like Us. Through the horror of the North Korean regime, Johnson is able in his latest book to create a book that is part thriller, part love story, part internal crisis and much more. There is something here for everyone to enjoy.

However, the Pulitzer Prize primarily deals with books that deal with American ideals and citizens. Although part of the book is set in Texas and North Korea is constantly compared and contrasted with the US in the book, it could be simply not American enough to win. There have been exceptions before, though, and the massive scope of the book is comparable to the sprawling plot lines of previous Pulitzer winners, so only time will tell if the judges decide the book features enough American “values” to merit the award.

Stay tuned at Toonari Post for more Pulitzer news and the reveal of the winners on April 15.

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Who will win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction? One website has created an algorithm designed to predict who will win and successfully predicted Jennifer Egan’s win in 2011 for her book, A Visit From the Goon Squad. In the weeks leading up to the award’s announcement (April 15), Toonari Post will be reviewing several of the more discussed books from last year and try to see which book, above all others, deserves the award.

In 2009, the winner, Tinkers by Paul Harding, was nowhere to be found on the list on pprize.com. It had received no nominations for other major prizes, and shown up on only a few “best-of” lists.

Today, Toonari Post will be examining dark horse candidates. What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank by Nathan Englander made a splash when it was published, but since then its chances of winning the prize have diminished dramatically. Kind One by Laird Hunt is the opposite: until its nomination for the Pen/Faulkner Award, few had heard of it.

Englander’s book, a collection of short stories, focuses on Jewish life—life as an assimilated American, life as an unassimilated American, life in Israel. As you might expect, religion is present in all of them. Despite this, the stories are all quite different. One focuses on a band of kids trying to get revenge on the local anti-Semite, another on an aging writer and his waning fanbase. The title story is about a wife seeing an old friend from Hebrew school who has since moved to Israel. It is similar, both in its language and in its characters, to the short story that provided the inspiration for its title, Raymond Carver’s famous “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.”

The prose is at times unrefined (“She and Mark ran off to Israel twenty years ago and turned Hassidic, and neither of them will put a hand on the other in public. Not for this. Not to put out a fire”) but full of character; its unrefined nature is the point.

The short story collection would be a worthy winner of the award. If Englander does not win for this book, be on the lookout for future work by him. He is a writer worth keeping an eye on.

Laird Hunt’s Kind One is an interesting, Faulknerian work that will definitely confuse more than a few readers. It is an antebellum, southern gothic tale, told through multiple perspectives. The largest of these sections is from the eyes of Ginny, a girl married off to a lying widower.

At times, characters seem to act not how they would naturally be expected to, but rather how the author needs them to act in order to move the story along. The multiple perspectives also seem overdone towards the end, where characters the reader thus far has never heard from suddenly get to voice their opinions for five pages and are then silenced. After hearing from one voice for a hundred pages, five pages seem a bit superfluous. A bit more editing and playing around with the story could have resulted in a tighter book. Although without a doubt Kind One deserves its nomination for the Pen/Faulkner Award, winning the Pulitzer seems a bit of a stretch for this book.

Stay tuned at Toonari Post for more Pulitzer Prize news and predictions in the days leading up to April 15.

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Of all American literary awards, none come close to matching the Pulitzer Prize for weight and prestige. Winners can expect to receive an astronomical boost in sales, and, aside from William Faulkner, no American has won the Nobel Prize for Literature without first earning a Pulitzer.

This leads many to speculate who the winner will be each year. Notably, one website has created an algorithm to predict who will win, and it successfully predicted Jennifer Egan’s 2011 win for her book, A Visit From the Goon Squad. In the weeks leading up to the award’s announcement Toonari Post will be reviewing several of the more discussed books from last year, and to try to see which book, above all others, deserves the award.

A Hologram for a King by Dave Eggers has been one of the more controversial books this year. It received glowing reviews from critics, but a quick visit to Amazon or Goodreads shows that the public is not too keen on the work. The plot features Alan Clay, an apathetic, divorced businessman, traveling to Saudi Arabia with his company’s hologram technology in order to impress the king and convince him to purchase the equipment. If Clay is successful he will receive more than enough money to pay off his many encroaching debts, but with the king never showing up to meetings, the pressure is building. The plot has been compared to Samuel Beckett and Franz Kafka, but without a single hint at anything fantastic, it is much more grounded in reality than the works of those authors.

The book has a high rank on pprize.com’s list due to several appearances in ‘best-of’ lists and a nomination for the National Book Award, but it seems doubtful it will win the author the Pulitzer. An examination of a failing businessman in Saudi Arabia juxtaposed with American businesses failing to compete with Chinese companies is interesting enough, but in the end, the whole narrative is forgettable. None of the characters are particularly memorable or well fleshed-out. The plot ends on an uncertain note, and, given Clay’s unfortunate predicament, this does not make a satisfying conclusion. In a year with so many strong books, it is unlikely this will be the one that wins the prize.

Kevin Powers’ debut novel, The Yellow Birds, has garnered similar praise from critics, although the pubic has been much kinder to it. Focused on the Iraq war, it tells the story of Pvt. Bartle and his friend, Murph, through chapters that alternate between the war and its aftermath. It is also very clichéd, but in this case that is not necessarily a bad thing. What sets Powers’ novel apart from the others is its language. Powers is a poet first and a novelist second, and it shows here, hinting at the language of William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. Occasionally, the wording gets out of hand, but, other than a few instances, is still pleasant enough to read.

The characters, while likable, never really develop. For example, all we learn about Murph is that he has a caring mother and a girl back home. The big reveal at the end is also anticlimactic. The book is not without its faults, but it has a definite shot at the Pulitzer Prize.

Stay tuned at Toonari Post for more Pulitzer Prize news and predictions in the days leading up to April 15.

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Toni Morrison has long been heralded for her difficult yet beautiful books. Ever since she won the Nobel Prize, Morrison has become a household name most commonly associated with her early books, such as The Bluest Eye and Beloved, and is both loved and hated by high school students everywhere. Her latest book, Home, however, is a far cry from the lyrical works that earned her fame.

Set during the 50s, Home follows the story of Korean War veteran Frank Money as he embarks on a journey to reach his home in Georgia where his sister is supposedly at death’s door. Along the way, Morrison explores the lives of those who have left their mark on Frank and his sister, often going back and forth through time to do so.

An examination of racial relations, a theme that carries on throughout all of Morrison’s work, is still present. Absent, though, are the breathtaking narratives that strung together those themes so well.

Frank Money has seen friends die on the battlefield and innocent orphans shot, and when he returns to the United States, he finds himself in a world where just looking suspicious can result in jail time. These horrors are so commonplace and so undeveloped that they lose meaning within the book.  A plot summary might read something like a list of terrors with little else included.

Part of the reason for this is that Home is very sparsely written.  The novel begins, “They rose up like men. We saw them. Like men they stood,” and continues in such a fashion for the rest of the novel. Although this will certainly attract some readers, it is hardly like Morrison’s usual beautiful language. Although many characters have whole chapters dedicated to them, other than Frank Money, none are as fleshed out as they could be and many come off as cliché and boring figures, resulting in the reader feeling apathetic towards them.

Still, the book does have its good points. Some passages—mostly those concerning Frank Money and his past—are quite captivating.  Morrison depicts the veteran without any sugarcoating, showing exactly how the war has changed him. As he watches a drummer get carried away by his fellow band mates, still drumming the air as they take him away, Frank wonders, “Maybe, as with the drummer, rhythm would take charge. Maybe he too would be escorted away, flailing helplessly, imprisoned in his own strivings.”

Upon reflection, many will probably wonder just what the point of this flawed work is. At 150 pages, it is quick and to the point, and yet so many parts seem unnecessary. It is worth a read more because if you do not like it, you will be on the last page before you even realize it.

Image Courtesy of   Angela Radulescu

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No award for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction will be given this year, it was announced earlier this week. Three finalists were listed: Train Dreams by Denis Johnson, a novella focusing on the life and times of a western logger, Swamplandia! by Karen Russell, a book about a thirteen year old trying to save her quirky family’s alligator wrestling park, and The Pale King by David Foster Wallace, which examined the American workplace. Foster had been at work on it when he committed suicide in 2008.

This is not the first time the prize committee has declined to hand out an award. Throughout the award’s history, this outcome has occurred on nine other occasions. The last time this happened was in 1977. No award was given for editorial writing, either.

The Pulitzer Prize First Edition Guide, which successfully predicted last year’s winner, A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, put together a list of likely winners which served as the basis for Toonari Post’s own speculations and predictions of the award. Both Train Dreams and Swamplandia! had spots on the list, coming in at 15 and 7, respectively, and have been previously reviewed by Toonari Post. The Pale King, though, comes as a surprise, as many had disregarded it because Foster had not yet finished it at the time of his death.

“The three books were fully considered, but in the end, none mustered the mandatory majority for granting a prize, so no prize was awarded,” said Sig Gissler, administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes, declining to go into further detail. Train Dreams is a novella and, with the board usually favoring longer works, it is at a bit of a disadvantage. The Pale King, as previously stated, is incomplete. Swamplandia!, though both complete and a full-length novel, is too quirky for some people’s tastes.

Although the award’s reputation ensures winners to have some place in literary history, in years when no Pulitzers were awarded, some of the most revered works of fiction were published.

Both For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway and Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, two works that were recommended to the Pulitzer board and subsequently snubbed in years where no award was given, have gone on to be recognized as literary masterpieces.

Could any of the works nominated for the Prize go on to become classics?  Only time will tell.  In the mean time a forum has been set up by the Pulitzer Prize First Edition Guide to discuss next year’s award.

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April 16 has arrived, and with it comes the announcement of the winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Another website has put up their own list of predictions, and the Toonari Post is reviewing seven works likely to win their author the award.

The fiction award, known as the novel, has always been a favorite form of writing when it comes to the Pulitzer. Toonari Post has had the opportunity to read and review three novels likely to win the award: The Tiger’s Wife by Tea Obreht, Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward, and Swamplandia! Karen Russell.

First up is The Tiger’s Wife, winner of the Orange prize for fiction. The book is Obreht’s first novel, but it is so intricate and well developed that it does not read like one.  The plot concerns two doctors in an unnamed Yugoslavian country giving orphans medical treatment.

One of the doctors recently had her grandfather pass away, and about two-thirds of the book are dedicated to retelling stories he had told her as a little girl, the stories of the deathless man and the tiger’s wife. The remaining third deals with the doctor giving out medicine to orphans and coming to terms with her grandfather’s death.

Magical realism, a term defining moments where extraordinary events, like a man waking up to find he has been transformed into a cockroach, is told in an everyday manner and the bizarre and the banal coexist naturally, playing a big part in the story (for example, the deathless man is literally deathless and the tiger’s wife is literally a tiger’s wife,) while readers of Salman Rushdie and Gabriel Garcia Marquez will feel right at home here.

The main problem with the book is that the two-thirds telling the grandfather’s stories are so detailed and make you want to read more and more, that the rest drags in comparison.  It is not that it is paced badly or that the prose does not stand up here, just that this section is not as interesting as the rest.

Overall, Obreht has a good shot at the Pulitzer. And, even if she does not win, she is definitely a writer to look out for.

Next up is Salvage the Bones, a novel that has already won its author, Jesmyn Ward, the National Book award. Set in Louisiana immediately before Hurricane Katrina hit, it tells the story of a poor black family and the trials they endure, seen through the eyes of their fifteen-year-old daughter.

Filled with references to Greek mythology, it is a deep book, but also one that is fun to read. Disaster after disaster keeps coming, from the daughter discovering she is pregnant to her older brother running into trouble training dogs to fight. But much like a train wreck, it is impossible to look away.

Ward’s prose is occasionally stellar, though it mostly comes off a bit awkward. For example, “China’s turned on herself. If I didn’t know know, I would think she was trying to eat her paws.  I would think that she was crazy.  Which she is, in a way.” Overall, the book is worth a read, but not a Pulitzer.

Swamplandia! is funny, engaging, and altogether weird, albeit in a good way. A family of alligator wrestlers get into financial trouble and struggle to get themselves out, as the father vanishes on a business trip, one of the two daughters becomes obsessed with the occult and the son runs away to make money on his own—all while the family copes with the matriarch’s death.  These leave poor Ava, the other daughter, to fend for herself as she tries to raise the funds to keep her family’s park going.

This book is not for everyone.  The prose is nothing special (“Kiwi sat like that, a toothpick speck in the whale’s smile, and pretended to read Plato’s Republic until his lunch hour was up,”) but it gets the job done and creates an intriguing atmosphere of drollness, much like films such as The Nightmare Before Christmas and Coraline. As for the book itself, it may be too quirky for some people, but those who have a sense for the absurd will love it.  It may be too out there to win the Pulitzer Prize, but it is definitely worth checking out.

Stay tuned for the announcement of the nominations and the prize itself on April 16.

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With the announcement of the winner of the Pulitzer Prize rapidly approaching,  the Toonari Post has begun speculating who will come home with the prize. Another website has put up their own list of predictions, and Toonari Post is reviewing seven of them to judge their likelihood of winning.

Two short story collections seem to have a good chance at getting the prize: The Angel Esmeralda by Don DeLillo and Binocular Vision by Edith Pearlman.

Don DeLillo, more than any other author on the list, has received critical recognition. Literary Critic Harold Bloom said,” he is one of four current American authors to have touched the sublime” (the others being Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy, and Thomas Pynchon.) Despite this, he still has not won a Pulitzer prize for his work.

The Angel Esmeralda consists of nine stories written from 1979 to 2011. Though some are much better than others, all are memorable thanks to DeLillo’s masterful prose. The settings stretch across the world, from New York to a high security prison in the Canary Islands, from Greece to outer space; however; there is one unifying theme throughout all of them: communication. It may take different forms in all of the stories, but an examination of how people pass thoughts and ideas from one another is always present.

Some of the earlier stories come off as a bit weak as the later ones seem like they were meant for critical analysis rather than pleasure reading, but the middle ones are amazing. The title story is almost unreal, and it is worth picking up the book based on that alone.

DeLillo is incredible with prose, and it shows.

“The old nun rose at dawn, feeling pain in every joint. She’d been rising at dawn since her days as a postulant, kneeling on hardwood floors to pray. First she raised the shade. That’s the world out there, little green apples and infectious disease.”

DeLillo has had a shot at the Pulitzer before with other nominated novels and this time around he has potential to add to his awards collection.

In contrast, Edith Pearlman is a small, lesser-known novelist, writing only short stories that have only made a small splash—until now. Binocular Vision won the National Book Critics Circle award last March and is currently ranked #1 on PPrize.com as ‘most likely to win’ the award. The book is split into two parts: the first consisting of selected stories previously published and the second being made up of new narratives. Pearlman’s prose at times reads bizarrely, but from the beginning onward is very effective:

“The town square was a bare knoll. A church faced the square. Its stucco walls seemed to be unraveling. The one-storied inn sagged towards its own courtyard. Robert was shown to a rear bedroom. From his window he could see oxen.”

Some of the stories are weak and forgettable, while others are strong. Though the book is excellent and is definitely in the running for the Pulitzer, it suffers from two problems. First, Pearlman has the uncanny ability to make even the most fantastic location seem banal, rendering what should be exciting stories into dull excursions.

Second, often the stories only come together and are worthwhile in the end, which at times works, but other times makes you wonder why you are even reading the story, and if the ending is messy or poor, the whole story comes off as unsatisfactory. While not all too many stories fall into this last category, enough do that the book at times seems disappointing.

Though the book itself is worth reading and definitely deserves the accolades it has already received, it does not exactly come across as Pulitzer material.

Stay tuned for the last installment of Pulitzer Prize speculation, as the Toonari Post takes a look at some of the novels nominated for the award.

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The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction is one of the United States’ oldest and most prestigious literary prizes. With a cash award clocking in at $10,000, it may not have the biggest monetary prize, but the amount of respect it commands makes any winner enviable, especially when considering that out of the nine US Nobel Laureates in Literature eligible for the Pulitzer, only two did not win the prize before they took the Nobel, and one of those—William Faulkner—went on to win an unprecedented two Pulitzers afterward. Only Nobel Laureate and poet Joseph Brodsky did not receive the honor.

With the revealing of the prize winner and finalists set on April 16, many readers are gearing up for the announcement. One website, using various algorithms, was able to predict last year’s winner, Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, and is at it again, compiling a list of 15 likely candidates for the award. In the coming days leading up to April 16, Toonari Post will review seven of these works and judge their likelihood of the award.

First up are two shorter works, both novellas, The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka and Train Dreams by Denis Johnson. While novellas often do not win the award, Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea proves it is not impossible, and both have a shot at the title.

The Buddha in the Attic, Otsuka’s second work, was the recipient of this year’s PEN/Faulkner award, and is a marvelous book that examines the lives of Japanese women brought to America in the 20s and 30s for marriage. Interestingly, Otsuka does not focus on one individual and her experiences, but rather looks at events from the perspective of a group of them. The book is narrated in the plural first person—“On the boat we were mostly virgins. We had black hair and flat wide feet and we were not very tall.”

The book is poetic and simple, and though there is no character to relate to, it is still easy to connect with the characters. The only problem is the repetitive nature of the work: Otsuka felt it necessary when explaining how one individual woman dealt with a problem to go on to say how the rest of them dealt with it.

For example, when describing their children, the entire chapter consists of ‘We did this. We did that:’ “We laid them down gently, in ditches and furrows and wicker baskets beneath trees. We left them lying naked, atop blankets, on woven straw mats at the edge of the fields.”

The result is a work that at times reads like a list, simply saying what one person did, then another, then another, stretching on occasionally for pages. The beautiful prose at times makes reading these lists easier, but the problem still remains. While the book is definitely worth a read, it may not be worth a Pulitzer.

The next novella, Train Dreams, was originally published in 2002 in the Paris Review, but in 2011 was for the first time put out in book form, making it eligible for the Pulitzer. This western tells the tale of Robert Grainier, a logger out in the American West, as he aimlessly goes through life. The story is not told in a linear fashion and the chapters often jump from Granier as a middle-aged man to a young boy to an old man. It is a neat idea and works really well.

Yet, despite the book’s excitement, it is not particularly memorable. It is a good story, and bits and pieces may stay with you, but within a few days the rest will be forgotten. The book is more than good enough to make you want to read other works by Denis Johnson, but that is all it is: a gateway.

The prose is good, and descriptions of the land are simple but effective: “They hiked over to Grossling’s meadow and waded into it through daisies up to their knees.” Johnson may strike gold and win a Pulitzer—he is a brilliant enough writer—but this is not the work that wins him it.

Stay tuned for more speculation about the Pulitzer Prize in the coming days.

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