Fiction:
Tinkers by Paul Harding
From Cormac McCarthy to Jeffrey Eugenides, the Pulitzer in fiction is usually awarded to a well-known and established writer, but this year, Paul Harding, an expository writing professor at Harvard, took the prize for his novel Tinkers. Published by Bellevue Literary Press, a small independent publisher, this is a tremendous surprise for a novel that had been winning critical praise for its “story of a dying man drifting back in time to his hardscrabble New England childhood.”
Fiction Finalists:
Love in Infant Monkeys by Lydia Millet
In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin