Tag Archives: Pulitzer Prize

“I am going to write about all this one day, I told her, and she smiled at me.”

Posted on May 30, 2023 by Kate Stover

This is the final sentence of Hua Hsu’s memoir. He is thanking his therapist for helping him deal with the death of his best friend. I imagine his therapist smiled because she knew that writing a memoir based on trauma … Continue reading →

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“I can allow myself to speculate on all that now, though it would not have occurred to me to do so at the time.”

Posted on April 20, 2023 by Kate Stover

When writing about something that happened years ago, should you stick to the story, or should you interject speculations about what could have happened? Should you also comment on your speculations? People who write stories about things that happened to … Continue reading →

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“Mom, I don’t know who to trust!”

Posted on December 28, 2022 by Kate Stover

Elizabeth Strout’s new novel — a Christmas gift of the first order – is her most enigmatic. Reviewers have drawn wildly different conclusions about the book’s message. For me, the book explores what happens when you don’t know who you … Continue reading →

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“There was this air, this light, a day of thorough and forgetful happiness . . .”

Posted on May 20, 2022 by Kate Stover

How many Pulitzer-Prize winning poets write about happiness? I can think of only one, Henry Taylor, who is considered by some critics to be “deliberately, determinedly unfashionable.” Why? Perhaps it is because his “technically well-ordered style and leisurely reflections of … Continue reading →

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“Thorny people. They don’t always follow the etiquette.”

Posted on April 8, 2022 by Kate Stover

What do you think a story about a thorny family would include? If it’s by Anne Tyler, and if it covers a period of sixty years, you can expect to see that things don’t always work out. For example, the … Continue reading →

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“The power of the mighty industrial overlords of the country had increased with giant strides, while the method of controlling them . . . remained archaic . . .”

Posted on June 23, 2020 by Kate Stover

Presidents Roosevelt and Taft – both Republicans – worked “as stewards of the public welfare” to check the power of huge corporations by supporting anti-trust legislation.  These two men were both willing to argue with members of their own party … Continue reading →

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“He felt as if he was never again going to know the reason for anything he did.”

Posted on June 19, 2018 by Kate Stover

Why read novels?  Jonathan Franzen argues in a Harper’s essay that people are drawn to strong fiction because they like to engage in complex stories that  don’t have simple resolutions. In Anne Tyler’s first novel, If Morning Ever Comes, the … Continue reading →

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“But what could possibly go wrong?”

Posted on May 18, 2018 by Kate Stover

Think of the funniest books you’ve ever read.  Did any of them win literary awards?  No?  As the Washington Post points out, there has long been a “critical resistance to comic novels.” Until now. The 2018 Pulitzer Prize for fiction … Continue reading →

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“Michael reciting the Declaration of Independence was an echo of something that existed elsewhere.”

Posted on January 4, 2018 by Kate Stover

In The Underground Railroad, Michael is a slave in Georgia in the 1850s who was taught to recite, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…” This is one of many powerful scenes in this … Continue reading →

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“Until recently, we simply didn’t know how immense this problem was, or how serious the consequences, unless we had suffered them ourselves.”

Posted on April 13, 2017 by Kate Stover

When Matthew Desmond was growing up, money was tight.  Sometimes the gas got shut off, and his parents eventually lost their home to foreclosure. This week, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his nonfiction book Evicted, which is about eight … Continue reading →

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“A writer’s goal is to light up the sky.”

Posted on July 7, 2016 by Kate Stover

As a fan of Pulitzer-Prize winning poet Ted Kooser, I couldn’t wait to see what he would say about using metaphors in this little-known book for people who want to start writing.  He writes, “. . .  an apt metaphor … Continue reading →

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“Can you taste what I’m saying?”

Posted on July 9, 2015 by Kate Stover

The poem continues: “It is onions and potatoes . . . it is obvious. . .” This is how Philip Levin conceptualizes truth in the poem “The Simple Truth.” I’m often reminded of this gritty, elegant poem when I scrub … Continue reading →

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“We understand ourselves, our lives, retrospectively.”

Posted on April 30, 2015 by Kate Stover

This is an interesting statement, considering it’s from someone who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for her column “Public and Private,” in which she explored different ways to understand her life and the world at large in the heat … Continue reading →

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“Tonight the windows hold all light inside: they fold it back on walls…

Posted on August 28, 2014 by Kate Stover

. . . and spill gold over things that tell us who we are.”  This is from “Learning the Language”  by Henry Taylor. It’s a beautifully constructed poem that follows strict rules of rhyme and meter. When he won the Pulitzer Prize … Continue reading →

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“We can’t chose what we want and what we don’t want and that’s the hard lonely truth.”

Posted on May 29, 2014 by Kate Stover

At 771 pages, this is a long novel.  Is it worth it?  Many of the 57 commentators on the Kirkus review didn’t think so.  However, I love the way Tartt develops big themes.  And she has sentences that are works of … Continue reading →

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