One of our favorite novels of 2010 won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction on Monday: Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad. Good news if you haven't yet read the book: Not only are you in for a treat, but it's out in paperback now.
Here's what a not terribly famous critic (me) wrote about Goon Squad when it came out last summer: "Jennifer Egan is stylistically fearless and eerily prescient, but what makes her new novel one of summer's best reads isn't solely its unconventional Mobius strip of a plot, its postmodern reconstruction of our pop-culture-and-PR-addled world or even its clever use of the music business to chart our past and future. When all these elements combine with flawed but irresistible characters, A Visit from the Goon Squad flares into flamboyant life. It mulls the sort of big-picture ideas good novels ought to ponder."
Other literary Pulitzer winners:
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee won the general nonfiction prize, while the Pulitzer for history went to The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and Slavery by Eric Foner. Ron Chernow won the prize for biography with Washington: A Life, and Kay Ryan took home the poetry prize for The Best of It: New and Selected Poems.
The play Clyborne Park by Bruce Norris won the drama Pulitzer.
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