Cookies
We use cookies to make your experience better. To comply with the new e-Privacy directive, we need to ask for your consent to set the cookies. Learn more.
Louise Edrich’s The Night Watchmen wins 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Master storyteller Louise Edrich bagged the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction as she took readers in another awestruck novel that depicted a strong sense of family, defining what it means to be in a community and its loving evocation of people trying to save their traditions.
The Night Watchmen is inspired by the extraordinary life of Edrich’s grandfather who worked as a night watchman and carried the fight against Native dispossession from rural North Dakota all the way to Washington, D.C.
Fighting for freedom: The Night Watchmen
National Book Award-winning author Edrich tells the story of Thomas Wazhashk who is a night watchman at the jewel bearing plant, the first factory located near the Turtle Mountain Reservation, and a Chippewa Council member who is trying to understand the consequences of a new “emancipation” bill on its way to the floor of the United States Congress.
It is 1953 and he and the other council members know the bill isn’t about freedom; Congress is fed up with Native Americans. The bill is a “termination” that threatens the rights of Native Americans to their land and their very identity. How can the government abandon treaties made in good faith with Native Americans “for as long as the grasses shall grow, and the rivers run”?
Since graduating high school, Pixie Paranteau has insisted that everyone call her Patrice. Unlike most of the girls on the reservation, Patrice, the class valedictorian, has no desire to wear herself down with a husband and kids. She makes jewel bearings at the plant, a job that barely pays her enough to support her mother and brother. Patrice’s shameful alcoholic father returns home sporadically to terrorize his wife and children and bully her for money. But Patrice needs every penny to follow her beloved older sister, Vera, who moved to the big city of Minneapolis. Vera may have disappeared; she hasn’t been in touch in months, and is rumored to have had a baby. Determined to find Vera and her child, Patrice makes a fateful trip to Minnesota that introduces her to unexpected forms of exploitation and violence, and endangers her life.
Thomas and Patrice live in this impoverished reservation community along with young Chippewa boxer Wood Mountain and his mother Juggie Blue, her niece and Patrice’s best friend Valentine, and Stack Barnes, the white high school math teacher and boxing coach who is hopelessly in love with Patrice.
In The Night Watchman, Louise Erdrich creates a fictional world populated with memorable characters who are forced to grapple with the worst and best impulses of human nature. Illuminating the loves and lives, the desires and ambitions of these characters with compassion, wit, and intelligence, The Night Watchman is a majestic work of fiction from this revered cultural treasure.
Complete list of 2021 Pulitzer Prize Winners and Finalists
FICTION
Finalists
A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth by Daniel Mason
Telephone by Percival Everett
HISTORY
Winner
Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America by Marcia Chatelain
Finalists
The Three-Cornered War: The Union, The Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West by Megan Kate Nelson
The Deviant's War: The Homosexual vs. The United States of America by Eric Cervini
BIOGRAPHY
Winner
The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X by Les Payne and Tamara Payne
Finalists
Red Comet: The Short and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath by Heather Clark
Stranger in the Shogun's City: A Japanese Woman and Her World by Amy Stanley
POETRY
Winner
Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz
Finalists
A Treatise on Stars by Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge
In the Lateness of the World by Carolyn Forché
NON-FICTION
Winner
Wilmington's Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy by David Zucchino
Finalists
Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning by Cathy Park Hong
Yellow Bird: Oil, Murder, and a Woman's Search for Justice in Indian Country by Sierra Crane Murdoch
Check out the Fully Booked Collection: Pulitzer Prize winners throughout the years here.
July 23, 2021
|
Categories: Featured, Book News
| Tags: fiction, history, non-fiction, book news, historical fiction, Poetry, biography, pulitzer prize
Related Products
-
Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath (Hardcover)₱1,920.00The highly anticipated new biography of Sylvia Plath that focuses on her remarkable literary and intellectual achievements, while restoring the woman behind the long-held myths about her life and art.
With a wealth of never-before-accessed materials--including unpublished letters and manuscripts; court, police, and psychiatric records; and new interviews--Heather Clark brings to life the brilliant daughter of Wellesley, Massachusetts who had poetic ambition from a very young age and was an accomplished, published writer of poems and stories even before she became a star English student at Smith College in the early 1950s.Get Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath (Hardcover) by Heather Clark and other biography books online and at Fully Booked bookstore branches in the Philippines.
Learn More -
Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (Paperback)₱899.00How do we speak honestly about the Asian American condition—if such a thing exists?
Poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong fearlessly and provocatively confronts this thorny subject, blending memoir, cultural criticism, and history to expose the truth of racialized consciousness in America. Binding these essays together is Hong’s theory of “minor feelings.” As the daughter of Korean immigrants, Cathy Park Hong grew up steeped in shame, suspicion, and melancholy. She would later understand that these “minor feelings” occur when American optimism contradicts your own reality—when you believe the lies you’re told about your own racial identity.
Get Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (Paperback) by Cathy Park Hong and other biography books online and at Fully Booked bookstore branches in the Philippines.
Learn More -
The Night Watchman: A Novel (Paperback)₱599.00NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERWASHINGTON POST, AMAZON, NPR, CBS SUNDAY MORNING, KIRKUS, CHICAGO PUBLIC LIBRARY, AND GOOD HOUSEKEEPING BEST BOOK OF 2020Based on the extraordinary life of National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich’s grandfather who worked as a night watchman and carried the fight against Native dispossession from rural North Dakota all the way to Washington, D.C., this powerful novel explores themes of love and death with lightness and gravity and unfolds with the elegant prose, sly humor, and depth of feeling of a master craftsman.
Get The Night Watchman: A Novel (Paperback) by Louise Erdrich and other contemporary fiction books online and at Fully Booked bookstore branches in the Philippines.
Learn More -
The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West (Paperback)₱899.00Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History
Megan Kate Nelson “expands our understanding of how the Civil War affected Indigenous peoples and helped to shape the nation” (Library Journal, starred review), reframing the era as one of national conflict—involving not just the North and South, but also the West.
Against the backdrop of this larger series of battles, Nelson introduces nine individuals: John R. Baylor, a Texas legislator who established the Confederate Territory of Arizona; Louisa Hawkins Canby, a Union Army wife who nursed Confederate soldiers back to health in Santa Fe; James Carleton, a professional soldier who engineered campaigns against Navajos and Apaches; Kit Carson, a famous frontiersman who led a regiment of volunteers against the Texans, Navajos, Kiowas, and Comanches; Juanita, a Navajo weaver who resisted Union campaigns against her people; Bill Davidson, a soldier who fought in all of the Confederacy’s major battles in New Mexico; Alonzo Ickis, an Iowa-born gold miner who fought on the side of the Union; John Clark, a friend of Abraham Lincoln’s who embraced the Republican vision for the West as New Mexico’s surveyor-general; and Mangas Coloradas, a revered Chiricahua Apache chief who worked to expand Apache territory in Arizona.
Get The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West (Paperback) by Megan Kate Nelson and other history books online at Fully Booked bookstore branches in the Philippines.
Learn More
-
Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America (Paperback)₱1,795.00WINNER, 2021 PULITZER PRIZE IN HISTORY
An estimated one-third of all American adults eats something from at a fast-food restaurant every day. Millions start their mornings with paper-wrapped English muffin breakfast sandwiches, order burritos hastily secured in foil for lunch, and end their evenings with extravalue dinners consumed in cars. But while people of all ages and backgrounds enjoy and depend on fast food, it does not mean the same thing to each of us. For African Americans, as acclaimed historian Marcia Chatelain reveals in Franchise, fast food is a source of both despair and power—and a battlefield on which the fight for racial justice has been waged since the 1960s.
Get Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America (Paperback) by Marcia Chatelain and other history books online at Fully Booked bookstore branches in the Philippines.
Learn More
-
Telephone: A Novel (Paperback)₱880.00Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize
Zach Wells is a perpetually dissatisfied geologist-slash-paleobiologist. Expert in a very narrow area—the geological history of a cave forty-four meters above the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon—he is a laconic man who plays chess with his daughter, trades puns with his wife while she does yoga, and dodges committee work at the college where he teaches.
Get Telephone: A Novel (Paperback) by Percival Everett and other contemporary fiction books online at Fully Booked bookstore branches in the Philippines.
Learn More
PRH Books Connect Us with Michelle Zauner
September 24, 2021
First Few Pages: The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood
September 23, 2021
First Few Pages: Hello (From Here) by Chandler Baker and Wesley King
September 23, 2021
10 Must-Read Books on Sustainability in 2021 to Inspire Change
September 23, 2021
Free Comic Book Day Goes Online
September 20, 2021
Comments