The Pulitzer Prizes were awarded Monday and, as we’re sure you’ve already heard, the big poster child this year was everyone’s favorite, Lin-Manuel Miranda, for his unstoppable musical Hamilton. In your completely justified celebration, however, you might’ve missed some other, wonderful works that deserve your attention as well. There was The Sympathizer, the debut novel about a Vietnamese spy in wartime, and Black Flags, the extensive chronicle on the rise of ISIS that beat out popular favorite Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates. If you consider yourself a book aficionado, these 18 books beckon at least a read-through. Check out the full list of non-book winners and finalists here.
Fiction:
Winner:
The Sympathizer, by Viet Thanh Nguyen
Finalists:
Get in Trouble: Stories, by Kelly Link
Maud’s Line, by Margaret Verble
Drama:
Winner:
Hamilton, by Lin-Manuel Miranda
Finalists:
Gloria, by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
The Humans, by Stephen Karam
History:
Winner:
Custer’s Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America, by T.J. Stiles
Finalists:
Marching Home: Union Veterans and Their Unending Civil War, by Brian Matthew Jordan
Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor, by James M. Scott
The Pentagon’s Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America’s Top-Secret Military Research Agency, by Annie Jacobsen
Biography/Autobiography:
Winner:
Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life, by William Finnegan
Finalists:
Custer’s Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America, by T.J. Stiles
The Light of the World: A Memoir, by Elizabeth Alexander
Poetry:
Winner:
Ozone Journal, by Peter Balakian
Finalists:
Alive: New and Selected Poems, by Elizabeth Willis
Four-Legged Girl, by Diane Seuss
General Nonfiction:
Winner:
Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS, by Joby Warrick
Finalists:
Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates
If the Oceans Were Ink: An Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of the Quran, by Carla Power