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Chrishayden
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Chrishayden
Post Number: 139
Registered: 03-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, April 15, 2004 - 11:16 am: | 
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At long last, Troy, other books that might have copped the Pulitzer for fiction. I cannot and will not say they are better than TKW, but I cannot say they are worse.
Echo Tree by Henry Dumas
Love by Toni Morrison
The Man in My Basement by Walter Mosely.
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Yukio
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Yukio
Post Number: 190
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, April 15, 2004 - 11:19 am: |
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what about...caryl phillips? |
Chrishayden
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Chrishayden
Post Number: 140
Registered: 03-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, April 15, 2004 - 03:33 pm: |
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Yukio:
I considered it and rejected it because I didn't like it. You can add it if you want. |
Yukio
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Yukio
Post Number: 191
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, April 15, 2004 - 05:00 pm: |
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ChrisHayden: oh...i haven't read Distant Shore; but i know he received pretty good reviews...i've read his work before...for me he can be a hit or miss... |
Steve_s
First Time Poster
Username: Steve_s
Post Number: 1
Registered: 04-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, April 17, 2004 - 06:47 pm: |
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Hope you don't mind if I throw in an opinion. I was surprised that Caryl Phillips even has American citizenship. Haven't read A Distant Shore, but I recently read The Nature of Blood which I thought was excellent. Very elegant writer with the ability to turn up the intensity to an almost unbearable level. Really impressed with that novel.
I don't put much stock in the Pulitzers but this year I think they got it right. I thought Monica Ali's Brick Lane was also a very fine novel, not as original nor as powerful as Jones, but of course as a British citizen she wasn't eligible for the Pulitzer.
William Taubman's Khrushchev, a book I'd like to read, won in the biography category, however, I would have voted for Lawrence Jackson's bio of Ralph Ellison, simply because it's one of the best things I've ever read. Really fantastic piece of writing, and now we also have Arnold Rampersad's Ellison bio to look forward to (hope it's two volumes). Jackson has set the bar way up in the stratosphere.
I liked The Man in My Basement but it's more like a novella. He just has a really hip mind or something but I don't think he really overextended himself with that piece, good though it was. He should really bust out and write something major, I liked his blues novel RL's Dream.
In 2003 I liked a book called Such Sweet Thunder by Vincent O. Carter, an expatriate who had lived in Berne, Switzerland since the 1950s. It's a very artistic novel which unfortunately, never found a publisher (he completed it in 1963) and never had the benefit of an editor so it's a little unrealistic to think it might win the Pulitzer Prize, but who cares? It's a beautiful, bittersweet novel about growing up in KC during the Depression. It ends with WWII looming as Amerigo graduates from high school. I'm not sure everyone would like it, it's 560 pages, but the author dedicated it to Duke Ellington and it's set in some tenements overlooking a courtyard . . . After reading it, I noticed a book called Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature by Daryll Pinckney, in which Carter is one of three authors profiled (Caryl Phillips and J.A. Rogers are the others). The interesting thing is that it was published in 2002, the year before Such Sweet Thunder was published, so Pinckney had not read the novel, he based the profile solely on Carter's only previously published work, The Bern Book: A Record of a Voyage of the Mind. It sounds like a fascinating memoir of living in Europe, which contains chapters entitled, Why I did not live in Paris, Why I did not live in Amsterdam, etc.
I hadn't heard of Henry Dumas, he's now on my list of authors to read. |
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