The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family, by Joshua Cohen (New York Review Books)

For distinguished fiction published during the year by an American author, preferably dealing with American life, Fifteen thousand dollars ($15,000).

A mordant, linguistically deft historical novel about the ambiguities of the Jewish-American experience, presenting ideas and disputes as volatile as its tightly-wound plot.

Joshua Cohen accepts the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction from Columbia University President Lee Bollinger. (Eileen Barroso/Columbia University)

Winning Work

The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family

By Joshua Cohen

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2021

A WALL STREET JOURNAL BEST BOOK OF 2021

A KIRKUS BEST FICTION BOOK OF 2021

Corbin College, not quite upstate New York, winter 1959–1960: Ruben Blum, a Jewish historian—but not an historian of the Jews—is co-opted onto a hiring committee to review the application of an exiled Israeli scholar specializing in the Spanish Inquisition. When Benzion Netanyahu shows up for an interview, family unexpectedly in tow, Blum plays the reluctant host to guests who proceed to lay waste to his American complacencies. Mixing fiction with nonfiction, the campus novel with the lecture, The Netanyahus is a wildly inventive, genre-bending comedy of blending, identity, and politics that finds Joshua Cohen at the height of his powers.

Biography

Photo: Beowuld Sheehan

Joshua Cohen was born in 1980 in Atlantic City. His books include the novels Moving Kings, Book of Numbers, Witz, A Heaven of Others, and Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto; the short-fiction collection Four New Messages, and the nonfiction collection Attention: Dispatches from a Land of Distraction. Cohen was awarded Israel’s 2013 Matanel Prize for Jewish Writers, and in 2017 was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists. He lives in New York City.

Finalists

Nominated as finalists in Fiction in 2022:

Palmares, by Gayl Jones (Beacon Press)

An engrossing epic set in 17th-century Brazil that is at once a fugitive slave’s odyssey, a love story, and an investigation into the meaning of freedom that is vaster and stranger than the sum of its parts.

Monkey Boy, by Francisco Goldman (Grove Press)

An autofictional inquiry into the protean nature of identity, written with disarming candor and grace, blending memory and imagination to transformational effect.

The Jury

Courtney Hodell (Chair)

Director of Writers’ Programs, The Whiting Foundation

Chris Abani

Board of Trustees Professor of English, Northwestern University

Tom Beer

Editor-in-Chief, Kirkus Reviews

Deborah Heard

Former Executive Director, Hurston/Wright Foundation

Sam Sacks

Fiction Columnist, The Wall Street Journal

Winners in Fiction

2024

Night Watch, by Jayne Anne Phillips (Knopf)

A beautifully rendered novel set in West Virginia’s Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in the aftermath of the Civil War where a severely wounded Union veteran, a 12-year-old girl and her mother, long abused by a Confederate soldier, struggle to heal.

2023

Trust, by Hernan Diaz (Riverhead Books)

A riveting novel set in a bygone America that explores family, wealth and ambition through linked narratives rendered in different literary styles, a complex examination of love and power in a country where capitalism is king.

2023

Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver (Harper)

A masterful recasting of “David Copperfield,” narrated by an Appalachian boy whose wise, unwavering voice relates his encounters with poverty, addiction, institutional failures and moral collapse–and his efforts to conquer them.

2021

The Night Watchman, by Louise Erdrich (Harper)

A majestic, polyphonic novel about a community’s efforts to halt the proposed displacement and elimination of several Native American tribes in the 1950s, rendered with dexterity and imagination.

See all Fiction

2022 Prize Winners

History

Cuba: An American History, by Ada Ferrer (Scribner)

An original and compelling history, spanning five centuries, of the island that became an obsession for many presidents and policy makers, transforming how we think about the U.S. in Latin America, and Cuba in American society.

National Reporting

Staff of The New York Times

For an ambitious project that quantified a disturbing pattern of fatal traffic stops by police, illustrating how hundreds of deaths could have been avoided and how officers typically avoided punishment.

Explanatory Reporting

Staff of Quanta Magazine, New York, N.Y., notably Natalie Wolchover

For coverage that revealed the complexities of building the James Webb Space Telescope, designed to facilitate groundbreaking astronomical and cosmological research.

Biography

Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist's Memoir of the Jim Crow South, by the late Winfred Rembert as told to Erin I. Kelly (Bloomsbury)

A searing first-person illustrated account of an artist’s life during the 1950s and 1960s in an unreconstructed corner of the deep South–an account of abuse, endurance, imagination, and aesthetic transformation.

See all 2022 winners