Annal:1994 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Pulitzer Prize in the year 1994. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
The Shipping News: A Novel
- 1994 Pulitzer–fiction winner
- 1993 NBA–Fiction winner
- 1993 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 26.44
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, The Shipping News is a celebration of Annie Proulx’s genius for storytelling and her vigorous contribution to the art of the novel.
Quoyle, a third-rate newspaper hack, with a “head shaped like a crenshaw, no neck, reddish hair…features as bunched as kissed fingertips,” is wrenched violently out of his workaday life when his two-timing wife meets her just deserts. An aunt convinces Quoyle and his two emotionally disturbed daughters to return with her to the starkly beautiful coastal landscape of their ancestral home in Newfoundland. Here, on desolate Quoyle’s Point, in a house empty except for a few mementos of the family’s unsavory past, the battered members of three generations try to cobble up new lives.
Newfoundland is a country of coast and cove where the mercury rarely rises above 70 degrees, the local culinary delicacy is cod cheeks, and it’s easier to travel by boat and snowmobile than on anything with wheels. In this harsh place of cruel storms, a collapsing fishery, and chronic unemployment, the aunt…
- 1994 Pulitzer–fiction finalist
- Score: 6.44
For over three decades, Reynolds Price has been one of America’s most distinguished writers, in a career that has been remarkable both for its virtuosity and for the variety of literary forms he has embraced. Now he shows himself as much a master of the story as he is of the novel, in a volume that presents fifty stories, including two early collections—The Names and Faces of Heroes and Permanent Errors—as well as more than two dozen new stories that have never been gathered together before.
In his introduction, Mr. Price explains how, after the publication of his first two collections, he wrote no new stories for almost twenty years. “But once I needed—for unknown reasons in a new and radically altered life—to return to the story, it opened before me like a new chance….A collection like this then,” he adds, “…will show a writer’s preoccupations in ways the novel severely rations (novels are partly made for that purpose—the release from self, long flights through the Other). John Keats’s assertion that ‘the excellence of every Art is its intensity’ has…
Operation Shylock: A Confession
- 1994 PEN-faulkner winner
- 1994 Pulitzer–fiction finalist
- Score: 16.44
In this fiendishly imaginative book (which may or may not be fiction), Philip Roth meets a man who may or may not be Philip Roth. Because someone with that name has been touring Israel, promoting a bizarre reverse exodus of the Jews. Roth is intent on stopping him, even if that means impersonating his own impersonator.
With excruciating suspense, unfettered philosophical speculation, and a cast of characters that includes Israeli intelligence agents, Palestinian exiles, an accused war criminal, and an enticing charter member of an organization called Anti-Semites Anonymous, Operation Shylock barrels across the frontier between fact and fiction, seriousness and high comedy, history and nightmare.
