Book Sense Pick Wins Pulitzer for Fiction

Edward P. Jones' The Known World (Amistad/HarperCollins) has been awarded the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Before it won the Pulitzer and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in early March, The Known World was recognized by independent booksellers as a Top Ten September/October 2003 Book Sense 76 Pick.

In her nomination of The Known World as a Book Sense Pick, Carla Cohen of Politics and Prose Bookstore and Coffeehouse in Washington, D.C., said, "I am in awe of Edward Jones' precise language and the weave of the story, but what I most admire is his brutal honesty. Every reader will again have to confront the horrors of slavery and how it brutalized every individual who was involved. That the slave owners are themselves black adds a new, terrifying dimension. This is a masterful novel."

Other Pulitzer winners, announced on Monday, April 5, include Gulag: A History by Anne Applebaum (Doubleday) for General Nonfiction; A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South From Slavery to the Great Migration by Steven Hahn (Belknap Press/Harvard University Press) for History; Khrushchev: The Man and His Era by William Taubman (Norton) for Biography; and Walking to Martha's Vineyard by Franz Wright (Knopf) for Poetry.