Each year, the Pulitzer Prize honors outstanding achievements in journalism, literature, drama, and music. Its literary categories—fiction, nonfiction, history, biography, memoir/autobiography, and poetry—offer a diverse and compelling collection of exceptional reading.
Here are some of the winning books and finalists for 2025 announced on May 4th of this year and available to borrow with your Livingston Library card.
Fiction
Winner
Angel Down by Daniel Kraus
An immersive World War I novel about five soldiers who discover a fallen angel in No Man’s Land—one that may hold the power to end the war. As greed, paranoia, and survival instincts take over, the men must overcome their inner demons before their miraculous discovery leads them all to destruction. A novel that blends brutal wartime realism with supernatural suspense and moral conflict.
Finalists
Audition by Katie Kitamura
One woman, the performance of a lifetime. Or two. An exhilarating, destabilizing Möbius strip of a novel that asks whether we ever really know the people we love. Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She’s an accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He’s attractive, troubling, young—young enough to be her son. Who is he to her, and who is she to him? In this compulsively readable, brilliantly constructed novel, two competing narratives unspool, rewriting our understanding of the roles we play every day – partner, parent, creator, muse – and the truths every performance masks, especially from those who think they know us most intimately.
Stag Dance : A Novel & Stories by Torrey Peters
A story collection that explores versions of transgender consciousness across literary forms that seem familiar but whose effects are strange, challenging and ultimately fresh. In the novel, a group of restless lumberjacks working in an illegal winter logging outfit plan a dance that some of them will volunteer to attend as women. When the broadest, strongest, plainest of the axmen announces his intention to dance as a woman, he finds himself caught in a strange rivalry with a pretty young jack, provoking a cascade of obsession, jealousy, and betrayal that will culminate on the big night in an astonishing vision of gender and transition. Three startling stories surround Stag Dance: “Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones” imagines a gender apocalypse brought about by an unstable ex-girlfriend. In “The Chaser,” a secret romance between roommates at a Quaker boarding school brings out intrigue and cruelty. In the last story, “The Masker,” a party weekend on the Las Vegas strip turns dark when a young crossdresser must choose between two guides: a handsome mystery man who objectifies her in thrilling ways, or a cynical veteran trans woman offering unglamorous sisterhood.
History
Winner
We the People : A History of the U.S. Constitution by Jill Lepore
A lively and engaging narrative that investigates why the Constitution is so difficult to amend, including a review of noteworthy failed amendments proposed by marginalized groups.
Finalists
Born in Flames : The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City by Bench Ansfield
Historian Ansfield revisits the urban arson crisis of the 1970s, when fires devastated poor Black and Brown neighborhoods in cities like the Bronx. Challenging the common belief that residents caused the destruction, Ansfield argues that many fires were deliberately set by landlords seeking insurance payouts amid collapsing property values. The book introduces the concept of “brownlining,” exposing how insurance, finance, and real estate industries profited from disinvestment while reshaping urban communities. Alongside this history, Ansfield highlights tenant-led resistance movements and the cultural impact of the era, connecting these patterns to ongoing inequalities and climate-related risks today.
King of Kings : The Iranian Revolution : A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation by Scott Anderson
A superbly written and dramatic account of the downfall of the Shah of Iran, American miscalculation and the revolution that ushered in an Islamic state, history that is timely today.
Biography
Winner
Pride and Pleasure : The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution by Amanda Vaill
A lively and detailed biography of two daughters of wealthy and influential Dutch landowners who colored our nation’s history, using present tense to tell their story and past tense to chronicle the dramatic sweep of the American Revolution.
Finalists
True Nature : The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen by Lance Richardson
The life of a talented, complicated writer who rejected conformity and whose experiences informed the philosophical and spiritual dimensions of his work.
The Life and Poetry of Frank Stanford by James McWilliams
A finely-researched work that illuminates the story of a little-known yet consequential literary figure, whose life helps us better understand the cultural history of the American South.
Memoir or Autobiography
Winner
Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li
A writer’s deeply moving and revelatory account of losing her younger son to suicide a little more than six years after her older son died in the same manner, an austere and defiant memoir of acceptance that focuses on facts, language and the persistence of life.
Finalists
Clam Down : A Metamorphosis by Anelise Chen
An experimental and deeply original memoir in which the writer reimagines herself as a clam, using humor and tenderness to explore a fraught relationship with her father and the pressures of being a first-generation daughter of immigrant parents.
Bibliophobia : A Memoir by Sarah Chihaya
An alternately searing and darkly humorous story of breakdown and survival told through books. Delving into texts such as Anne of Green Gables, Possession, A Tale for the Time Being, The Last Samurai, Chihaya interrogates her cultural identity, her relationship with depression, and the intoxicating, sometimes painful, ways books push back on those who love them.
I’ll Tell You When I’m Home : A Memoir by Hala Alyan
A memoir that reimagines diaspora and the long consequences of war with literary clarity, in which the author’s experiences with infertility and then motherhood are juxtaposed with an intergenerational family history.
General Nonfiction
Winner
There is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America by Brian Goldstone
A feat of reportage, analysis and storytelling focusing on the issues that have created a national crisis of family homelessness among the so-called working poor. Through intimate, novelistic portraits, Goldstone reveals the human cost of this crisis, following parents and their kids as they go to sleep in cars, or in squalid extended-stay hotel rooms, and head out to their jobs and schools the next morning. These are the nation’s hidden homeless—omitted from official statistics, and proof that overflowing shelters and street encampments are only the most visible manifestation of a far more pervasive problem.
Finalists
A Flower Traveled in my Blood : The Incredible True Story of the Grandmothers Who Fought to Find a Stolen Generation of Children by Haley Cohen Gilliland
A beautifully written and well-reported book on Argentina’s Dirty War, told through the eyes of the mothers and grandmothers who sought the truth about what happened to their “disappeared” loved ones and raised awareness of political repression in South America.
Mother Emanuel : Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church by Kevin Sack
A sensitive exploration of a church massacre in Charleston, South Carolina, a rigorously researched and reported story of faith, African American institutions, the legacy of slavery and what remains after devastating losses.
–Archana, Adult Services & Acquisitions Librarian