2022 Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
by Joshua Cohen
Absorbing, delightful, hilarious, breathtaking and the best and most relevant novel I've read in what feels like forever. — Taffy Brodesser-Akner, The New York Times Book Review
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.
The Pulitzer Prize has been awarded by Columbia University each spring since 1917. The awards are chosen by a board of jurors for Journalism, Letters, Music and Drama. The awards for Letters include Nonfiction, Poetry, Biography or Autobiography, History, and Fiction.