And now Elizabeth Strout gives us Lucy by the Sea, not just a sequel but a crossover: The writer-narrator of Strout’s My Name Is Lucy Barton (2016) and Oh, William! (2021) flees Manhattan with her ex-husband (and titular focal point of Strout’s last book) at the start of the pandemic to settle in fictional Crosby, Maine, hometown of Olive Kitteridge, the spiky antiheroine of Strout’s 2009 winner.

Its narrator, Selin, an undergraduate at Harvard in the ’90s who thinks about sex in The Idiot (a finalist in 2018), finally has it. Elif Batuman’s Either/Or arrived last spring as well. The Candy House turns various of that book’s minor figures major, continues messing with form, and zeroes in on the tech world. In April, Jennifer Egan came out with a companion to her genre-busting 2011 winner, A Visit From the Goon Squad, a formally inventive story cycle centered on the music industry. The pair tell the story of the son of a Vietnamese mother and French Catholic priest as he serves as both a communist mole and a double-crossing underling (in the first) to a Vietnamese general, then escapes to Los Angeles following the fall of Saigon and (in the second) decamps the underworlds of SoCal for those of France. Viet Thanh Nguyen, who won in 2016 for The Sympathizer, released The Committed in March of last year.

The five books in question are accordingly varied. The fiction prize is awarded to “distinguished fiction published in book form during the year by an American author, preferably dealing with American life.” This leaves a rather broad field. “There are no set criteria for the judging of the Prizes,” the Pulitzer website declares. Of major prizes awarded to American authors of literary fiction, the Pulitzer has a particular gravitas, due in some combination to its institutional backing (Columbia University), its longevity (the first awarded to a novel was in 1918, more than three decades before the first National Book Award for fiction and more than 60 years before the Pen/Faulkner), and the you-can’t-sit-with-us hauteur with which the board reserves the right not to award a prize at all.

He joins four other Pulitzer winners and finalists who have recently done their own serializations. This month, he launches Less Is Lost, the sequel to Less, about an author named Arthur Less on a road trip across America. “Literally, she said, ‘You can’t write a sequel to a Pulitzer Prize–winning novel,’ ” Greer recalls. After Andrew Sean Greer won the Pulitzer Prize for Less in 2018, his agent issued a single warning.

Less pulitzer prize