Less Wins the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction

Around 3PM EST on April 16th, it was announced that Less, a novel by Andrew Sean Greer, was the 2018 Recipient of the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. The committee called it “a generous book, musical in its prose and expansive in its structure and range, about growing older and the essential nature of love.” Other finalists included The Idiot of Elif Batuman and In the Distance by Hernan Diaz.  Andrew Sean Greer joins the likes of such acclaimed writers as Michael Cunningham, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Donna Tartt, Junot Diaz, and Jeffrey Eugenides, in recent years.

Here is Less’s Amazon seller’s blurb:

Who says you can’t run away from your problems? You are a failed novelist about to turn fifty. A wedding invitation arrives in the mail: your boyfriend of the past nine years is engaged to someone else. You can’t say yes–it would be too awkward–and you can’t say no–it would look like defeat. On your desk are a series of invitations to half-baked literary events around the world.

QUESTION: How do you arrange to skip town?

ANSWER: You accept them all.

What would possibly go wrong? Arthur Less will almost fall in love in Paris, almost fall to his death in Berlin, barely escape to a Moroccan ski chalet from a Saharan sandstorm, accidentally book himself as the (only) writer-in-residence at a Christian Retreat Center in Southern India, and encounter, on a desert island in the Arabian Sea, the last person on Earth he wants to face. Somewhere in there: he will turn fifty. Through it all, there is his first love. And there is his last.

Because, despite all these mishaps, missteps, misunderstandings and mistakes, Less is, above all, a love story.

Andrew Sean Greer is a San Francisco-based author of five other books aside from Less and is also the executive director of the Santa Maddalena Foundation writers’ residency in Tuscany. He is 47 years old.

I haven’t read this book yet but it’s been on my Amazon wish list for awhile because it comes so highly recommend. Can’t wait to pick it up soon!

You can learn more about the other 2018 Pulitzer Prize winners here.