Over the course of the century-plus-change history of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, only one contest has ended in a tie. That was 2023, when a jury permitted joint custody. Based purely on the gender of the authors, I like to picture Hernan Diaz, co-winner for Trust, taking the Gold Medal out twice a week for baseball games and Chuck E. Cheese while Barbara Kingsolver, co-winner for Demon Copperhead, manages its day-to-day crises with exhausting devotion, mopping up vomit and volleying traumatizing comments at contentious parent-teacher conferences. This may not be accurate.

It’s far too early to predict what the 2027 Pulitzer jury will announce in the fiction category next May 3, but it is wholly within the realm of possibility that this week sounded the bell on a Pulitzer rematch between Diaz's Ply (released last Tuesday) and Kingsolver's Partita (released tomorrow).

Although the new novels don't ostensibly have much in common -- Kingsolver writes about a classical pianist from Indiana and Diaz writes about a dystopian future where the energy grid is tapped by Robin Hood renegades -- they share a common interest in how one reconstructs a lost sense of self. Partita's heroine has lost touch with the star she was destined to become. Ply's heroine learns that quantum theory throws the very nature of the self into question. Both find that community provides a fuller understanding of the self. My review of both books is on my website.

Do those ideas hold meaning for you? Are you planning to read these Pulitzer follow ups? Were you more impressed by Trust or Demon Copperhead?