Browse All Work by DLPP Recipients and Runners-Up

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What is the What: A Novel

Dave Eggers
2006

A biographical novel traces the story of Valentino Achak Deng, who as a boy of seven was separated from his family when his village in southern Sudan was attacked by government helicopters and became one of the estimated 17,000 "lost boys of Sudan" before relocating from a Kenyan refugee camp to Atlanta in 2001.
Short Short Stories

Dave Eggers
2005

Dave Eggers has been partly responsible for a rejuvenation of short fiction in the USA, and these short stories are as original and witty as any of his longer works.
How We Are Hungry: Stories

Dave Eggers
2004

Dave Eggers presents his first collection of short stories. The characters are roaming, searching, and often struggling, and revelations do not always arrive on schedule.
The Unforbidden Is Compulsory, or Optimism

Dave Eggers
2004

A slender paperback of absurdly humorous contemporary fiction by the author of "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius," this book is described as "a self-contained portion of a larger work."
You Shall Know our Velocity!

Dave Eggers
2002

After acquiring $32,000, Will and Hand, devastated over the death of their closest friend, travel around the world giving away the money.
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

Dave Eggers
2000

A wrenching, hilarious, and stylistically groundbreaking story of a college senior who, in the space of five weeks, loses both of his parents to cancer and inherits his eight-year-old brother.
Teachers Have It Easy

Dave Eggers, Daniel Moulthrop, and Ninive Clements Calegari
2005

Presents an examination of the reality of public school teaching in the United States, combining facts and statistics with the voices of schoolteachers from across the country, describing how society views teachers and how public policy intersects with teachers' lives.
This Bridge Will Not Be Gray

Dave Eggers and Tucker Nichols
2015

The Golden Gate Bridge is the most famous bridge in the world. It is also, not entirely coincidentally, the world's only bright-orange bridge. But it wasn't supposed to be that way. In this book, fellow bridge-lovers Dave Eggers and Tucker Nichols tell the story of how it happened - how a bridge that some people wanted to be red and white, and some people wanted to be yellow and black, and most people wanted simply to be gray, instead became, thanks to the vision and stick-to-itiveness of a few peculiar architects, one of the most memorable man-made objects ever created.
The Veins of the Ocean

Patricia Engel
2016

Reina Castillo is the alluring young woman whose beloved brother is serving a death sentence for a crime that shocked the community, throwing a baby off a bridge—a crime for which Reina secretly blames herself. With her brother's death, though devastated and in mourning, Reina is finally released from her prison vigil. Seeking anonymity, she moves to a sleepy town in the Florida Keys where she meets Nesto Cadena, a recently exiled Cuban awaiting with hope the arrival of the children he left behind in Havana. Through Nesto's love of the sea and capacity for faith, Reina comes to understand her own connections to the life-giving and destructive forces of the ocean that surrounds her as well as its role in her family's troubled history, and in their companionship, begins to find freedom from the burden of guilt she carries for her brother's crime. Set in the vibrant coastal and Caribbean communities of Miami, the Florida Keys, Havana, Cuba, and Cartagena, Colombia, with The Veins of the Ocean Patricia Engel delivers a profound and riveting Pan-American story of fractured lives finding solace and redemption in the beauty and power of the natural world, and in one another.
It's Not Love, It's Just Paris

Patricia Engel
2013

Lita del Cielo has been granted one year to pursue her studies in Paris before returning to America to work in the family business. She moves into a gently crumbling Left Bank mansion known as the House of Stars, where the spirited but bedridden Countess Seraphine rents out rooms to young women visiting Paris to study, work, and, unofficially, to find love. Cautious and guarded, Lita keeps a cool distance from the other girls, who have come to the City of Light from all over the world, and who intimidate and fascinate her. Then one day Lita meets Cato, and the contours of her world shift. Set in a Paris of late-night bars, parties on the river, and vintage shops, Engel's debut novel marks the arrival of an original new voice.
Vida

Patricia Engel
2010

Fresh, accomplished, and fearless, Vida is the distinct and daring debut by award-winning writer Patricia Engel. Vida follows the unforgettable Sabina as she navigates her shifting identity as a daughter of the Colombian diaspora and struggles to find her place within and beyond the net of her strong, protective, but embattled family.
Infinite Country

Patricia Engle
3-2-2021

Talia is being held at a correctional facility for adolescent girls in the forested mountains of Columbia after committing an impulsive act of violence that may or may not have been warranted. She urgently needs to get out and get back home to Bogotá, where her father and a plane ticket to the Untied States are waiting for her. If she misses her flight, she might also miss her chance to finally be reunited with her family in the north. How this family came to occupy two different countries, two different worlds, comes into focus like twists of a kaleidoscope. We see Talia's parents, Mauro and Elena, fall in love in a market stall as teenagers against a backdrop of civil war and social unrest. We see them leave Bogotá with their firstborn, Karina, in pursuit of safety and opportunity in the United States on a temporary visa, and we see the births of two more children, Nando and Talia, on North American soil. We witness the decisions and indecisions that lead to Mauro's deportation and the family's splintering - the costs they've all been living with ever since. Award-winning, internationally acclaimed author Patricia Engle, herself a dual citizen and the daughter of Colombian immigrants, gives voice to all five family members as they navigate the particulars of their respective circumstances. And all the while, the metronome ticks: Will Talia make it to Bogotá in time? And if she does, can she bring herself to trade the solid facts of her father and life in Colombia for the distant vision of her mother and siblings in North America? Rich with Bogotá urban life, steeped in Andean myth, and tense with the daily reality of the undocumented in the United States, Infinite Country is the story of two countries and one mixed-status family - for whom every dream pursued bears the weight of a dream deferred.
The Sentence

Louise Erdrich
11-9-2021

A small independent bookstore in Minneapolis is haunted from November 2019 to November 2020 by the store's most annoying customer. Flora dies on All Souls' Day, but she simply won't leave the store. Tookie, who has landed a job selling books after years of incarceration that she survived by reading with murderous attention, must solve the mystery of this haunting while at the same time trying to understand all that occurs in Minneapolis during a year of grief, astonishment, isolation, and furious reckoning.
The Night Watchman

Louise Erdrich
3-3-2020

Based on the extraordinary life of National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich’s grandfather who worked as a night watchman and carried the fight against Native dispossession from rural North Dakota all the way to Washington, D.C., this powerful novel explores themes of love and death with lightness and gravity and unfolds with the elegant prose, sly humor, and depth of feeling of a master craftsman.
Future Home of the Living God

Louise Erdrich
2017

A chilling dystopian novel both provocative and prescient, Future Home of the Living God is a startlingly original work from one of our most acclaimed writers: a moving meditation on female agency, self-determination, biology, and natural rights that speaks to the troubling changes of our time.
LaRose: A Novel

Louise Erdrich
2016

North Dakota, late summer, 1999. Landreaux Iron stalks a deer along the edge of the property bordering his own. He shoots with easy confidence—but when the buck springs away, Landreaux realizes he’s hit something else, a blur he saw as he squeezed the trigger. When he staggers closer, he realizes he has killed his neighbor’s five-year-old son, Dusty Ravich.

The youngest child of his friend and neighbor, Peter Ravich, Dusty was best friends with Landreaux’s five-year-old son, LaRose. The two families have always been close, sharing food, clothing, and rides into town; their children played together despite going to different schools; and Landreaux’s wife, Emmaline, is half sister to Dusty’s mother, Nola. Horrified at what he’s done, the recovered alcoholic turns to an Ojibwe tribe tradition—the sweat lodge—for guidance, and finds a way forward. Following an ancient means of retribution, he and Emmaline will give LaRose to the grieving Peter and Nola. “Our son will be your son now,” they tell them.

LaRose is quickly absorbed into his new family. Plagued by thoughts of suicide, Nola dotes on him, keeping her darkness at bay. His fierce, rebellious new “sister,” Maggie, welcomes him as a coconspirator who can ease her volatile mother’s terrifying moods. Gradually he’s allowed shared visits with his birth family, whose sorrow mirrors the Raviches’ own. As the years pass, LaRose becomes the linchpin linking the Irons and the Raviches, and eventually their mutual pain begins to heal.

But when a vengeful man with a long-standing grudge against Landreaux begins raising trouble, hurling accusations of a cover-up the day Dusty died, he threatens the tenuous peace that has kept these two fragile families whole.
Makoons

Louise Erdrich
2016

Named for the Ojibwe word for little bear, Makoons and his twin, Chickadee, have traveled with their family to the Great Plains of 1860s Dakota Territory. There they must learn to become buffalo hunters and once again help their people make a home in a new land. But Makoons has had a vision that foretells great challenges -- challenges that his family may not be able to overcome.
Chickadee

Louise Erdrich
2012

In 1866, Omakayas's son Chickadee is kidnapped by two ne'er-do-well brothers from his own tribe and must make a daring escape, forge unlikely friendships, and set out on an exciting and dangerous journey to get back home.
The Round House: A Novel

Louise Erdrich
2012

When his mother, a tribal enrollment specialist living on a reservation in North Dakota, slips into an abyss of depression after being brutally attacked, 13-year-old Joe Coutts sets out with his three friends to find the person that destroyed his family. Sunday in the spring of 1988, a woman living on a reservation in North Dakota is attacked. The details of the crime are slow to surface as Geraldine Coutts is traumatized and reluctant to relive or reveal what happened, either to the police or to her husband, Bazil, and son, Joe. Increasingly alone, Joe finds himself thrust prematurely into an adult world for which he is ill prepared. While his father, who is a tribal judge, endeavors to wrest justice from a situation that defies his efforts, Joe becomes frustrated with the official investigation and sets out with his trusted friends, Cappy, Zack, and Angus, to get some answers of his own. Their quest takes them first to the Round House, a sacred space and place of worship for the Ojibwe. And this is only the beginning.
Shadow Tag: A Novel

Louise Erdrich
2010

This novel presents the story of Irene America, who is a smart, beautiful, introspective woman of Native American descent. Too distracted to finish her doctoral degree, she musters the emotional resources needed to keep two journals. The "Red Diary" is bait, filled with adulterous scenes that Irene uses to push volatile artist husband Gil close enough to the brink that he'll leave her. She unleashes all her rage and frustration in the "Blue Notebook," which she keeps in a bank deposit box. Meanwhile, Gil believes that his obsessive graphic paintings of Irene will somehow lure her back to him. Caught in the crosshairs of their parents' cruel, messy unraveling are 13-year-old Florian, a genius who models his mother's excessive drinking habits; Riel, 11, who believes that only she can hold her disintegrating family together; and sunny little Stoney. The result is a cautionary tale of the shocking havoc that willfully destructive, self-centered spouses wreak not only upon themselves but also upon their children.
The Red Convertible: Selected and New Stories, 1978-2008

Louise Erdrich
2009

A collection of three dozen short works includes six previously unpublished pieces and offers insight into the author's use of plot twists and contrasting psychological landscapes.
The Plague of Doves: A Novel

Louise Erdrich
2008

The unsolved murder of a farm family haunts the small, white, off-reservation town of Pluto, North Dakota. The vengeance exacted for this crime and the subsequent distortions of truth transform the lives of Ojibwe living on the nearby reservation and shape the passions of both communities for the next generation.
The Porcupine Year

Louise Erdrich
2008

In 1852, forced by the United States government to leave their beloved Island of the Golden Breasted Woodpecker, fourteen-year-old Omakayas and her Ojibwe family travel in search of a new home.
The Game of Silence

Louise Erdrich
2005

Nine-year-old Omakayas, of the Ojibwa tribe, moves west with her family in 1849.
The Painted Drum: A Novel

Louise Erdrich
2005

While appraising the estate of a New Hampshire family descended from a North Dakota Indian agent, Faye Travers is startled to discover a rare moose skin and cedar drum fashioned long ago by an Ojibwe artisan. And so begins an illuminating journey both backward and forward in time, following the strange passage of a powerful yet delicate instrument, and revealing the extraordinary lives it has touched and defined.