In fall 1995, Michael Chabon was sitting pretty. He had three books to his credit, each more warmly received than the last. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, published when he was just 24, was one of the most celebrated first novels in recent memory.

Few accolades are so widely recognized and respected that receiving one is almost a guarantee that it will appear in the first paragraph of your biography and usually within the first sentence. But such is the case with The Pulitzer Prize, an annual award recognizing American achievements in journalism as well as literature and musical composition.

A new biography on General George Armstrong Custer, Custer’s Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America by T.J. Stiles, focuses on the life and events in Custer’s world, saving the famous battle, the Battle of Little Bighorn – or Greasy Grass, to the epilogue.

At the 2014 Festival of Books, Brookings County writer Jerry Nelson attended Pitchapalooza, an idea generating session led by The Book Doctors, Arielle Eckstut and David Henry Sterry.

What are we to make of a book such as Some Luck, that begins with a farmer watching owls emerge from a dead elm tree and ends with a death we are given scant time to mourn?

Writing and teaching have been the lifework of Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve. Her stories come from childhood experiences on the Rosebud Reservation.

Robert Olen Butler’s military service in Vietnam informs much of his most recognized writing