Pulitzer slight

[Bekah]

On Apr 16, 2012, at 4:19 PM, kelber at mindspring.com wrote:

> Once again, no Pulitzer Prize for fiction:
> 
> http://shelf-life.ew.com/2012/04/16/pulitzer-prize-no-fiction-award/


Apparently the 3 judges (Susan Larson, Maureen Corrigan and Michael Cunningham) couldn't come to an agreement - 2 out of the 3 have to agree.  

The finalists,  according to  http://www.pulitzer.org/citation/2012-Fiction   were :

"Train Dreams," by Denis Johnson  (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), a novella about a day laborer in the old American West, bearing witness to terrors and glories with compassionate, heartbreaking calm; 

"Swamplandia!" by Karen Russell (Alfred A. Knopf), an adventure tale about an eccentric family adrift in its failing alligator-wrestling theme park, told by a 13-year-old heroine wise beyond her years; 

and

"The Pale King," by the late David Foster Wallace(Little, Brown and Company), a posthumously completed novel, animated by grand ambition, that explores boredom and bureaucracy in the American workplace. 


Personally,   I didn't think Swamplandia was worthy of a Pulitzer -  I doubt I could have brought myself to award anything to a book not completed by its author and I don't know anything about Train Dreams.    Maybe it was just not a great year for novels.   

Bek