Tinkers Wins Pulitzer

The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction this year goes to Paul Harding for Tinkers. According to The New York Times its :

... a powerful celebration of life in which a New England father and son, through suffering and joy, transcend their imprisoning lives and offer new ways of perceiving the world and mortality.

And the runners up were Love in Infant Monkeys by Lydia Millet :

...an imaginative collection of linked stories, often describing a memorable encounter between a famous person and an animal, underscoring the human folly of longing for significance while chasing trifles ...

and In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin:

... a collection of beautifully crafted stories that exposes the Western reader to the hopes, dreams and dramas of an array of characters in feudal Pakistan, resulting in both an aesthetic and cultural achievement.

You can read about the recipients of the award in the different categories on the Pulitzer website. (And its great to see Hank Williams getting a special citation, isn't it?)

Postscript :

Tinkers has been acclaimed one of the strongest debut American novels, and it is heartwarming to learn that it was published by a small press. The Bellevue Press site has an impressive collection of  quotes about the book from a range of newspapers. There's also a very good interview with the author (dating from last year) on the Bookslut blog and you can read an extract from the novelhere.
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In the comments Chet mentions a very interesting post by Ginny Wiehardt about the lessons we can learn from this winner. I was particularly intrigued by his writing process. He says he wrote episodes and then "collaged" them together:

I don't write the book in any order, I just literally wake up and write about whatever immediately strikes me as interesting. Usually I'm wondering, I have a question about something. 'What does she think at that point?' Or, 'What does he do?' . . . And I just start writing. Eventually, I have to have faith in the process, it happened with Tinkers so I'm hoping it will happen again, eventually everything ends up overlapping.

This is definitely a novel I must read.

I must say though the pallid cover does the book no favours on the internet - it looks completely washed out, doesn't it? Lucky though the book buyer who holds a first edition hardback copy of the book - prices are climbing.

A Novel in Stories Wins Pulitzer

The Pulitzer Prizes have also been announced, and the winner in the fiction category is Olive Kitteridge, by Elizabeth Strout :

... a collection of 13 short stories set in small-town Maine that packs a cumulative emotional wallop, bound together by polished prose and by Olive, the title character, blunt, flawed and fascinating.

The New York Times review is here. And you can find an extract here.

The other finalists were :

The Plague of Doves - Louise Erdrich
All Souls -Christine Schutt

The Wonderous Life of Junot Diaz

For any young person who's attempting to make art against all the odds, I hope this can be inspiration and motivation.

Junot Diaz, who describes himself as :

This Dominican kid from New Jersey ...

has won the 2008 Pulitzer fiction prize for literature with The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao which tells the story of a family of Dominican immigrants, both in the present in New Jersey and in the past in the Dominican Republic. (And which is already happily sitting on my bookshelf!)

The novel is described in the Guardian as :

... an unconventional tale ... funny, unapologetic and intensely readable ...

and took him 11 years to complete - four for the idea to germinate and seven more to actually get written :

In some ways I think that this book waited for me to become a better person before it wrote itself ...

he is quoted as saying in a report on the Pulitzers in the New York Times. He credits his fiancee and his agent for coaxing and cajoling him to get the book finished.

(You can find an extract here, and there's an interview with Diaz on Powell's website)

The runners-up for the fiction prize were Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson (which, you may remember, won the National Book Award last year) and Shakespeare’s Kitchen by Lore Segal a collection of 13 interrelated stories about the universal longing for friendship.

And a much deserved special citation this year goes to Bob Dylan, as much poet as musician.

More about the awards on the Pulitzer website.

Nuke Them Darn Apostrophe's!

Ahah! I said to myself. A typo. A carelessly missed apostrophe.

Why it should be there on the second page of the novel, I couldn't imagine: this was certain not the first edition of this book, it was published by Random House, honoured with the Pulitzer, endorsed by our beloved Oprah.

I looked again.

He thought the month was October but he wasnt sure.

Frustrations of frustrations - I didn't have a free hand to fumble in my big bag for an editor's pen (automatic reaction), trying to read while strap- hanging on the LRT.

And then the next sentence:

He hadnt kept a calendar for years.

Ouch and double ouch!

Because now I could see that the novel was part of a sinister plot to rid the world of its apostrophes. I flicked through the pages with my nose to confront my darkest fears. With great relief I saw that this strange disease had not yet spread to other contractions:

I'm ... they'd ... there'd ... what's ...

maybe there was hope for the world after all!

As soon as I got home after teaching my class I googled:

"cormac mccarthy"+apostrophes

and found that numerous others had the same problem with his writing. Kimbofo of Reading Matters went so far as to write the author an open letter:

Dear Mr McCarthy,

I am currently about a third of the way through your latest book, The Road. I am very much enjoying it. The post-apocalyptic setting reminds me of Mad Max meets Stephen King's The Stand. However, there is one thing that is really bugging me, and it is this:

WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO THE APOSTROPHES IN THE CONTRACTED WORDS?

For example, why have you written don't as DONT, won't as WONT, couldn't as COULDNT?

Is this some kind of clever literary thing I don't understand, or a lazy editor's error? I find it so annoying I have to do everything within my power not to scribble proofing marks in red pen all over the book's crisp white pages.

Yours sincerely,
Kimbofo.

P.S. I wonder what the Apostrophe Protection Society would have to say about the matter.

Another blogger, Jodi of iwilldare.com writes:

The random apostrophes are bothering me and take me right out of the story. See, he apostrophizes I’m, I’ll, I’d, and It’s, but not cant, wouldnt, aint, isnt, and dont. It drives me bonkers. I think I am paying more attention to the contractions then to the story. While reading, I’m constantly making a mental tally of the apostrophes and trying to figure out the mystery. Why do some words get them? What could possibly be the symbolism? Does anyone have any idea why he did this?

Jordan Lapp reckons with some justification that McCarthy is resorting to what he calls Stupid Pet Tricks to get attention, and takes issue with his use (or lack thereof) of other punctuation marks.

But it's Sam Leith on the Telegraph blog who really gets it right about The Road:

Why, for example, is his vision of the apocalypse one in which the imaginary holocaust seems to have destroyed apostrophes? This is hard core stuff. ... These people don't just need gasoline and tinned food: they need punctuation.

Now I can live with the short choppy sentences, the incomplete sentences that present themselves as sentences, and the dropping of colons and semi-colons. The paucity of commas holds no fears for me. (Peter Carey didn't use a single one in True History of the Kelly Gang, recreating the voice of an unschooled man, based on the style of Ned Kelly's own writing.) And I'm perfectly happy to see inverted commas dropped from dialogue anyway.

But please, Mr. McCarthy, hands off the apostrophes.

Maybe Oprah can set you right when she interviews your reclusive self on her show tomorrow (only the third one ever). But then again, I think she (or whoever writes her publicity blurbs) might be apostrophically challenged too:

Oprah's Book Club has approximately one million online members. Each of it’s selections have skyrocketed to the top of bestsellers lists.

Punctuation aside, McCarthy's novel is very well worth reading, if harrowing. I'm reviewing it so will post more about it later.

Pulitzer for McCarthy

The Pulitzer Prizes were announced a few hours ago and the fiction prize this year goes to Cormac McCarthy for his highly acclaimed novel The Road. Here's the blurb from the book jacket to whet your appetite ...

A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don’t know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food—and each other.

The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, “each the other’s world entire,” are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.

You can also find an extract here.

Don't know about you, but it sounds like a must-read for me!

Ray Bradbury was given a special citation for his:

... distinguished, prolific and deeply influential career as an unmatched author of science fiction and fantasy.

This makes me very happy as Bradbury's short stories, discovered when I was fifteen or so, have given me enormous pleasure.

Anyway, what was it that we were saying about silly snobbishness and genre fiction the other day?

You can find the full list of prize winners and infomation about them here.