THE LA TIMES BELL REPORTING TEAM & TO LAT PHOTOGRAPHER BARBARA DAVIDSON FOR THEIR WELL-DESERVED PULITZERS
I believed and hoped that the Bell series would win. But one never knows. The committee can be quirky.
Barbara Davidson’s win for her strong and heartbreaking photos was a welcome surprise.
It was also nice to see that Jennifer Egan’s “A Visit From the Goon Squad” won for fiction, although it wasn’t a huge surprise since she already won the National Book Award, and one could feel the wind has been blowing her way, what with the Franzenfreude still running so hot and heavy that he didn’t even get shortlisted. But hers is a wonderful book. A satisfying winner.
However, speaking personally, I think the choice of Joseph Rago from the Wall Street Journal for editorial writing was a bit weird. But okay.
Here’s the full list.
AND A CONGRATULATORY BOUQUET TO THE LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS, WHICH HAS JUST LAUNCHED A TEASER VERSION
The LA Review of Books is the first major book review to launch in the 21st century, and it’s an exciting prospect that you can read more about here. (I’m delighted to say that I’ve got something in the works for LARB myself.)
Ben Ehrenreich has written about The Death of the Book, for this soft launch moment.
Expect lots more great things soon!
PLUS A CHEER TO RODGER JACOBS FOR SNAGGING THE RUNNER-UP POSITION IN PEN’S SHORT FICTION CONTEST
You’ll remember writer Rodger for his essays about struggling with homelessness.
His short story opens thusly:
“It’s the damnedest case of Bluebeard Syndrome I’ve ever seen.”
Detective Spellacy lit a cigarette and stared at the police psychologist for a beat through an acrid haze of blue smoke. “Doesn’t Bluebeard Syndrome have to do with matricide?”
Thank you, Celeste. As a longtime fan of PEN’s efforts on behalf of writers worldwide, it was an honor to have my work selected and highlighted. We are heading back to L.A. this week (tomorrow, in fact); it’s a temporary housing situation but so is the arrangement we’re in now and better a temp situation in L.A. than here in Las Vegas.
The Wall Street Journal has, arguably, the most strident, compulsively partisan and serially dishonest editorial page of any major newspaper. The choice of Rago was paying respect to a guy who is as lazy and biased as they come.
http://www.thenation.com/blog/160024/rago-against-machine-wsj-pulitzer-winner-simply-blasted-obamacare
Okay, I was being polite. I think the judges made a shameful choice in Rago. If they were looking for thoughtful conservative “against-the-grain” commentary, they didn’t find it. Rago’s bright enough, but his work is wearyingly littered with grinding divisiveness. All liberals are idiots in Ragoworld. This choice is a bit like giving the prize during the Bush years to some pundit who repeatedly referred to the then POTUS as “Chimp” and those from the red side of the aisle as “Repugnicans.”
I was glad to see David Leonhardt, arguably the most intellectually honest commenter on the economy, win.
Rago, by the way, appears to be an instance of what the right are always complaining about with regard to affirmative action: someone desperately unqualified merely selected to fill a perceived need for a quota.
Leonhardt is very good. (Also, Martin Wolf at Financial Times is a good economics commentator at a staid, mainstream journal.)
If the Pulitzer board wanted to give credence to an “against the grain” conservative, they might have chosen Bruce Bartlett. Frankly, David Frum is more of a risk-taker with his commentary than the lazy little sychophant Rago.