Take it away, Maureen Corrigan:
"Like everyone else, we three jurors found out Monday that there would be no 2012 prize in fiction. That terrible news capped what was otherwise the greatest honor of my career as a book critic and professor of literature."
After reading 300-plus novels and short-story collections, Corrigan, Susan Larson and Michael Cunningham made their pick in November, Corrigan
told the Washington Post.
"We were not told to stick to the middlebrow, nor did we egg each other on to aim for the edgy. Our directive was to nominate 'distinguished' works of fiction, published in book form in 2011 that, ideally, spoke to American themes."
She suggests THE PALE KING was taken out because it's unfinished (true), TRAIN DREAMS because it was short (true) and already published in the
Paris Review (also true), and SWAMPLANDIA! because its author is young (true but specious).
"We’ll never know why the Pulitzer board declined to award the prize this year, because, as is the board members’ right, they’ve drawn their Wizard of Oz curtain closed tight. We jurors have heard only the same explanation that everyone else has heard: The board could not reach a majority vote on any of the novels. I’d like to think that THE PALE KING, TRAIN DREAMS and SWAMPLANDIA! each garnered such fierce partisans on the board that no compromise could be reached. Right. Whenever I succumb to that fantasy, the words written by the winner of the 1953 Pulitzer Prize in fiction ring in my head: 'Isn’t it pretty to think so?'"
That's a SUN ALSO RISES reference, of course. Don't mess with English professors, they will quote you. Corrigan's suggestions to fix this problem are to allow the jury final say (unlikely), allow the board to ask the jury for alternate selections (kind of icky and political) or change the voting rules so the winner doesn't need a majority (might be the best). Was Corrigan wrong to turn out the lining of all this? What do you think they should do?
1 comment:
Well first of all, having two bodies called a "board" and a "jury" is very confusing.
But besides that, I think in an ideal world it would make sense for the board to ask the jury for alternate selections--they *must* have had other ideas besides the three they selected to advance. However, once the board has already held their selection process, it seems like a lot to expect them to read three more books and start again, since I assume the timeline on announcing all the awards is fairly inflexible.
I haven't read TRAIN DREAMS and don't know anything about it, but if it was rejected on grounds of previous publication, that seems like a policy matter that should have been hammered out before any of the board or jury members started reading. If it was just too short, it's a shame the Pulitzers aren't more like the Hugos, with categories for "novella" and "novelette" as well as novels and short stories.
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