So there is no Pulitzer Prize winner in fiction this year. Book politics.
No seriously, the book world is having a rough year, or several. Recently, the DOJ files a suit against publishers who were trying to stall an Amazon e-book monopoly.
This doesn't necessarily mean that there was no good fiction produced during 2011, this isn't true actually. The Pulitzer Prize is the best literary award for American fiction; it holds an amount of prestige internationally as well. Readers take the Pulitzer seriously so I cannot stress it's importance enough. That being said, it is a literary award, and thus fairly political.
Laura Miller discussed her experience on the jury two years ago.
I can tell you that choosing the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction is a two-tier process, a fact that even people well-versed in the literary world tend to forget.
The first tier is the jury’s selection. Three jurors (usually an academic, a critic and a fiction writer) are responsible for wading through huge boxfuls of books. Anyone can submit his or her book to the Pulitzer competition for a small fee, and believe me: anyone does. We got hundreds and hundreds of them, including many self-published novels with titles like “The Bikinis of Alpha Centauri,” most of which read as if they’d been run through Google Translate into Farsi and then run back again into English before being committed to print.
From the many submissions, the jury picks three titles to recommend to the Pulitzer Board, and the board picks the actual winner, as well as selecting the winners of all the other Pulitzer Prizes. The board does have the option to select a title not on the jury’s list, but it rarely does so nowadays.
Miller mentions that the Pulitzer Board often consists of journalists, professors and others who rarely have time to read fiction.
This year the three novels selected were: Swamplandia by Karen Russell, Train Dreams by Denis Johnson, and The Pale King by David Foster Wallace. The group couldn't reach a majority on any of these title. They also probably didn't read enough fiction to make a different choice.
The more concerning part of Miller's argument is that if these people represent US public opinion of literature, then we're in trouble. The reality is that the Pulitzer is picked by people who don't spend their lives emerged in fiction so they have limited time. I'm hoping the US public spends more time on literature.
