Photo: David Foster Wallace
Out of the three nominees for this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction — David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, Karen Russell’s Swamplandia, and Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams — not a single one was good enough to win this year’s prize. Nice job, Pulitzer board. The twenty-member body was apparently unable to reach a majority vote approving the selection from the fiction jury. The last time this happened was in 1977, when A River Runs Through It got the shaft, and before that in 1974, when Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow was similarly denied. We’re sure that 2008’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction–winner Junot DÃaz (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao), who was on this year’s board, is pissssssed.