Saturday, April 21, 2012

Prizeless

Apparently book publishers -- well, some of them, anyway, -- are having a bit of a snit because the Pulitzer prize people couldn't narrow down the choices until one had a majority of votes from the jury. This means that for the first time in 35 years, there's no Pulitzer Prize for fiction .

The Pulitzer people say this was just a problem with too many people liking different finalists and not a commentary on whether or not this year's fiction was any good or not. Having thumbed through some recent literary fiction, I'm not so sure.

The problem for the publishers is that these books generally sell bupkis and need a Pulitzer burnish to move them off the shelves. So they're ticked that nobody will get one. Other publishers apparently are less concerned: Hard Case Crime, for example, made no comment.

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