When the Pulitzer Prize board decided not to award a prize in fiction last April, you were confused. Was this a bum year for the American imagination? An artistic recession for representing imaginary people with words? Had our writers, like our politicians and parents, let us down? But if you’d been reading with any diligence in 2011, you knew there was no lack of deserving books. So your confusion quickly morphed into anger, maybe rage. What’s wrong with these 
judges? How could they do this to us? Don’t they know we have families? Inner lives? Should we take to the streets? Send strongly-worded letters studded with exclamation points?!!
Usually, CR seeks to incite civil and literary unrest, but in our upcoming issue, we wish to quell it. In issue 9.2 (forthcoming in November) we’ve asked four intelligent reviewers to make a case for the most Pulitzer Prize-deserving book of 2011.
Alissa Nutting chose Kevin Wilson’s The Family Fang. She writes, “The Family Fang explores exactly what it takes . . . for anyone to be well: how to reasonably formulate the molecular structure of happiness when life is an imperfect and volatile laboratory.”
Jensen Beach selects Alan Heathcock’s short story collection, Volt, about which he says, “Here’s a book that collects a town’s past and its present together into a single frame and presents us with the shared identity of these people so that it might say something about us and to us.”
Suzanne Warren selects Edith Pearlman’s short story collection, Binocular Vision. She says, “Read in succession, these thirty-four stories gain depth and intensity, as if each were a coat of red lacquer applied atop the last.”
Peter Grimes selects Justin Torres’s novel-in-stories, We the Animals. He says, “Any great work of literature . . . replies to works of the past, recontexualizing age-old themes as human culture diversifies and changes. We the Animals does both in the zoos and wildernesses of twenty-first century America.”
Hopefully, these insightful and sound judgments will calm your anger, or at least make you grab our upcoming issue and these great prize-deserving books.
