A blog by Dan Brooks
Image from “Secret of the Space Monster,” DC Comics 1958
When Leng the Torturer captured me, I pretty much knew what would happen. Okay, I thought as his oily henchmen trooped down the corridor, stopped, and trooped back to my hiding place. Now for torture. That’s what Leng does. Whole squadrons of space marines have vaporized themselves rather than be taken as his prisoners, and I would have done the same if I’d had a vaporizer or been wearing a belt and sitting in a chair. But they got me.
Whom do I have to kill to get a major award for literature around here?
Good news, you guys: the Pulitzer Prize committee has announced the winners of this year’s prizes in investigative reporting, public service, editorial cartooning, drama, biography, poetry, music and fiction. That last category is the one that counts, unless you’re some weirdo reporter, and it’s also the one in which the committee elected to give no award. They still announced finalists, though: Denis Johnson, David Foster Wallace and Karen Russell. Even more than all other authors of fiction, those authors specifically did not win a Pulitzer this year.