Photo by Ricardo Barros

Woe betide our republic of letters! The shadowy culture arbiters who serve on the Pulitzer Prize board have withheld their favor from the field of American novels published in 2011. Booksellers, writers and critics have been up in arms ever since news of the non-award broke in mid-April. In a cri de coeur published in the New York Times’s op-ed pages, novelist Ann Patchett—who also runs an independent bookstore in Nashville—decried the committee’s abstention as a cause for “indignation” and, indeed, “rage.”

“I can’t imagine there was ever a year when we were so in need of the excitement the [fiction Pulitzer] creates in readers,” Ms. Patchett wrote.

It’s easy to miss, amid Ms. Patchett’s vehemence, the patent condescension that prize-dependent marketing visits upon American readers. In her distinctly arid account of readerly engagement, news of a prestigious laurel is what’s needed to generate “the buzz,” as she puts it, “that is so often lacking.” But the question is far better turned on its head: If an entire industry must rely on aloof prize boards to gin up sustained interest, then the trouble would seem to be the industry itself, rather than the prize boards or the consumers.

This was, after all, the identical argument that publishing executives trotted out in favor of Oprah Winfrey’s relentlessly middle-brow book club when Dame Oprah threatened its retirement, and when Jonathan Franzen sullied it with his sniveling high-brow criticisms: If we sacrifice Oprah’s market-making might, then surely the sky will fall! the collective wail then went; without patient tutelage from the sovereign of daytime talk, it was thought, Americans would revert to simply using books to squash bugs or prop open their outhouse windows. In reality, of course, publishers survived the withdrawn patronage of the Big O just fine—and far from being starved for reliable advice, readers can glean literary recommendations, opinions and argument from a wider range of sources than ever, thanks largely to the explosion of online literary sites.

Funnily enough, the brunt of Ms. Patchett’s indictment was being disproved even as it was published: Thanks to the coverage surrounding the non-awarding of the 2012 Pulitzer, sales of all three finalists werespiking; one of those titles, Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams, had even sold out in hardcover on Amazon. (My own informal canvass of half-a-dozen Manhattan bookstores last week likewise failed to turn up a single copy of Train Dreams.) These initial returns suggested two healthy correctives to the general publishers’ alarm. First, self-generated debate over literary judgments, even of the sort kicked up by this gnat-straining controversy, is at least as capable of sparking book sales as a ceremonial annual honor. And second, it’s generally far healthier for three books to occupy the center of said debate than a single fawned-over honoree—in pretty much the same way that it’s a far greater civic boon to have three political parties than one.

But there are other, more fundamental reasons to look askance at the business of award-driven fiction. The kind of literary consensus championed by Ms. Patchett tends to work as a de facto restraint on trade in the marketplace of ideas. That is to say, to the extent that readers look to prizes to arbitrate their own tastes, the already cloistered enterprise of literary fiction narrows further, to a charmed circle of writers publishing works by, for and about the types of people who pursue and win literary prizes. Take two highly praised novels of the past year that didn’t place as Pulitzer finalists but have earned lavish attention as prize-worthy works: Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding and Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot. Both are studies in star-crossed individuation among a cloistered intellectual class; and as befits the earlier fictional traditions each novel cribs widely from, they hew closely to gender stereotype, with The Marriage Plot’s Madeleine Hanna embarking on a lifelong quest for a satisfying love relationship, and Mr. Harbach’s protagonist, Henry Skrimshander, finding metaphysical repose in old-fashioned male camaraderie and the pursuit of excellence on the baseball diamond. In a very different register, David Foster Wallace’s posthumously published and Pulitzer-nominated novel, The Pale King, projects the self-aware, multilayered quest for authentic experience onto the lumbering federal bureaucracy of the IRS, fragmenting the author’s own identity across the book’s unfinished pages.

There’s nothing wrong, of course, with literate, knowing fiction revolving around the inner lives of articulate young achievers—and Messrs. Eugenides, Wallace and Harbach all render the central struggles of their protagonists with narrative assurance. Still, nearly all the action in these signature 2011 fictions takes place through a distracting scrim of writerly meditation on writing, which tends to leave readers feeling a bit obtrusive. Wallace’s corps of IRS auditors, toiling earnestly away behind their desks and pencils in the 1980s, are clearly stand-ins for the authors of fiction, casting about for some deeper sense of meaning amid an American entertainment public, that, much like the taxpaying clientele in The Pale King, has little use for their efforts. Mr. Harbach’s ballplayers likewise are perfecting a militantly counterutilitarian pride of craft—and are surrounded by a raft of allusions to the work of Herman Melville, for good measure. Meanwhile, The Marriage Plot is so steeped in obsessive MFA-style self-examination that it derives its title from Madeleine’s senior English thesis on the Victorian novel.

This isn’t the first time, by the way, that the Pulitzer committee has taken a flyer on the fiction award—the Prize has gone unclaimed on 10 prior occasions, the last time in 1977. And indeed, the first-ever Pulitzer Prize for fiction was widely perceived as a make-up laurel. In 1918, the committee gave the prize to the radical proletarian novelist Ernest Poole for a book called His Family. It was commonly understood, though, that the Pulitzer board was actually honoring Poole’s far better 1915 novel, The Harbor, which chronicled a journalist’s conversion to the working-class cause amid a general strike that paralyzed New York Harbor. As he ponders the fateful step toward radical commitment, Billy, the novel’s narrator, proposes forsaking his successful career lionizing the age’s industrial titans in favor of something in a more social realist vein. Seeking to sum up his mounting distress to his wife—the daughter of one of Billy’s model captains of industry—he conjures the appeal of his next big journalistic subject: “Poverty, that’s what it is, and I’ve always steered way clear of it as though I were afraid to look. I’ve taken your father’s point of view and left the slums for him and his friends to tackle when they get the time. I was only too glad to be left out. But … I’m beginning to wonder now why I shouldn’t get up the nerve to see for myself, to have a good big look at it all.”

His wife, Eleanore, takes emphatic exception to the plan. “Her voice was so sharp it startled me,” Billy recounts: “‘You’re different,’ she answered. ‘You leave poverty alone and force yourself to go on with your work. You’ve made a very wonderful start. You’ll be ready to take up fiction soon.’”

]]>

Photo by Ricardo Barros

Woe betide our republic of letters! The shadowy culture arbiters who serve on the Pulitzer Prize board have withheld their favor from the field of American novels published in 2011. Booksellers, writers and critics have been up in arms ever since news of the non-award broke in mid-April. In a cri de coeur published in the New York Times’s op-ed pages, novelist Ann Patchett—who also runs an independent bookstore in Nashville—decried the committee’s abstention as a cause for “indignation” and, indeed, “rage.”

“I can’t imagine there was ever a year when we were so in need of the excitement the [fiction Pulitzer] creates in readers,” Ms. Patchett wrote.

It’s easy to miss, amid Ms. Patchett’s vehemence, the patent condescension that prize-dependent marketing visits upon American readers. In her distinctly arid account of readerly engagement, news of a prestigious laurel is what’s needed to generate “the buzz,” as she puts it, “that is so often lacking.” But the question is far better turned on its head: If an entire industry must rely on aloof prize boards to gin up sustained interest, then the trouble would seem to be the industry itself, rather than the prize boards or the consumers.

This was, after all, the identical argument that publishing executives trotted out in favor of Oprah Winfrey’s relentlessly middle-brow book club when Dame Oprah threatened its retirement, and when Jonathan Franzen sullied it with his sniveling high-brow criticisms: If we sacrifice Oprah’s market-making might, then surely the sky will fall! the collective wail then went; without patient tutelage from the sovereign of daytime talk, it was thought, Americans would revert to simply using books to squash bugs or prop open their outhouse windows. In reality, of course, publishers survived the withdrawn patronage of the Big O just fine—and far from being starved for reliable advice, readers can glean literary recommendations, opinions and argument from a wider range of sources than ever, thanks largely to the explosion of online literary sites.

Funnily enough, the brunt of Ms. Patchett’s indictment was being disproved even as it was published: Thanks to the coverage surrounding the non-awarding of the 2012 Pulitzer, sales of all three finalists werespiking; one of those titles, Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams, had even sold out in hardcover on Amazon. (My own informal canvass of half-a-dozen Manhattan bookstores last week likewise failed to turn up a single copy of Train Dreams.) These initial returns suggested two healthy correctives to the general publishers’ alarm. First, self-generated debate over literary judgments, even of the sort kicked up by this gnat-straining controversy, is at least as capable of sparking book sales as a ceremonial annual honor. And second, it’s generally far healthier for three books to occupy the center of said debate than a single fawned-over honoree—in pretty much the same way that it’s a far greater civic boon to have three political parties than one.

But there are other, more fundamental reasons to look askance at the business of award-driven fiction. The kind of literary consensus championed by Ms. Patchett tends to work as a de facto restraint on trade in the marketplace of ideas. That is to say, to the extent that readers look to prizes to arbitrate their own tastes, the already cloistered enterprise of literary fiction narrows further, to a charmed circle of writers publishing works by, for and about the types of people who pursue and win literary prizes. Take two highly praised novels of the past year that didn’t place as Pulitzer finalists but have earned lavish attention as prize-worthy works: Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding and Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot. Both are studies in star-crossed individuation among a cloistered intellectual class; and as befits the earlier fictional traditions each novel cribs widely from, they hew closely to gender stereotype, with The Marriage Plot’s Madeleine Hanna embarking on a lifelong quest for a satisfying love relationship, and Mr. Harbach’s protagonist, Henry Skrimshander, finding metaphysical repose in old-fashioned male camaraderie and the pursuit of excellence on the baseball diamond. In a very different register, David Foster Wallace’s posthumously published and Pulitzer-nominated novel, The Pale King, projects the self-aware, multilayered quest for authentic experience onto the lumbering federal bureaucracy of the IRS, fragmenting the author’s own identity across the book’s unfinished pages.

There’s nothing wrong, of course, with literate, knowing fiction revolving around the inner lives of articulate young achievers—and Messrs. Eugenides, Wallace and Harbach all render the central struggles of their protagonists with narrative assurance. Still, nearly all the action in these signature 2011 fictions takes place through a distracting scrim of writerly meditation on writing, which tends to leave readers feeling a bit obtrusive. Wallace’s corps of IRS auditors, toiling earnestly away behind their desks and pencils in the 1980s, are clearly stand-ins for the authors of fiction, casting about for some deeper sense of meaning amid an American entertainment public, that, much like the taxpaying clientele in The Pale King, has little use for their efforts. Mr. Harbach’s ballplayers likewise are perfecting a militantly counterutilitarian pride of craft—and are surrounded by a raft of allusions to the work of Herman Melville, for good measure. Meanwhile, The Marriage Plot is so steeped in obsessive MFA-style self-examination that it derives its title from Madeleine’s senior English thesis on the Victorian novel.

This isn’t the first time, by the way, that the Pulitzer committee has taken a flyer on the fiction award—the Prize has gone unclaimed on 10 prior occasions, the last time in 1977. And indeed, the first-ever Pulitzer Prize for fiction was widely perceived as a make-up laurel. In 1918, the committee gave the prize to the radical proletarian novelist Ernest Poole for a book called His Family. It was commonly understood, though, that the Pulitzer board was actually honoring Poole’s far better 1915 novel, The Harbor, which chronicled a journalist’s conversion to the working-class cause amid a general strike that paralyzed New York Harbor. As he ponders the fateful step toward radical commitment, Billy, the novel’s narrator, proposes forsaking his successful career lionizing the age’s industrial titans in favor of something in a more social realist vein. Seeking to sum up his mounting distress to his wife—the daughter of one of Billy’s model captains of industry—he conjures the appeal of his next big journalistic subject: “Poverty, that’s what it is, and I’ve always steered way clear of it as though I were afraid to look. I’ve taken your father’s point of view and left the slums for him and his friends to tackle when they get the time. I was only too glad to be left out. But … I’m beginning to wonder now why I shouldn’t get up the nerve to see for myself, to have a good big look at it all.”

His wife, Eleanore, takes emphatic exception to the plan. “Her voice was so sharp it startled me,” Billy recounts: “‘You’re different,’ she answered. ‘You leave poverty alone and force yourself to go on with your work. You’ve made a very wonderful start. You’ll be ready to take up fiction soon.’”

]]> http://observer.com/2012/04/read-it-and-whine-writers-dont-need-prizes-they-need-ideas/feed/ 0 jhanasobserver Eugenides(MarriagePlot) Ricardo Barros http://observer.com/2012/04/women-and-children/#comments Tue, 17 Apr 2012 20:13:57 -0400 http://observer.com/2012/04/women-and-children/ http://www.observer.com/?p=233510

Clinton.

It was Beyoncé Knowles who sang that “Girls (Run the World).” She would know, especially given Sunday’s mob scene outside Bar Pitti, where she and husband Jay-Z attracted an agitated crowd, frenzied by a rare public appearance of their new daughter, Blue Ivy.

For evidence, tune to HBO, which debuted a show Sunday night starring daughters of David Mamet, Brian Williams and Laurie Simmons, whose 24-year-old spawn, Lena Dunham, also wrote, directed and coproduced Girls alongside Hollywood’s favorite one-manchild movie factory, Judd Apatow.

Note that Beyoncé didn’t have “women” in the chorus of her song. Even though Hillary Rodham Clinton can cover the New York Post, drinking beer and earning a classic headline—‘SWILLARY!’—in the process, it would seem Old Age and Treachery are no match for the youth these days, or at the very least, the fawning attention youth commands. Like Girls, the exciting winner of this year’s Pulitzer Prize for fiction, Nobody, sent the chattering classes into overdrive, but not quite the way 24-year-old reporter Sara Ganim winning a prize for investigative reporting did. At that moment, Arianna Huffington and the first Pulitzer for her news operation of largesse was an afterthought.

How obsessed are New Yorkers with fixating on young people? Just take the thousands who tuned into a live stream of the NYU Library’s most famous residents—two red-tailed hawks, Rosie and Bobby—as they hatched two new New Yorkers into the world. Elsewhere at the city’s finest factory of Drunk and Debt-Riddled Youth, NYU president John Sexton finally hammered out a deal with Manhattan borough president Scott Stringer for the university to continue to metastasize onto Manhattan like an invasive tumor.

Incredibly, it was only five years ago that Gossip Girl first premiered, and introduced the world to a new take on what happens when the young are left to their own hormonal devices. The first song on the show was a catchy 2007 hit with the saccharine-sweet chorus: “They don’t care about the young folks.” Things change quickly, especially since perpetual Peter Pans from Jay McInerney to Jerry Lewis all clamored for cameos on the show, which is now about as cool as April in New York City used to be (before young people ruined the ozone layer, too).

Perhaps Girls presents the only viable option for fighting the youth as an adult human, as evidenced by the way it closed out its pilot episode with a too-appropriate tune by Paul Simon’s 39-year-old songwriting spawn, Harper: If you can’t beat ’em, don’t join them, but spawn your own youth to infiltrate and conquer.  

And who, pray tell, pulled the Pulitzers?

The New York Times! All of them!

Except, not:

This is what happens when a trigger-happy blogger attempts to head off the competition, armed with a form post, a 'Publish' button, and SEO blackmagick: You get Internet Egg all over your face.

Even more, almost half an hour after Politico blogger Patrick Gavin noticed the page, it's still live on The Daily Beast's site.

On that note, The Daily Beast is probably not going to take home that 'Breaking News Reporting' Pulitzer. Bookies, adjust your odds accordingly.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

The death of Mr. Shadid, an American of Lebanese descent who had a wife and two children, abruptly ended one of the most storied resumes in modern American journalism. Fluent in Arabic, with a gifted eye for detail and contextual writing, Mr. Shadid captured dimensions of life in the Middle East that many others failed to see. Those talents won him a Pulitzer Price for international reporting in 2004 for his coverage of the American invasion of Iraq and the occupation that followed, and a second Pulitzer in 2010, also for his Iraq reporting. He also was a finalist in 2007 for his coverage of Lebanon, and has been nominated by the Times for his coverage of the Arab Spring uprisings that have transfixed the Middle East for the past year.

Anthony Shadid's 2004 Pulitzer article was "A Boy Who Was 'Like a Flower,'" written for the Post. It was a powerful piece about the death a 14-year-old Baghdad boy, Arkhan Daif:

With a cotton swab dipped in water, he ran his hand across Daif's olive corpse, dead for three hours but still glowing with life. He blotted the rose-red shrapnel wounds on the soft skin of Daif's right arm and right ankle with the poise of practice. Then he scrubbed his face scabbed with blood, left by a cavity torn in the back of Daif's skull.

The men in the Imam Ali mosque stood somberly waiting to bury a boy who, in the words of his father, was "like a flower." Haider Kathim, the caretaker, asked: "What's the sin of the children? What have they done?"

Mr. Shadid was also an author. His most recent book, House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family and a Lost Middle East, will be released at the end of March.

[NYT]

Reaser and Butz as a rather close niece and uncle in How I Learned to Drive.

It’s always a pleasure to experience a well-written, expertly staged and sensitively acted play that is both provocative and off the beaten path. The current Off-Broadway revival of How I Learned to Drive, Paula Vogel’s 1998 critical blockbuster about incest, child abuse and destructive sexual empowerment, is such a play. Its excellent, limited run at Second Stage on West 43rd Street (through March 11, but don’t be surprised if packed houses and good reviews lead to an extension) is a must-see, and with the marvelous two-time Tony-winner Norbert Leo Butz taking a break from musicals to portray the tragic role of a pedophile with an oily charm that makes him understandable if not entirely forgivable, missing such an opportunity is out of the question.

I’m not sure I understand why this slight, 90-minute, one-act play won the Pulitzer Prize in a year that also produced the unforgettable musical sensation Side Show and the savage Irish drama The Beauty Queen of Leenane, but it does hold up well in retrospect. The story spans some 30 years in the life of a girl known only by her family nickname, Li’l Bit, as she looks back on her sexually charged relationship with a favorite married uncle called Uncle Peck, who lavished her with affection from ages 11 to 18. Ms. Vogel writes on cruise control as she soft pedals her way through the lives of two disturbed people in the rural farmland and back roads of suburban Maryland. Looking back to the summer she was 17 and taking driving lessons from a man old enough to be her father, Li’l Bit inspires suspicion about her own sexual response to the hand inching its way under her skirt and into her panties. Dirt, agriculture and the smell of animals and hay under a full moon, and you see why Uncle Peck was intoxicated. Thanks to Mr. Butz’s three-dimensional performance, his character’s dysfunctional side is perfectly balanced with the “normal” side of his frustrated personality. He can unhook the buttons on her blouse with one hand and beg to kiss her “celestial orbs” at the same time, instructing her to keep her own hands firmly on the steering wheel. At 17, her breasts are so big her family jokes about writing Dolly Parton for some of her hand-me-down bras. But nobody’s fascination with them excites her as much as her favorite uncle, a former Marine who was stationed in the Pacific, as he keeps reassuring her “nothing’s gonna happen ’til you want it to” and “I’m a patient man—I’ve been waiting a long time.” There’s an ease to the writing, and Mr. Butz is so moving in depicting Uncle Peck’s balking inhibition that you can’t help but feel sympathy for him. This is not the way it’s supposed to play out in the world of pedophilia, but Ms. Vogel is careful to wisely refrain from passing moral judgment. Uncle Peck is a predator who makes you care because Ms. Vogel makes you care, and the power of the writing is that you care without feeling guilty. At the least of it, the girl’s emerging sexuality and confused sense of identity, fueled by her uncle’s sadness and desperation to love, make you wonder who is doing what to whom. The driving lessons, while reciting passages from driver’s instruction manuals, become an insidious metaphor for sexual seduction.

He’s such a sweet man the neighbors “borrow” him to help out—shoveling snow, jump-starting their dead car batteries. His sweetness shows in one scene in which he tries to teach a nephew how to catch a pompano, then throws it back when the boy feels sorry for the fish. He’s troubled, but the girl is a master of manipulation, too. As played by the gifted and lovely Elizabeth Reaser (so rounded and memorable as the pregnant older sister in the film The Family Stone), Li’l Bit has vulnerability, but it is clear she is not entirely innocent. She’s more like Nabokov’s Lolita—clearly cognizant of her power and more in charge of her fate than you suspect—and Mr. Butz finds a sweaty humor in the role of a pathetic older man with uncontrollable urges, giving Uncle Peck a sympathetic dimension, doing his best to avoid moustache-twirling lecherousness. The play is not a psychological mystery about what has already gone wrong in his life—it’s a tense and artfully restrained memory piece about the consequences of emotional scar tissue.

The structure of How I Learned to Drive takes dramatic detours into past, present and future tenses as Ms. Vogel makes it clear that both Uncle Peck and the object of his carnal passion made unpredictable choices. This juxtaposition of vignettes is clearly guided by Kate Whoriskey’s firm, sparse direction. A lot of things go unresolved, making the salient dramatic point that in life, human behavior is rarely fair and never easily pigeonholed. Like good theater, if you ask me.

rreed@observer.com

- For fiction, Tinkers (Paul Harding)

- For drama, Next to Normal (music by Tom Kitt, book and lyrics by Brian Yorkey)

- For history, Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World (Liaquat Ahamed)

- For biography, The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (T.J. Stiles)

- For poetry, Versed (Rae Armantrout)

- For general nonfiction, The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy (David E. Hoffman)

- For music, Violin Concerto (Jennifer Higdon)

Surprising and noteworthy in all this: Tinkers was published by Bellevue Literary Press, which is run out of Bellvue Hospital; and the Pulitzer Prize for music exists.

Also, Hank Williams got a Special Citation!

It's a big win for Post editor Marcus Brauchli, who has gone through a year marred by semi-scandals and bad publicity--the SalonGate, Sally Quinn's embarrassing column, questions of a lost identity at the paper--and can now wave a bit of good news in front of everyone's face. Two years ago, in Len Downie's final year as editor, The Washington Post took home a record for the paper with six Pulitzers, which Mr. Brauchli followed up by delivering only one Pulitzer in his first full year as editor (and the award was for not any work produced by the paper's staff at large, but instead for Eugene Robinson's commentary).

 Anthony Shadid, who left The Post for The Times in September 2009, won for international reporting, and Gene Weingarten won his second Pulitzer in three years. Kathleen Parker won for commentary and Sarah Kaufman won for her dance reviews. But if you're a Post-critic, you do have some ammunition that the accomplishments had little to do with Mr. Brauchli because (a) Shadid left the paper, (b) Parker has been due for the award for some time, (c) Kaufman is a dance critic and (d) Weingarten* already has won the award, and was a prized part of the Downie-era as well.

MORE >> Late Country Musician Also Tops Journal in Pulitzers

The Times, which last year took home five Pulitzers after being disappointed with the Pulitzer Committee in recent years, nabbed a respectable two--or three!--depending on how you count it. Michael Moss won for explanatory reporting for food safety issues, and Matt Richtel won the National Reporting prize for all his stories on cell phone usage. Sheri Fink won for a ProPublica story that was published in The Times Magazine, which may count as a prize for The Times or not, depending on how you want to score these things.

Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal, which was once a Pulitzer-hoarder under Paul Steiger, once again goes home empty-handed. The paper has not won an award since April 2007, and this brings The Journal's Pulitzer count in the Murdoch era to a grand total of zero. On the one hand, Mr. Murdoch and Journal editor Robert Thomson would tell you that they don't care about awards. And yet that didn't stop Mr. Thomson from getting into a public shoving match with Times editor Bill Keller over a George Polk Award submission. Mr. Thomson said that Mr. Keller tried to tamper with the awards process in 2008.

To deflect the attention away, minutes before the Pulitzer news was released, The Journal sent out a press release about their accomplishments with the Payne Awards.

And for the record, Paul Steiger now has now delivered more Pulitzers to ProPublica than The Journal has won since he left the paper.

*UPDATE: We forgot to mention that Mr. Weingarten is not even on staff on the paper anymore after he took a buyout from the Post last June (though he still contributes to the paper).

MORE >> Late Country Musician Also Tops Journal in Pulitzers

How many emails did Mr. Meacham get Monday when his American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House won for biography? "Oh, probably five or six hundred," he told The Observer the next day at a reception on the 21st floor of Newsweek's New York office on 57th Street.

One message was from New Yorker editor and fellow Pulitzer Prizewinner (1994, general nonfiction for Lenin's Tomb) David Remnick, who told him, "You're about to hear from your third grade teacher, so enjoy it." (Close: Mr. Meacham heard from his seventh grade teacher.)

"I'm still a little numb," Mr. Meacham said surveying the room. "It's all very exciting."

Mr. Meacham's attention was a bit divided by the crowd of well-wishers—among them legendary Washington Post executive editor Ben Bradlee, Gay and Nan Talese, about 50 Newsweek staffers, and Mr. Meacham's 6-year-old son, Sam, who ran over more than once to offer his dad some love—but The Observer managed to ask him a question or two.

Was it strange that on the very week his magazine ran a cover story headlined “The Confessions of Eliot Spitzer” (the latest in a series of gestures The Observer's John Koblin called “The Reconstruction of Eliot Spitzer” in March), The New York Times took home journalism's top award for breaking the story that brought the former governor of New York down?

"Yeah," Mr. Meacham said with a long, almost uncomfortable pause. "I guess I think that's what we call coincidence."

At that, he laughed.

Among those who won journalism's top honors were The New York Times' David Barstow for Investigative Reporting, The Times' Staff for Breaking News Reporting, and Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post for Commentary.

Newsweek's Jon Meacham also won for his biography of Andrew Jackson

The New York Times was the big winner with five awards (which included criticism and feature photography). Bill Keller, The New York Times' executive editor, has gathered his team on the third floor of the New York Times Building to celebrate the news. Last year, Mr. Keller sounded a less-than-triumphant note about the whole notion of prizes, telling Times staffers, “Prizes are not why we do what we do, and prizes are not how we measure what we do. ... Prize juries are human. They can be arbitrary. They can be political. They can be sentimental. They can miss the point. There are countless examples of truly great reporters who will not have a Pulitzer in the lede of their obituaries—and of profoundly important work that never gets a trophy.”

We're assuming this year he sounds a little different.

The breaking-news-reporting prize went to the paper for the story that brought down the former New York governor and this week's Newsweek cover boy, Eliot Spitzer. (So, it's a good and bad week for Mr. Spitzer!) The international reporting prize was for coverage of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Damon Winter was awarded his feature photography prize for his coverage of the Obama campaign, and Holland Cotter won his criticism prize for his art writing.

News of The Times' good day was widely leaked on Niemanlab's Twitter feed, as well as Editor & Publisher's E&P Pub blog and Gawker.

Here's the list, courtesy of the official Pulitzer site:

JOURNALISM:

Public Service - Las Vegas Sun

Breaking News Reporting - The New York Times Staff

Investigative Reporting - David Barstow of The New York Times

Explanatory Reporting - Bettina Boxall and Julie Cart of the Los Angeles Times

Local Reporting -

Detroit Free Press Staff and

Ryan Gabrielson and Paul Giblin of the East Valley Tribune, Mesa, AZ

National Reporting - St. Petersburg Times Staff

International Reporting - The New York Times Staff

Feature Writing - Lane DeGregory of the St. Petersburg Times

Commentary - Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post

Criticism - Holland Cotter of The New York Times

Editorial Writing - Mark Mahoney of The Post-Star, Glens Falls, NY

Editorial Cartooning - Steve Breen of The San Diego Union-Tribune

Breaking News Photography - Patrick Farrell of The Miami Herald

Feature Photography - Damon Winter of The New York Times

LETTERS, DRAMA and MUSIC:

Fiction - Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout (Random House)

Drama - Ruined by Lynn Nottage

History - The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family by Annette Gordon-Reed (W.W. Norton & Company)

Biography - American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House by Jon Meacham (Random House)

Poetry - The Shadow of Sirius by W.S. Merwin (Copper Canyon Press)

General Nonfiction - Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II by Douglas A. Blackmon (Doubleday)

Music - Double Sextet by Steve Reich, premiered March 26, 2008 in Richmond, VA (Boosey & Hawkes)

Sure, anybody can send stuff to the committee for consideration, but the board designates a certain number of finalists to each category before deciding the final award, and every year for the last six years, it has fallen to industry maven Joe Strupp of Editor & Publisher to tell us who they were.

This year, the Pulitzer committee met the first week in March. In the past, we’ve seen Mr. Strupp’s dispatch shortly after that meeting. So where is it, now that it’s about to be April?

“It’s hard to describe,” said Mr. Strupp in an interview. “There are so many other variables. It hasn’t been the priority that it was in the past because there’s so much going on and it’s not a priority for people in the business because there’s so much else going on. And perhaps the tightening of security around the leaks is better.”

That’s true! Everyone in newspapers are thinking about other things like, well, survival.

But still: Had Sig Gissler, the Columbia professor who administers the prizes, placed some kind of protected glyph on the finalists’ files that is plus-two against Joe Strupp?

“We haven’t done anything differently really,” said Mr. Gissler. “The jurors sign a pledge to maintain confidentially and we’ve done it for many years. I do appeal to their integrity.”

Maybe that appeal was a little more forceful this year?

“Not any greater than in past years,” he said.

Oy vay!

“As you pointed out, the news media has a lot of things to engage in these days,” he continued.

Or else, this is what Pulitzer Day means to us now: Nice work, buddy, now give us something that will sell!

“On the one hand, it might be less interesting to leak finalists, but you might see more interest in the awards when they come out because it’s gonna be good news and everyone needs good news,” said Mr. Strupp.