Dear Author: Romance Book Reviews, Author Interviews, and Commentary

FICTION: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz (Riverhead Books)

DRAMA: August: Osage County by Tracy Letts

HISTORY: What Hath God Wrought by Daniel Walker Howe (Oxford University Press)

BIOGRAPHY: Eden’s Outcasts by John Matteson (W.W. Norton)

POETRY: Time and Materials by Robert Hass (Ecco/HarperCollins)

POETRY: Failure by Philip Schultz (Harcourt)

Pulitzer.org

Source: © William Coupon/CORBIS.

Norman Mailer, a two time Pulitizer Prize winner, died from renal failure at the age of 84 on Saturday. Mailer’s award winning books were The Armies of the Night which his his account of the peace march on the Pentagon and The Executioner’s Song, the true story of the execution of Gary Gilmore.

Mailer was awarded a lifetime achievement award at the 2005 National Book Awards where he decried the decline of both the serious author and the public’s interest in the serious novel.

Obits at CNN, NY Times and an interview with .

Charles Simic can add one more accolade to his already embarrassingly full resume. The 69 year old Yugoslavian who the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1990 also recently won the Academy of American Poets’ 14th annual $100,000 Wallace Stevens Award and was awarded a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant in 1984.

The Poet Laureate annual stipend is small at $35,000 plus a $5,000 travel allowance. Surely our government could pony up a little more money for such an august position?

Via Publishers’ Weekly and Media Bistro.

Robert Olen Butler, a Pulitzer Prize winning author, is a believer that what goes on in the marriage bed should be shared with others and thus when his wife of twelve years, Elizabeth Dewberry, left him for Ted Turner, he wrote a long detailed email to his favorite grad students and others about the demise of his relationship.

Gawker has the entire email, but probably the best part is when Butler compares Turner to Dewberry’s abusive, child molesting grandfather or when he describes Ted Turner as being deeply devoted to his harem of girlfriends.

Elizabeth is leaving me for Ted Turner.

She and I will remain the best of friends. She also knows about, endorses, and even encourages that I tell this much detail of the story:
She has spoken openly in her work and in her public life of the fact that she was molested by her grandfather from an early age, a molestation that was known and tacitly condoned by her radically Evangelical Christian parents. She then went into a decade-long abusive marriage. I met her when she was in a terminally desperate state from this lifetime of abuse, and we married and we truly loved each other. . . .

And …

It seems pretty innocuous but to those in the business, doing a little photoshop editing of a journalism photo is pretty egregious. Allan Detrich, formerly of the Toledo Blade, was found to have photoshopped prints submitted for publication. Most of the editing was done to remove backgrounds according to Detrich.

Two Pulitzer Prizes are awarded to photojournalism, Breaking News and Feature Photography. I’m having a bit of trouble wrapping my head around why this is such a bad thing but I get the point from those in the know that it is.

Oprah’s Book Club selection, The Road by Cormac McCarthy, won the Fiction prize. The Wall Street Journal won for its investigation of corporate backdating of stock options. Interestingly, the “Breaking News Reporting” was awarded to the Staff of The Oregonian for its reporting of the family missing in the Oregon mountains, both in print on and online. All of the Pulitzer journalism prizes recognize online media, in addition to print media, as worthy of recognition.

All the winners can be found at the Pulitzer Prize website.

Last night, two time Pulitzer Prize winning author, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr died as a result of a heart attack last night in New York City. He was 89.

Schlesinger won the Pulitzer Prize for the books The Age of Jackson and A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House. A Thousand Days was also a recipient of the National Book Award.

His most recent work, War and the American Presidency, was a critical look of President Bush’s foreign policy.

Via Shelf Awareness, Wikipedia, and the New York Times.