The Weekend Special

Pieces are given up to three Ellises (for fiction), McClellands (for essays), or Whitakers (for random picks). As with restaurant stars, even one Ellis, McClelland, or Whitaker indicates a generally positive review.

⏰ Fiction

“Process of Elimination” by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh. No Ellises. tip, time, tie. Sayrafiezadeh lately writes variations on the theme of shitty jobs, in what has been, for me, a series of diminishing returns. This is stronger than his last two efforts, finding a better balance between incident and Sayrafiezadeh’s characteristically repetitive, stripped-back voice. The central problem here, though, is that the voice of the story is numb from the very start and stays numb till the very end, even as it chronicles, in first person, a series of events that are surely meant to change the speaker’s view of the world. If this is meant to be a story about a character who is alienated from the first, then it’s strange to create an intricate plot in which Tamerlan’s identity is unexpectedly and ambiguously called into question. Sayrafiezadeh wants us to judge Tamerlan, but he also wants us to feel conflicted about our judgements, and to make sure that we stay conflicted he gives almost no information about Tamerlan’s interior state. But this ends up feeling like a trick; whether we decide to despise this sellout climber or empathize with this hurt, exploited youngster, we’re reminded that neither individual validation (and payment) nor individual condemnation will actually do anything – the corporation will prevail – rendering the entire story self-defeating. This nihilism doesn’t have to be a bad thing; when Sayrafiezadeh has owned this blankness and framed it as a character’s repression, it makes far more sense. But Tamerlan is far too active and, frankly, untraumatised for me to buy that his story is at its heart one of stasis and misapprehension. At least at first, he needs to sound like someone who’ll put up a fight.

⏰ Weekend Essay

“Inside the World-Conquering Rise of the Micro-Drama” by Chang Che. Two McClellands. clips, cliché, class. A super-fun international trends piece, and also a voyage to the end of art. Che doesn’t mention the disastrous but somehow also ahead-of-its-time Quibi, but that’s what this is – short-form narratives whose “quality ranges from brisk entertainment to prurient slop”. Che spends a lot of time on culture-clash between white stars and Chinese crew, and thankfully she characterizes this as a labor-rights issue, not just a source of zany misunderstandings – though it is also that. (I appreciate that Che ends on an oddly touching moment of humanity.) Analytics are opposed to art, and they’ll always offer a warped vision of what viewers actually favor, but that doesn’t mean following them relentlessly is inherently a recipe for commercial failure – certainly not in the short term. The A.I.-content future these companies are invested in creating is the same story at an accelerated pace: The faster viewers realize there’s no life behind your eyes, the faster they’ll get bored. But it might take longer than we’d hope, and by then it could be too late: These things go fast.

⏰ Random Pick

“Department of Amplification” by Edward Teller. (December 15, 1956). One Whitaker. perils, poem, positron. A bizarre and fascinating curio. At the beginning of the space age, the magazine published a fun bit of light verse gently ribbing Teller’s theories of matter and antimatter by proposing his meeting with Dr. Anti-Teller, and the man wrote back, indulging the conceit and slipping toward a witty indulgence of language himself. (“All this will happen faster than anti-thought, which is probably the same as thought.”) As long as one can push away knowledge of Teller’s biography (testifying against Oppenheimer, advocating for a nuclear arsenal, helping with Reagan’s Star Wars shit) this is fun, and even if you can’t push that away, it’s still undeniably weird – an artifact of an era in which public figures actually cultivated prose style. Plus, you can picture Benny Safdie in the role!¹

⏰ Something Extra

Skarstedt’s Vuillard show left me stunned, genuinely wondering if he’s the best painter ever. Lots of other good (and baaaad) art seen around, but I’m always catching things just as they close. So I dunno… if you ever have something you want my takes on, write in!

Anyway, on to the real business of the week: My second annual attempt to PREDICT THE PULITZER PRIZES. Arts and Letters categories only, because there have to be limits to such things.

Fiction

This category is by far the most-prognosticated of these things (basically the only-prognosticated of these things, except a few theater nerds guessing at the Drama winner). That first link, if you click on “most”, is from a real expert, and full of great detail. My precursor algorithm, which has spotted four of the last ten picks – not great, but not nothing – suggests The Wilderness, The Sisters, and The Slip as the central contenders; while I’m rooting for Flournoy on the basis of her previous novel The Turner House, which I loved, I wonder if the marketing of the new book has pitched it as too light and book-club-ish. The Sisters is a multicultural family saga, the writer’s first book in English; The Slip is a debut, but it’s also a big book about America. I think The Slip takes it. But watch for The Antidote, highly acclaimed and perhaps a way to make up for Swamplandia!’s no-prize.

Drama

Liberation is a presumptive frontrunner, but Meet the Cartozians feels more like a Pulitzer play to me, a show full of ideas, all about what it means to be an American. That’s my prediction. I’d love to see Practice or Bowl EP, both by Nazareth Hassan, get picked as finalists, though I think their chances of winning would be slim (too out-there); and similarly Prince Faggot, my second-favorite show of last year, would make a lot of sense as a finalist in the mode of Circle Jerk/Oh, Mary (weirdo gay comedy), plus director Chowdhury has already been a finalist as a writer, albeit for something less bizarro. (Tannahill lives in London, which could hurt its chances.) Caroline was excellent but maybe too actor-focused or too on-the-nose as an award winner; Grangeville doesn’t feel major, but it was very good and Samuel Hunter is surely in line for a nod. Weird one-person shows with some braininess can also get a finalist slot a la Christina Wong, and the superb Can I Be Frank fits the bill. One more wild swing at a far-left-field finalist: Nina by Forrest Malloy; no idea if it’ll even get looked at, as it was a pretty short, off-off run, but audiences and critics loved it and it’s a super-smart, electric show. I know I basically just listed every eligible show I liked last year, so I’ll narrow my predicted finalists, along with Cartozians, to Can I Be Frank and, why not, Nina.

History

There’s always some slippage between History, Biography, and General Nonfiction, and the board will find a way to reward everything they really love. Precursors are of only moderate use here unless something is unignorable. In History, an astonishing five of the last nine winners have concerned specifically 1800s Black America; another one is about the civil rights era, and two more about early Native America. Greg Grandin won a General Nonfiction prize for his last book, and his latest, America, América, is sweeping and big-time. (Too vast?) The Bancroft Prize is a frequent precursor, and Emilie Connolly’s Vested Interests, on Native dispossession, would be an especially good match for the jury’s usual preferences here. Taking Manhattan has gotten a lot of praise. And how about Kevin Sack’s Mother Emanuel, exploring two centuries of the Charleston church, which the Times liked? But I’m going with a moderately less academic pick, The Crossing: El Paso, the Southwest, and America’s Forgotten Origin Story, a “sweeping history” which would win Richard Parker a posthumous prize.

Biography

The biggest drop of the year is Nicholas Boggs’ giant Baldwin book. Adam Morgan’s A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls, about the publisher of Ulysses, seems like the sort of nerdy, insidery, but still relevant thing that crops up here, as does Trouble Maker, on Jessica Mitford, which Rachel Syme liked in the magazine. Maggie Doherty covered True Nature, a revelatory Peter Matthiessen biography, too, that I could see here; or maybe a take on another writer: Positive Obsession, about Octavia Butler; A Matter of Complexion, about Charles Chestnutt; A Day Like Any Other, reviewed in the magazine by Dan Chiasson, about James Schuyler. What if it’s not a writer? The pickings are weirdly slim. Maybe The Maverick’s Museum, on Albert Barnes? The board will try to squeeze anything it can in here; I could see Mother Emanuel getting in, perhaps, or When It All Burns or Empire of AI, touched on below, or Paul Elie’s history of ‘80s art, The Last Supper. But I’m going with a book that sounded absolutely fascinating and delicious when Casey Cep reviewed it in the magazine, Sister, Sinner: The Miraculous Life and Mysterious Disappearance of Aimee Semple McPherson.

Memoir or Autobiography

There are about one thousand well-received memoirs released every year. The obvious frontrunner here is Mother Mary Comes to Me, Arundhati Roy’s rapturously received award-winner. But is it too obvious? Other precursor favorites include Melting Point, reviewed in the magazine by Kathryn Schultz, about Rachel Cockerell’s family of Jews in Texas; Things In Nature Merely Grow, excerpted in the magazine, by Fiction finalist and magazine regular Yiyun Li; and the legend Miriam Toews’ A Truce That Is Not Peace. But I think the prize will go to Michael Thomas for his The Broken King. Everything I’ve read from Thomas has knocked me off my feet, and this long-in-the-works, vast portrait of mental breakdown (and, seemingly, just about everything else) has the depth of detail that the jury generally favors.

General Nonfiction

A catchall/wildcard category, and surely the hardest single category to predict, since it pivots between more academic and more popular choices. The National Book Award winner, also a big seller, One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, on Palestine, is a default frontrunner but likely too essayistic for these awards. Jordan Thomas’ When It All Burns could appear in memoir or even biography; I’d give it the best odds of any single book to be a finalist, but I’m not sure it has the scope to win. A Marriage at Sea made all the lists but is probably too pop. Karen Hao’s Empire of AI seems to be everywhere. King of Kings, on the Iranian revolution, reviewed in the magazine by Daniel Immerwahr, would make a lot of sense; it highlights its own focus on American policy – there’s our flag on the cover – and it’s somewhere between academic and popular. But somehow I have a feeling that there’s a more poetic choice in the offing, so I’m going with Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People by Imani Perry, a cultural history of blueness and Blackness. Perry is a major thinker and her newest has been very well received.

Music

Generally there are two main types of new music recognized here: Big productions at symphony halls and operas, often an excuse to recognize a major name; and ambitious twenty-ish-minute group pieces by composers on the verge of a breakout. The most-acclaimed new opera of the year was Philly’s fascinating-sounding Complications in Sue, with a libretto by Drama prize winner Michael R. Jackson and music by a mass group of collaborators trading off in what I now unfortunately think of as Spongebob The Musical style. I think it’s gonna win, rewarding Philly’s opera for years of risk-taking new productions. The latter category is inherently more of a grab bag. One should never count out Clare Chase, and Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s Ubique features her and other luminaries. I saw some of About Ghosts, the new Mary Halvorson, at Roulette, and it’s incredible; Patricia Brennan, whose vibraphone is all over that record, also came out with her own Of the Near and Far, which was a smash at Roulette. I don’t think The Necks can win but Disquiet is awesome. People dug the new Anna Högberg, Ensamseglaren; not sure if it’s technically US. What if Nels Cline from Wilco wins for his weird jazz shit (Consentrik Quartet)? That would be hilarious.

That’s it. If I get one of these right (as I did last year, with obvious Fiction pick James) I’ll be thrilled, if I get two I will never shut up about it.

Sunday Song: