Turns out there was backstage drama at the Pulitzers this year. The WSJ reports that the board expressed “some worry” about the three fiction finalists being considered, and requested an extra submission from the jury to avoid a flashback to 2012, when nobody won.
At Vulture, Stephen Elliott notes that he is grateful director Pamela Romanowsky adapted his memoir, The Adderall Diaries, for the screen. But the author’s gratitude became mixed with disappointment when he went to see the film, which stars James Franco. “What I saw was a very different Stephen Elliott than the person I believe myself to be, and it made me question some of my fundamental beliefs about art,” the author writes. As Elliott admits, his book is, in many ways, a meditation on bending the truth, on the fallibility of memory. That said: “Almost nothing in the movie is ‘true’—in terms of both the source material, as it was published, and my life, as it has been lived. . . . I kept wondering, Why did they use my name?” We’re curious to see if Romanowsky (or Franco) will respond.
The evergreen genre of anti\-Clinton books is blossoming again. And as the Hillary-bashing ramps up, it’s worth revisiting Laura Kipnis’s piece about the men who hate her.
Courtney Maum takes us inside the mind of the debut author, “a nasty, lonely, seedy place to be”. Suddenly all your so-called friends are the competition, people around you seem to be reading every other book but yours, and you’re “nipple deep in a mudpit of despair”.
Rob Kuznia, a reporter for the small California paper the Daily Breeze, was surprised to win a Pulitzer this week for his work on an investigation into school corruption. Kuznia, however, has since had to leave journalism and become a publicist, because award-winning reporting just doesn’t pay the bills anymore.