Paper Trail

Joshua Cohen is among the Pulitzer Prize winners; New novels about art


Joshua Cohen

The 2022 Pulitzer Prizes have been announced: Joshua Cohen received the award for fiction, the late Winfred Rembert won a posthumous award for his illustrated autobiography (as told to Erin I. Kelly), and Diane Seuss won the poetry prize. Here’s a full list of winners.  

For the New York Times, Jackson Arn reviews two new novels about art: Emily Hall’s The Longcut and Mark Haber’s Saint Sebastian’s Abyss. Arn writes, “Characters in novels about art . . . tend to be frauds: weaselly dealers, greedy collectors, hack painters and shallow critics who pretend art is about truth but know it’s really about money and hype.”    

At Vulture, an excerpt from a new book about right-wing comedy by Matt Sienkiewicz and Nick Marx: “A lot of mainstream, high-profile right-wing humor is simply stuff from the past dragged into the present, a beat-up old Cadillac trying to turn heads with a new coat of paint.”

For The Baffler, Willis McCumber writes about the radical abolitionist John Brown and depictions of him in historical fiction, from Truman Nelson’s The Surveyor (1960) to James McBride’s comic novel The Good Lord Bird (2013). 

Harmony Holiday will celebrate the launch of her epic poem Maafa this Saturday with Ariana Reines at Wendy’s Subway in Brooklyn. Register here to attend the 6pm event.