Pulitzer for Diaz

The 2008 Pulitzer Prizes have just been announced--and the fiction prize (possibly the most prestigious in American letters) has gone to The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz--one of the CRB's books of the year for 2007, reviewed in our current issue by Marlon James.

Addendum: thanks to Antilles reader Matthew Hunte for pointing me to this recent interview with Diaz in Newsweek. Nice quote:

The Caribbean generally and the island of Hispaniola specifically is the linchpin, the pivot point where the old world swung into the new world. If you want the transformation point, if you want the ground zero where the Old World died and the New World began, it's there. I mean, nothing is more quintessentially American—in the entire span of that description—than the Caribbean and more specifically the Dominican Republic. If you want to be incredibly grandiose, the entire world, we're all the children of what happened in the Caribbean, whether we know it or not. I mean, the extermination of indigenous people, the conquest of the New World, slavery and in some ways the rise of this form of capitalism that we all live under. I mean really the modern world was given rise by what began in the Caribbean.