Few prizes are as coveted by journalists and authors as the Pulitzer, and last week's announcement of the 2016 winners was greeted with the usual fusillade of champagne corks flying in editorial offices across the land. And who could contest the rationale cited by the judges for the winning work of fiction-The Sympathizer, by Viet Thanh Nguyen, deemed on the Pulitzer Web site to be "a profound, startling, and beautifully crafted debut novel." Critical acclaim rarely gets as good as this: "A gripping spy novel, an astute exploration of extreme politics, and a moving love story, The Sympathizer explores a life between two worlds and examines the legacy of the Vietnam War in literature, film, and the wars we fight today."
Grove Press, the book's publisher, would surely agree, since the assessment of the book was lifted entirely from its own Web site, without any attribution. The casual reader-heck, the most eagle-eyed reader-would look at the critical parsing of the novel on the Pulitzer Web site and assume the words were a citation written by the judges. So impressed was I by their words that I decided this weekend to check out what others had said about the book, which is when I discovered the source.
