Friend Wins Pulitzer

Last night I dreamt that a close friend of mine here at the Workshop won the Pulitzer. He won the Pulitzer, and I was not happy about it. At. All.

My immediate reactions were jealousy and bewilderment. He won for a novel none of us knew he’d written. Come to find out, that was because it hadn’t been released yet.

My friend’s book was the first in history to win the Pulitzer Prize before it had even been published.

This was a staggering achievement, as you can imagine. We were shocked. How? Why? Could it be so amazing that the uncorrected proofs warranted the most prestigious prize in American letters? And what was the damned thing called?

So–rather than asking my friend any more about it–I looked up his book on the Internet. I discovered that not only was it a straight-to-paperback, it was a straight-to-mass-market-paperback. This brand-new, unpublished, Pultizer prize-winning novel’s cover was brown with age and wear, and in the style of an antique Del-Rey sci-fi book. It looked like it had been designed in the 1960s and then quietly fermented at a printer somewhere, waiting for someone at Random House to give the go-ahead.

And then I saw it. The title.

My friend’s book, the new classic of our time, was called The Big Swallow: A Story of Organisms.

Sadly, that’s when I woke up.