“Everybody, everybody everywhere, has his own movie going, his own scenario, and everybody is acting his movie out like mad, only most people don’t know that is what they’re trapped by, their little script.” Tom Wolfe wrote this more than half a century ago, in his book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Since then, the world has expanded and splintered and niche-ified itself in ways even Wolfe—who was certainly the leading man in his own movie, strolling down Madison Avenue in a white three-piece suit and homburg hat as the culture wars of the 60s raged on—might not have imagined.
Air Mail’s literary prizes, which we’re awarding for the first time, were born out of a desire to establish some semblance of togetherness in this singularly isolating age.
When it came to naming the prizes, we knew that we wanted them to honor a titan of literature, and that we wanted to award them to writers of both fiction and reportage, which demanded a namesake who was a virtuoso in both. Put that way, Wolfe is the natural choice. He was at the vanguard of New Journalism both in his groundbreaking magazine articles “The Me Decade” and “Radical Chic” and in books such as The Right Stuff. When he turned his hand to fiction, the results—such as The Bonfire of the Vanities and A Man in Full—were every bit as seismic.
It helps that the wryness, imagination, and flair Wolfe branded onto every handwritten page find a kindred spirit in Air Mail. Not to mention that Wolfe’s daughter, Alexandra, writes regularly for us, and that Air Mail Co-Editor Graydon Carter was a longtime friend. Wolfe was also a devotee of the Meisterstück fountain pen, a detail that sealed the deal with pen-maker Montblanc as the sponsor of the prizes.
The nominating committee, headed by Graydon and Alexandra, came together just as naturally. Wes Anderson and Lena Dunham—no strangers to the influence of literature on their own work, from Salinger and Stefan Zweig to Joan Didion and Philip Roth—signed on right away. As did Lisa Taddeo, one of the great writers of our age, whose work (Three Women, Animal) spans genres and defies easy characterization; Emma Roberts and Karah Preiss, co-founders of the online book club Belletrist; and John McWhorter, a linguist and New York Times columnist who teaches at Columbia.
The long list of nominees for the prizes—devoted to a young, emerging writer in each of the two categories, fiction and reportage—featured submissions from our nominating committee as well as from Air Mail’s Books Editor, Jim Kelly; people from all corners of the publishing world, including Wolfe’s longtime agency, Janklow & Nesbit, and veteran Knopf editor Gary Fisketjon; and from readers of Air Mail.
The list, which was painstakingly winnowed down over the course of several months, started with upward of 100 names. It was a difficult process only because so many of the submissions were excellent, comprising authors such as Kathleen Alcott (“a genius,” according to Dunham), Lili Anolik (nominated by Roberts and Preiss), Rob Franklin (“If Tom Wolfe, Jay McInerney, and Margo Jefferson collaborated,” read The Atlantic’s review of his debut novel, Great Black Hope), and Olivia Nuzzi (a talented wild card thrown in by Taddeo). Bianca Bosker, Karim Dimechkie, Hal Ebbott, Max Marshall, and Shawn McCreesh were also in the running.
At a meeting last month, the committee analyzed the nominees with an eye toward not just their literary merit but to how Wolfean they were, and ultimately settled on the winners: the Italian writer Vincenzo Latronico, for fiction, and the American writer Meghan Daum, for reportage.
Wolfe once wrote, “The problem with fiction, it has to be plausible. That’s not true with non-fiction.” Vincenzo and Meghan are living incarnations of this. On the fiction end of things, Vincenzo’s meticulously well-observed book, Perfection, about the comings and goings of a generic millennial expat couple in Berlin, is so plausible it hurts. On the flip side, Meghan’s nonfiction books, including The Problem with Everything, which wades into the culture wars, and, most recently, The Catastrophe Hour, on money, vanity, and the decay of modern life, make you wonder how any of what she’s reporting could actually be true. As for the “young” criteria: this process has proved our long-held belief that 55 is the new 45, 45 the new 35, and so on.
The prizes are brought to life by Bernard Maisner, the master calligrapher, and will be awarded in person at a dinner at the Waverly Inn next week.
Another of Wolfe’s most well-known lines comes from The Bonfire of the Vanities: “Bullshit reigns.” Though he wrote this in 1987, Wolfe might as well have been peering through a telescope at today’s world. More than anything else, these literary prizes serve as our attempt at sifting through the boggy ground and getting at the authenticity and quality we can only hope exists somewhere underneath.
Julia Vitale is the Deputy Managing Editor at AIR MAIL
