When we at AIR MAIL set about putting together our inaugural literary prizes last year, we recalled a particularly striking line in Tom Wolfe’s 1968 counterculture epic, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. “Everybody, everybody everywhere, has his own movie going, his own scenario, and everybody is acting his movie out like mad,” Wolfe wrote, “only most people don’t know that is what they’re trapped by, their little script.” In chronicling “the whole business of ‘the way we live now,’” Wolfe was decades ahead of his time, as usual. The prizes were conceived as an antidote, or at least a balm, for our ever more polarized, atomized, and technologically addled moment, and to honor the young literary talent following in Wolfe’s footsteps.
To sum up the current annus horribilis, I’ll quote another of Wolfe’s classic lines, this one more succinct, from the novel he is perhaps most remembered for, 1987’s The Bonfire of the Vanities: “Bullshit reigns.” If anything, it is more entrenched than ever. And many, perhaps understandably, choose to escape into romances involving elves and hockey players. Others earnestly wring their hands. But who, we asked ourselves as our prizes returned for another year, was daring to capture the here and now with wit, style, and originality?