PODCAST PRIMES PONDERS : AUTHOR DANIEL KRAUS

THE NEW YORK TIMES Book Review chose Daniel Kraus's '' Angel Down '' a gory novel told in one long, never ending sentence about World War 1 soldiers who encounter a fallen angel - as one of its 10 Best Books of 2025.

To the surprise of many including Kraus himself, the novel also won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction last month. Kraus spoke to the Book Review Podcast The day after that honor was announced.

The interview has been condensed and edited :

.-  I think anyone would be surprised to win a Pulitzer. Was this something you had ever thought about ?

The answer is definitely no. Some people asked if I had been watching live and I was like, '' I didn't have the slightest idea it was happening. ''

This sounds cheesy, but I just love writing so much that I would write several days a week, day and night, and on every holiday if I could.

Anything that tears me away from that is a frustration. So awards, or anything like that are completely off my radar.

.-  Did you celebrate in any way?

I was already planning on going to this pizza place last night, so I went there and had the same night I was going to have anyway.

But I didn't sleep all that well. My brain was spinning. So I am not completely impervious to all this.

.-  Your book is written as one sentence from beginning to end. Did that control come first, or did the story?

I started writing the book in a more or less traditional manner. I had gotten about 30 pages in and was going well, but I was frustrated. It didn't seem like the right approach.

So I sat down and thought. What is this book about? What are the themes, what am I trying to say, how could that inflect the prose?

What I came up with was that this is a story about how World War 1 began a cycle of industrialized violence that we are incapable of stopping. It just moves like a wheel that we are trapped inside.   

And so I thought, What if I write an all-in-one-sentence and the end of the book circles back to the beginning, so that once you start reading it, in effect, you're trapped in the book forever.

Within the first paragraph I knew it was working. I felt like, oh, my fingers can't move fast enough. This is providing the right energy. It was thematically relevant.

Suddenly it felt like I was tumbling and I was running so fast and just trying to stay on my feet. And that felt like war to me as well.

!WOW! thanks The New York Times.