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The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

Of all the winners of the Pulitzer Prizes announced Monday, perhaps the most unexpected was the poetry collection 3 Sections by Vijay Seshadri, which largely passed under the critical radar. (Donna Tartt's brick of a novel, The Goldfinch, also was honored, as were Dan Fagin's nonfiction work Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation and Alan Taylor's widely praised history The Internal Enemy Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832. The full list of winners is here.) The committee called Seshadri's work "a compelling collection of poems that examine human consciousness, from birth to dementia, in a voice that is by turns witty and grave, compassionate and remorseless."

The best of his poems swing from the epic to the mundane, like his poem "This Morning." He writes:

"First I had three

apocalyptic visions, each more terrible than the last.

The graves open, and the sea rises to kill us all.

Then the doorbell rang, and I went downstairs and signed for two packages—"