newsmakers

newsmakers

Pulitzer Prizes for arts announced

NEW YORK

Donna Tartt’s “The Goldfinch,” already among the most popular and celebrated novels of the past year, has won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. One of the country’s top Colonial historians, Alan Taylor, has won his second Pulitzer, for “The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War In Virginia.”

Annie Baker’s “The Flick” won the Pulitzer for drama, a play set in a movie theater that was called a “thoughtful drama with well-crafted characters” that created “lives rarely seen on the stage.”

The award Monday for general nonfiction went to Dan Fagin’s “Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation,” a chronicle of industrial destruction in a small New Jersey community that was praised by The New York Times as a “classic of science reporting.” Megan Marshall’s “Margaret Fuller: A New American Life,” about the 19th-century intellectual and transcendentalist, won for biography; and Vijay Seshadri’s witty and philosophical “3 Sections” received the poetry prize.

The Pulitzer for music was given to John Luther Adams’ “Become Ocean,” which judges cited as “a haunting orchestral work that suggests a relentless tidal surge, evoking thoughts of melting polar ice and rising sea levels.”

Flavor Flav takes deal in battery case

LAS VEGAS

Entertainer Flavor Flav pleaded guilty Monday to reduced charges and was sentenced to probation and more counseling in a Las Vegas domestic-violence case involving the teenage son of his longtime girlfriend.

The 55-year-old rapper and reality TV personality, whose legal name is William Jonathan Drayton Jr., acknowledged in court that he wielded a kitchen knife during an Oct. 17, 2012, argument at home in Las Vegas.

The teen testified during a preliminary hearing a year ago that Drayton threatened to kill him, chased him to a bedroom and stabbed the knife through the door during the argument.

The family since has reconciled and has been undergoing counseling, defense attorney Kristina Wildeveld told Senior Clark County District Court Judge Kathy Hardcastle on Monday.

In court, Drayton called the victim his stepson.

“I love my son, and my son loves me, too,” he told the judge.

The teen, now 18, and his mother were not in court when Drayton entered his plea to misdemeanor charges of attempted battery that could have caused substantial injury and battery constituting domestic violence.

Drayton had been facing felony charges of assault and child endangerment with a weapon that could have gotten him up to 12 years in prison.

Associated Press