Maybe I shouldn’t say this here – but I wasn’t familiar with this year’s winner of the Pulitzer Prize in fiction! Daniel Kraus is the author of more than 20 books … so really, I have no excuse. He won the prize for Angel Down, a WWI-era novel about a group of American soldiers who discover a fallen angel on a battlefield.

The book is a work of speculative fiction and is written as one continuous sentence spanning 285 pages. When I heard this, something about this detail sounded familiar. Then I realized I was thinking back to last year’s Nobel Prize in literature, which went to László Krasznahorkai, whose novel Herscht 07769 is also comprised of one very long sentence.

Earlier this year, Kraus spoke with Iowa Public Radio’s Ben Kieffer about Angel Down. Here’s what the author had to say on the now award-winning novel:

“Once you commit to the idea of writing a single sentence over the entire book, you lose all the normal tricks … the normal tools you have, which are periods and paragraph breaks and indents. You lose all that stuff and you have to rely instead on rhythm. So no matter what I’m doing in the prose, there’s kind of like this beat.”

As part of my personal education in Kraus, I also enjoyed this conversation he had with NPR’s Ayesha Rascoe a few years ago. (Ayesha is known around here for being a horror fan.)

They discussed Kraus’ novel Whalefall, about 17-year-old Jay who has just one hour of oxygen to retrieve his father’s skeleton from the depths of the ocean. Whalefall, like Angel Down, has a unique structure: Many of its chapters are very short, some only a sentence long. On this, Kraus told Rascoe: “I wanted the chapter breaks to feel like gasps for air. And I wanted the reader to constantly be aware of how much air [Jay is] losing.”

(You know, come to think of it, one of Krasznahorkai’s apocalyptic epics features a giant whale carcass. Maybe there’s something there!)

It’s always nice to be introduced to a new-to-me author. Have you recently discovered any big gaps in your own book knowledge? And how much weight do you place on literary prizes? Does the Pulitzer news have you placing library holds on Yiyun Li’s Things in Nature Merely Grow or Brian Goldstone’s There Is No Place For Us? (They won for memoir or autobiography and general nonfiction, respectively.) Let us know at bookoftheday@npr.org.