The 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction went to a single unspooling line of prose that begins at the first word of Chicago-based writer and screenwriter Daniel Kraus’ novel Angel Down and does not stop until the last, almost 300 pages down.

There is no period anywhere in the novel, a writing style obliquely reminiscent of the writing style of the Hungarian Nobel laureate László Krasznahorkai. There is only the forward grind of soldiers crossing No Man’s Land toward a rumored German stronghold, where they find not an enemy battalion but a fallen angel tangled in the wire. This breathless, claustrophobic rush is the syntactic equivalent of a trench barrage.

“It’s like you have the feeling of being locked into the book forever,” he told the Associated Press in a telephone interview, describing the effect of abandoning traditional punctuation.…