2013 National Book Award Shortlists Released

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October 16, 2013 | 15 books mentioned 4 2 min read

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The contenders for the 2013 National Book Award were pared down to a five nominees in each category today. Winners will be announced in New York City on November 20.

Fans of Jhumpa Lahiri will be excited to know that after missing out on yesterday’s Man Booker Prize, the Lowland author is still squarely in the running for the National Book Award. Of course, in order to attain the honor she’s going to have to beat out former Millions Top Ten member George Saunders and Millions favorite Rachel Kushner – as well as previous NBA winner Thomas Pynchon. On the nonfiction list, Millions readers should recognize George Packer’s The Unwinding, which Chris Barsanti called an “awe-inspiring X-Ray of the modern American soul.”

At the final awards ceremony on November 20, each finalist will receive $1,000, and each winner will receive an additional $10,000. Additional awards will also be goven to E.L. Doctorow and Maya Angelou, who will be receiving the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters and the Literarian Award for Outstanding Contribution to the American Literary Community, respectively. The National Book Foundation has also announced that free e-books will be released containing excerpts from each of the works on the shortlist. (We’ll have more on that when it’s available.) Edit: The new e-books are now available for the Fiction Finalists, Nonfiction Finalists, Poetry Finalists, and Young People’s Literature Finalists. (E-books for other platforms are available here.)

Here’s a list of the finalists in all four categories with bonus links and excerpts where available:

Fiction:

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Nonfiction:

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Poetry:

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Young People’s Literature:

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This is the byline used for site announcements and for articles by more than one Millions contributor.

Prizes

Here Come the Americans: The 2014 Booker Prize Longlist

Prizes
July 23, 2014 | 15 books mentioned 2 2 min read

The Booker Prize has long been, arguably, the book prize with the most buzz, the one award that carries with it a raft of commentary and gossip. There has always been something provincial about the Booker; the award is closely watched by book lovers globally, but these readers may also roll their eyes a bit at the betting lines and fevered U.K. newspaper commentary that it comes with. That changes this year — we’ll see how much — as books from the U.S. are eligible for the first time. Previously, entries were limited to titles from the U.K. and Commonwealth countries (India, Australia and so on). Books published between October 2013 and September 2014 are eligible.

U.S. book prizes have never generated the same degree of interest in the U.S. that the Booker does in the U.K, and the Booker folks clearly saw an opportunity there. The motivation behind the wider Booker field seems to be to try to build the brand, as they say, and create a first truly global, annual book prize, a plan met with some consternation by those who appreciated that Prize’s ability to focus the book world’s attention on U.K. writers. The U.S. and U.K. book industries run on parallel tracks that also have plenty of crossover. Novels become hits on both sides of the Atlantic, but readers and the publishing establishments in each country also have distinct tastes (and not just in book cover design).

The experiment begins today, with Joshua Ferris, Karen Joy Fowler, Siri Hustvedt, and Richard Powers representing the first crop of Americans to be featured on a Booker Prize longlist. While the list has some global diversity, it is male-dominated, with only three women among the 13 authors on the longlist. The biggest surprise might be the appearance of Paul Kingsnorth, whose longlisted novel The Wake was released by a crowd-funded publisher, Unbound.

All the Booker Prize longlisters are below (with bonus links where available):

To Rise Again at a Decent Hour by Joshua Ferris (excerpt, Ferris’s Year in Reading 2009)
The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler (Khaled Hosseini on Karen Joy Fowler)
The Blazing World by Siri Hustvedt (our review)
J by Howard Jacobson
The Wake by Paul Kingsnorth (at Unbound)
The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell (Exclusive: David Mitchell’s Twitter Story “The Right Sort” Collected)
The Lives of Others by Neel Mukherjee
Us by David Nicholls
The Dog by Joseph O’Neill (O’Neill’s 2008 Year in Reading)
Orfeo by Richard Powers (our review)
How to Be Both by Ali Smith (Wordsmith: The Beguiling Gifts of Ali Smith)
History of Rain by Niall Williams

Prizes
| 15 books mentioned 2 2 min read
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4 comments:

  1. Strong list in fiction, but personally I think it’s an epic fail that THE WOMAN WHO LOST HER SOUL by Bob Shacochis isn’t included. That is one fantastic, important and relevant novel….

  2. I haven’t read any of these books or these authors but I would like to. Thanks for sharing, I have been wanting to read Lahiri’s novels for awhile.

  3. I only read George Saunders’ Tenth of December from this list. I don’t recall any of the stories really gripping me the way that a short story by Flannery O’ Connor would grip me and stay with me forever. Saunders is an interesting fellow, writing from the have nots perspective and the minds of corporate middle managers. This is a useful and relevant perspective today, and a much needed Point of View. He made an interesting graduation speech at a University I cannot recall, much in the same vein as David Foster Wallace’s graduation speech. I’m a fan of Pynchon, but reluctant to read the Bleeding Edge until I make my way through Against the Day and Mason & Dixon, which keep getting pushed to the middle of my reading queue. I’ve never read Jhumpa Lahiri and don’t think that I ever will because I don’t care about the experiences of Indians trying to assimilate in the West. This list overall, seems frightfully tame.

  4. Pingback: The TBR List: October 18 | PAPER/PLATES

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Prizes

The Madness Approaches

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February 22, 2007 | 15 books mentioned

All sorts of madness is coming in March. Of course, there is the basketball sort, of which it appears my long beleaguered alma mater may finally be taking part (go Wahoos!)But more cogent to this blog and its readers, the literary world’s more refined yet no less raucous brand of madness is on its way, The Morning News 2007 Tournament of Books. If you aren’t familiar, here’s how it works: the TMN editors pick a bunch of books from the past year or so and align them in a bracket, tournament style. However, instead of having these books hash it out on a basketball court, which wouldn’t make much sense, TMN assigns each pair of books to a prominent blogger or reviewer or literary type, who then picks which one goes through to the next round.Why does TMN do this? Well, tournament commissioner Kevin Guilfoile explains it thusly in this year’s introductory essay:Exchanging emails with the TMN editors after a few glasses of Argentinean Malbec, we each confessed that we’re attracted to the sexiness of book awards despite the fact that book awards are also arbitrary and stupid.And so the Tourney was born. Just like with that other tournament, the brackets aren’t out yet, but several candidates have been named, among them a few books that have been reviewed here at The Millions, including Against the Day, which was reviewed by Garth, The Lay of the Land, which was reviewed by Noah, and Kate Atkinson’s One Good Turn, which I wrote about a few months back.Also, at the bottom of that introductory essay, readers can vote to pick which books should be included in the “Readers’ Favorites round.”

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| 15 books mentioned
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