The Booker’s Dozen: The 2017 Booker Longlist

If there is an award season for the book industry, it’s probably right around now. The Booker will be announced in a couple of days, the Nobel Prize was just announced, and now the finalists for the National Book Award have been announced. (The Pulitzer doesn’t happen until the spring, though.) The big news this year is that the 9/11 Commission Report has been nominated in the non-fiction category. It’s an unprecedented development, and I can’t help but think that a message is being sent. And it is a rather clever way of getting publicity for the award. It also, however, reflects the important place in history that 9/11 will hold. On the fiction side, the nominees are an interesting bunch, all of the women and none of them big, well-known names. Below you can find the nominees for the fiction and non-fiction categories, and some excerpts or whatever else I could find.FictionMadeleine Is Sleeping by Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum — profileFlorida by Christine Schutt — interviewIdeas of Heaven: A Ring of Stories by Joan Silber — excerptThe News from Paraguay by Lily Tuck — excerptOur Kind: A Novel in Stories by Kate Walbert — excerptNon-FictionArc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age by Kevin Boyle — reviewWashington’s Crossing by David Hackett Fischer — excerptLife on the Outside: The Prison Odyssey of Elaine Bartlett by Jennifer Gonnerman — excerpt (this is a good one)Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare by Stephen Greenblatt — excerpt9/11 Commission Report — read it here

The IMPAC shortlist is in. If you don’t know about the IMPAC, it’s very unique prize with a very long longlist. The longlist is composed of nominees from over 150 libraries around the world. Those picks are then whittled down to a shortlist via a panel of judges. As you’ll see from the shortlist, since the process leading up to this award takes so long, some of the books aren’t exactly new. I think involving libraries makes the IMPAC unique compared to a lot of other awards out there. It seems a lot more egalitarian than, say, the Booker or the National Book Award, and I appreciate the international flavor as well. That’s why I included it in my prizewinners post last year. There’s more info about the award at the IMPAC site. Now, here’s the shortlist with some comments:Graceland by Chris Abani – This book about Nigeria was nominated by a library in Sweeden. – excerptMaps For Lost Lovers by Nadeem Aslam was an LBC nominee – we wrote about it for five posts sarting with this one. Another example of the multiculturalism of the IMPAC: this book about Pakistanis living in England was nominated by libraries in Belgium and South Africa. – excerptHavoc in Its Third Year by Ronan Bennett – I’ve been wanting to read this book ever since I first heard about it. Was read and loved at Book World. – excerptsThe Closed Circle by Jonathan Coe – excerptAn Altered Light by Jens Christian Grondahl – excerptBreaking the Tongue by Vyvyane LohDon’t Move by Margaret Mazzantini – excerptThe Swallows of Kabul by Yasmina Khadra – excerptThe Master by Colm Toibin – excerptThe Logogryph by Thomas Wharton

Now that Hollywood’s “award season” is over, the book world’s is getting started, and, in what may be a preview of the Pulitzer, Edward P. Jones’ much lauded novel, The Known World, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. It took him so long to write this book that he was too embarrassed to call his agent when he finally finished it. Lucky for him, it seems to have worked out quite well. The winners in the other categories are: Sons of Mississippi: A Story of Race and Its Legacy by Paul Hendrickson in the general non-fiction category; Khrushchev: The Man and His Era by William Taubman in the biography category; River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West by Rebecca Solnit for criticism; and Columbarium by Susan Stewart for poetry. As I may have mentioned before, the NBCC Award is great because it is not limited to American books — it includes all books written in English — and because, unlike the Pulitzer, it doesn’t skew towards rewarding books that are focused on American themes, thus allowing a book like Khrushchev to be praised.A New Wave of Graphic NovelsScott McCloud writes on his blog that the runaway experimentalism in comics in recent years has given way to a return to storytelling. The shining stars of this new trend are Blankets by Craig Thompson and an upcoming anthology called Flight.

I was ruminating a bit about the Pulitzer Prize this week and wondering why it isn’t a bigger deal. The bookstore I worked at in Los Angeles may not be indicative of national trends, but while I was there, the Booker Prize and the National Book Award moved more books than the Pulitzer. (The Nobel Prize had a bigger impact on sales than all the other awards combined, believe it or not.) I think part of the reason that the Pulitzer fails to capture the interest of readers is that it’s much less controversial than other awards. Pulitzer winners are almost always safe picks. But part of it, I think, is that the award has no build up. The judges do not announce the nominees (aka the shortlist) in advance, instead the finalists are revealed at the same time as the winner. It’s pretty obvious that having a shortlist would build interest – some might say artificially – by placing the prize in the public eye for longer. But I’d argue that the Pulitzer is worthy of this treatment. Though the picks are often safe, taken together, the Pulitzer winners are an incomplete, but still compelling bunch of books. The Pulitzers are primarily a journalism award, and that, I think, matters too, in that it allows us to equate the novel with journalism, which, at its best, is meant to be a noble and unfrivolous pursuit. (And this isn’t just the J-school grad in me talking.) Finally, giving the Pulitzer a shortlist would just be more fun and it would give us book bloggers more to natter on about.Previously: Excerpts and links for the Pulitzer winners and finalists.

The winners of the National Book Critics Circle Award have been announced in New York City. The award is voted on by critics and considers all books in English (including in translation), no matter the country of origin. The winners in the various categories and some supplementary links:

Fiction: Edith Pearlman, Binocular Vision (excerpt)

Nonfiction: Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary War (excerpt)

Autobiography: Mira Bartók, The Memory Palace: A Memoir (“The Writer at the Memory Table“)

Criticism: Geoff Dyer, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition: Selected Essays and Reviews (“Putting It Together,” “The Millions Interview: Geoff Dyer on the London Riots, the Great War, and the Gray Lady“)

Biography: John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life (excerpt)

Poetry: Laura Kasischke, Space, in Chains

Previously: The finalists