This issue: Unfiltered thoughts about the NBA nominations, a report from Harper’s first gala, how Book Gossip readers find time for books, and the November books worth buying from your local bookstore. |
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Do People Still Care About the National Book Awards? We asked book people who should win tonight. |
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The National Book Awards are tonight! So we polled a few of our industry connections for their unfiltered thoughts about this year’s lineup: |
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“The past few years it seems like they’ve really tried to elevate books by small presses or just books that haven’t gotten any attention. Which is great! But it hasn’t always translated into those books actually selling or getting any more attention outside of the people that follow the NBAs. The NBA used to be a way to ensure (or almost ensure) a book would enter into the public consciousness. But now some of the books are so obscure that even winning or being shortlisted for an NBA won’t make it sell. I probably sound like a corporate monster, and I really don’t mean to.” —a book editor at a top-five publisher
- “I feel that while there are of course many good books in these lists, I have found this award season quite boring, safe, and MFA-ified.” —a book critic
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“I'll say from this crew of poets, I really think it's Patricia Smith's time. She has been singing arias in a time of blue notes for so long, she deserves it. As for who is going to win, my God it's hard to know — I do think it's Hamid Ismailov's year as well. Just a hunch, so 1,000 percent scientific!.” —a book editor at a top-five publisher
- “I am really surprised Flashlight didn't make it to the finals. Also The Wilderness, which people really loved. North Sun: Or, the Voyage of the Whaleship Esther as a finalist is lol to me. Good for you, Deep Vellum, but I actually think we are good on whaling-allegory books, possibly forever.” —an author
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“I don’t know if there’s a front-runner in the same way as last year. And the fiction shortlist has fewer books that people have really been talking about — no Miranda July, for instance, or James, or Martyr!, which it seems like everyone read. My favorite category this year is Translated Literature, where it seems like the books people have been talking about are hiding out — On the Calculation of Volume and Sad Tiger and, on the longlist, Perfection.” —a book critic
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“What function do the National Book Awards currently serve in the culture? What function should they serve? The answers to these questions yield very different responses. By and large, I think the NBAs convey less cultural ballast today than they did in the past — interpret that as you will. It would be interesting to BookScan their impact on hardcover sales through end-of-year numbers over the past decade.”—a publicist at a top-five publisher
- “It would be so cool if a debut novelist published by Deep Vellum won. But I’d be shocked. And would honestly fear Deep Vellum being able to handle distribution demand.” —a book critic
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“The only books I am really rooting for are On the Calculation of Volume (Book III); One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This; and I Do Know Some Things. Those are prob the best, most interesting books this year that were nominated. I will say it is a real shame that Brian Goldstone's book There Is No Place for Us was not nominated. Also why no Fort Bragg Cartel? Those are books people are deeply engaged with and speak to the problems … of life in America and its deleterious effects everywhere else.
On fiction, I think as I do every year: How depressing! An actually interesting novel that no one is talking about enough is Service by John Tottenham … a really funny book in a time when I think so much of writing is drained of humor. Helen DeWitt, as is true every year … should win every award.” —an editor at a literary magazine - “I follow pretty much all the big literary prizes, but the NBA has got to be my least favorite. I never like the options very much (in this case I enjoyed a few books on the longlist) and feel the selections can be pretty on the nose in their tackling of ‘Big American Topics.’ All to say, none of the books on the shortlist have piqued my interest this year. I'm sure they're great, but I may never find out.” —a literary Substacker
- “I haven't read any of this year's NBA nominees because I've mostly been reading books by or about dead people because the real money is in reviewing literary biographies. If I were betting on this year's prize, I would put my money on Rabih Alameddine or Karen Russell, both worthy writers whose careers are hitting an NBA-shaped crest.
If I were awarding prizes to the new books I've read this year, I'd probably award the National Book Award to Anika Levy's Flat Earth, a very funny conjuring of a digitally mediated and absolutely addled zoomer dystopia, a New York City I'm lucky not to experience directly because I'm an old man who doesn't look at his phone very much. I'd give the National Book Critics Circle award to Zoe Dubno's Happiness and Love, a sharp transposition of Thomas Bernhard's Woodcutters to the world of artists and writers cursed to dine, drink, and degrade each other in a fancy Soho loft. I'd give the Pulitzer to Stephanie Wambugu's Lonely Crowds, about the journey of two young Gen-X women from lower-middle-class New England via Liberalartsistan to NYC Bohemia, a journey I can very much relate to as a Masshole, is a very tender and wry book with a narrator whose quiet alienations often put me in mind of the narrators of Alberto Moravia. I'd give the Booker Prize to Leo Robson for his novel The Boys, a critic's novel more inviting than any of those written by Sontag, Wilson, or Trilling; a comedy of manners about the piecemeal replication of family in the aftermath of parental death set in London's Olympic summer of 2012. These are all books written by friends of mine. That's how prizes often work.” —a critic
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And now for an unscientific tally of the likely winners in a few select categories … |
A majority of the people we surveyed seemed to think that while The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) by Rabih Alameddine is the favorite to win this category, Megha Majumdar’s A Guardian and a Thief should win. |
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Almost unanimously, our pollees believe that Omar El Akkad’s One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This both will and should win. |
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Most people believe that Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume (Book III) will win and were split on whether Hamid Ismailov’s We Computers: A Ghazal Novel or Neige Sinno’s Sad Tiger should take the prize. |
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Harper’s Magazine’s First Gala Receives Some Uninvited Guests
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Harper’s Magazine held its first-ever gala dinner on Park Avenue last Thursday night, honoring New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger and the novelist Marilynne Robinson. It’s a notable departure for the 175-year-old publication. When its employees unionized in 2010, staffers pushed for the magazine to begin holding fundraising galas featuring major authors. Their hope was to become less dependent on the individual generosity of the magazine’s publisher, Rick MacArthur, who has often spent millions per year to help keep Harper’s running. Back then, MacArthur refused, perhaps to keep total control over the publication. According to a Harper’s spokesperson, his reversal is the result of “serious financial challenges” that have arisen through the past decade and a half’s changes to publishing and journalism. (It’s also possible that MacArthur has come to accept that he won’t be around to fund it forever.)
During the predinner cocktail hour, a jazz quartet provided accompaniment as white-gloved waiters offered trays of wine to guests. Adam Shatz, the Frantz Fanon biographer and London Review of Books editor, was telling me about one of his favorite books of the year, Tomorrow Is Yesterday. “A brilliant and very elegant dissection of the illusions of the quote-unquote peace process in Israel-Palestine,” he began, when we heard a loud eruption outside. Dozens of protesters from Writers Against the War on Gaza had assembled on the sidewalk and were marching in an oval and shouting “FREE FREE FREE Palestine!” They handed out issues of their New York Times critical broadsheet, the New York War Crimes. “A.G. Sulzberger receives press freedom award from his dad” read one of their fliers, which also featured the Times publisher’s face stamped with the designation “GENOCIDAL ACCOMPLICE.” (A.G.’s father, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., was on the gala’s benefit committee; the Times was one of the event’s official sponsors.)
WAWOG was there to object to the gala’s awarding the New York Times’ publisher and chairman a “First Amendment Award,” in light of what the group calls the “Paper of Zionist Record”’s biased coverage of Gaza during the region’s recent years of war and genocide. One protester called giving a press-freedom award to the head of the Times a complete joke, given what WAWOG sees as the Times’ pro-Israel bias amid the deadliest-ever conflict for journalists — with the Israeli military repeatedly appearing to target journalists in Gaza. Another marcher claimed that at least four former Harper’s columnists were demonstrating with them.
Inside, the gala’s programmed speakers included the actress and playwright Eleanor Reissa, performing an invigorating reading of Dorothy Thompson’s 1941 essay “Who Goes Nazi?,” which Harper’s was proud to remind attendees it had published. MacArthur, discussing press freedom and democracy, told the crowd that Harper’s has been “alert to danger.” A book editor turned to me and nodded toward the protesters: “Maybe not alert enough.”
When it was time to accept his award, Sulzberger appeared unfazed by the chanting. “I did not expect that you would have hired an entire marching band to welcome me,” he joked to the crowd. Robinson, who was there to accept an award for literary excellence, seemed less able to shake off the protesters. “I prepared remarks — they seem rather eclipsed,” she said after the noise from outside caused her to lose her place in her speech. The dining room then cracked up, either in sympathy or Schadenfreude, when she read the apparently prewritten line that “to experience democracy requires a little quiet.”
As for Sulzberger, he promised he’d try to find me after he finished another conversation, but instead ducked out the back door soon after, avoiding journalists and protesters alike. —Jack Denton |
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The November Releases You Should Buy, Skip, or Put on Hold at the Library |
On the Calculation of Volume (Book III), by Solvej Balle
If you knew a tragic accident were to happen, and you could stop it, would you? Balle probes that moral quandary in the excellent third installation in her speculative septology about a woman stuck in time. After New Directions published the English translations of the first two volumes last year, On the Calculation became a word-of-mouth sensation. It was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. Volume III has the same stark prose and airy atmosphere, but it’s charged with newfound political urgency. The series' lonely protagonist, Tara Seltzer, finds fellow travelers. Now working in community, she interrogates the social contract we have with others. Buy. —Cat Zhang, culture writer, The Cut
Flat Earth, by Anika Jade Levy
In her debut novel, the Forever Magazine founding editor offers a bleak portrait of a writer named Avery as she navigates grad school, a series of empty trysts, and her best friend Francis’s overnight success. Fans of Sarah Rose Etter and Elizabeth Wurtzel will find familiarity in Levy’s unfussy prose, though her most beautiful sentences usher in diagnoses of a dead-eyed generation, the brains of which have been ravaged by the stupidest corners of the internet. Through a series of vignettes, Levy plumbs the contrarian nonsense of Dimes Square — a scene where everyone is so loudly spewing bullshit, it’s hard to pick out whose shit stinks the worst. But Levy’s voice is at its best when burrowing inside Avery’s rotting brain, as she contends with the declining stock of her body and rattles her empty pill bottles. In what is easily one of my favorite debuts of the year, Flat Earth is so detached that I almost missed its underlying tenderness. Almost. Buy. —Emily Leibert, writer, The Cut
Palaver, by Bryan Washington
Washington’s third novel ruminates on familiar topics — estrangement, family, connection, Japan, Houston — asking if it’s possible to bridge gaps and heal wide wounds. It follows a man whose mother shows up on his doorstep after nearly a decade of them not speaking. It traces their reunion, the initial frigidness punctuated by moments of levity and intimacy, switching between their perspectives and offering bits of their histories until it reveals the full scope of their relationship. It’s Washington’s first novel where Houston is more of a ghost than living, breathing thing. It’s a compelling shift. Washington’s characters are often returning, in Palaver, they are making homes in new places with unfamiliar people and asking if this is a way to construct a fulfilling life. As is always the case with Washington, the answer isn’t neat, but Palaver isn’t absent of catharsis. There are lots of moments where the characters catch you off guard with their observations, reminiscent of when a friend randomly says a deeply profound thing while you’re having a totally ordinary conversation. Overall, a welcome return to Washington’s world. Buy. —Tembe Denton-Hurst, writer, the Strategist
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Book Gossip Subscribers on How They Find Time to Read |
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As a student at NYU School of Medicine, I used to purchase stacks of books from the McNally Jackson flagship store in Soho. It was compulsive, never at all productive, and I'd come out of the place each time promising myself that I would find the time. Then I did not. So I made it: I read the most-discoursed ones at restaurants while my classmates attended study groups and lectures. When that became impractical and I stopped caring about discourse, I moved the book pile to every subsequent residence at my own cost. The cost to my soul is the half of them left unread to this day.
These days I read audiobooks during walks and long runs. Tuesdays and Saturdays get the bulk of the listening time. Usually I alternate between a "big book" from the canon and new literary fiction. Most recently I bookended Bleak House by Charles Dickens with The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai and The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz. If it's draggy (Buckley by Sam Tanehaus, Ms. Desai) or I don't care for the story (Five-Star Stranger by Kat Tang, wonderfully strange for the first half) or the narrator (the zippy mid-Atlantic pep squad guy who read Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis who fit Seize the Day by Saul Bellow better) I will listen to the audio as I fall asleep and trust that the osmosis will guide my subconscious into unanticipated directions, following after my grandmother, who could not sleep through a night without an AM radio blaring me-ward. We are our ancestors, like it or not. —Maureen Miller
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I love tracking my books, not just because of my competitive nature, but because I love to see the data. I've had Goodreads forever, but it's kind of bad, so I also use Storygraph and Fable. I also use the BookRiot tracker that you copy in your Google Drive, and that has some really fun data visualization (author gender, sexuality, and region, length of book, genre, nonfiction versus fiction, etc.). I find picking a number of books you want to read in a year fun, and I usually pick 52 (a book a week), but I never want to feel like I'm choosing the books I read because of the goal. I found myself a few years ago mainlining graphic novels and novellas just to catch up, and I never want to find myself in that position again. I'll just lower the goal if I have to. I'm a mood reader, and I love to follow what I'm interested in at any given time.
I can read anywhere, but I do a lot of my reading in my car on my lunch break and on my couch on the weekends. I read at least 40 minutes a day during my hour-long lunch break, and I like to read at least three hours a day on weekends. My ideal Saturday is starting a book as soon as I get up in the morning and not stopping until I've finished. I can really get lost in a book and forget where I am, what year it is, and what position my body is in. Sometimes my husband has to remind me to drink or eat something because he'll walk by the living room and see me in the same position for hours at a time. I think reading is how I get into a flow state. Some people have running or yoga, I have books. —Kim Anguish
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