* Barnes & Noble named Louise Penny‘s THE BRUTAL TELLING as their sixteenth “Recommends” program main selection. The pick also marks three in a row for publisher Voice (following August’s The Day the Falls Stood Still, by Cathy Marie Buchanan and July’s The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, by Katherine Howe), a first for any single imprint.
* In the UK, The Bookseller reports that Nielsen BookScan data shows sales of almost 551,000 copies for Dan Brown’s THE LOST SYMBOL in the first five days on sale.
* Writers Edwidge Danticat and Deborah Eisenberg and poet Heather McHugh are among the new class of 24 MacArthur Fellows, as well as founding director of the University of Iowa Center for the Book, papermaker Timothy Barrett.
USAT list
* In other awards, yesterday the National Book Awards named the finalist for their special Best of the National Book Awards Fiction prize, and opened the voting to the public. Oddly, though story collections have been infrequent winners, they dominate the shortlist selected by 140 writers that is supposed to “represent the best of the National Book Awards for Fiction”:
The Stories of John Cheever
Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison
The Collected Stories of William Faulkner
The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor
Gravity’s Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon
The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty
NBA site
* In Canada, Margaret Atwood’s new book The Year of the Flood is among the 12 titles on the Giller Prize longlist.
* More prizes? The Dayton Literary Peace prize went–aptly–to Richard Bausch‘s Peace for fiction, and Benjamin Skinner‘s A Crime So Monstrous: Face to Face with Modern Day Slavery for nonfiction. Oprah pick Uwem Akpan had to settle for fiction runner-up.