The last of the four NBA longlists, for fiction, was announced Thursday morning. Evenly divided between men and women, it includes two previous NBA winners (Alice McDermott and Thomas Pynchon, though the latter declined to accept his 1974 award for Gravity’s Rainbow) and a few previous nominees. There is only one debut novelist (Anthony Marra), two story collections (Saunders and Silber), and most of the nominees come from four big houses. As people are discussing the newly announced changes in Booker candidates for 2014, under the existing rules Jhumpa Lahiri is a contender for both prizes:
Pacific, Tom Drury (Grove)
The End of the Point, Elizabeth Graver (Harper)
The Flamethrowers, Rachel Kushner (Scribner)
The Lowland, Jhumpa Lahiri (Knopf)
A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, Anthony Marra (Hogarth)
The Good Lord Bird, James McBride (Riverhead)
Someone, Alice McDermott (FSG)
Bleeding Edge, Thomas Pynchon (Penguin Press)
Tenth of December, George Saunders (Random House)
Fools, Joan Silber (Norton)
And for another list of award nominees, there’s the shortlist for the FT/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award. Martin’s book has not been published in the US yet — and Brad Stone’s book won’t release until October 15:
The Alchemists: Inside the Secret World of Central Bankers, Neil Irwin
Making it Happen: Fred Goodwin, RBS and the Men Who Blew Up the British Economy
Iain Martin
Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier
The Billionaire’s Apprentice: The Rise of The Indian-American Elite and The Fall of The Galleon Hedge Fund, Anita Raghavan
Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, Sheryl Sandberg
The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, Brad Stone