All the “best of 2014” lists are finished and so we are ready to note for the record our final aggregation of the very Best Books of 2014. Anthony Doerr’s novel remains at the top as the consensus “book of the year,” with works of fiction claiming 7 of the top 10 slots overall. Our final lists are quite similar to the last installment from December, though Lily King’s Euphoria rose on the fiction chart and Leslie Jamison’s essays moved up on our nonfiction chart. As in the past, our final lists also note the editors and agents who worked on […]
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People, Etc.
Nan Vermylen Thornton will join Zachary Shuster Harmsworth as an agent. Previously, she was in-house counsel practicing copyright law at Pearson Education. The January Pennie’s Pick at Costco is BOSTON GIRL by Anita Diamant. More Best of 2014 lists keep coming in as the year draws to a close. Vanity Fair offers “11 Best Books of 2014 You Can Spend 2015 Reading” while the SF Chronicle‘s Top 10 list leads off with current “Best of the Best” fiction frontrunner ALL THE LIGHT YOU CANNOT SEE by Anthony Doerr. On that theme, the NYT recently featured Anthony Doerr’s long journey to […]
Nearly Final: Doerr Still Leads Among the Best of the Best Books of 2014
We’ll be back one more time in early 2015 once all of the final “best books of the year” lists are published (the latest is James Wood’s favorites), but as we near the end, our aggregated ranking of the best of all the “best books of 2014” has — as usual — yielded two quite solid lists of top fiction and nonfiction. Anthony Doerr’s novel remains in the lead for “book of the year” and Roz Chast’s book retains a comfortable lead among nonfiction titles: Top 10 Fiction of 2014 1. All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr (20) 2. Station […]
More Year-End Items
The Guardian has their annual feature in which they survey top UK editors, asking about their “books that deserved to do better” and the books they wish they had published. Or rather, they survey 11 men and 2 women — so Virago associate publisher Ursula Doyle has mobilized a broader look from female editors under the #hitsandmisses hashtag on Twitter. Robin Robertson at Jonathan Cape goes above and beyond in listing 3 books that deserved bigger audiences in “a grim year for literary publishing”: Adam Foulds’s In the Wolf’s Mouth, Elizabeth McCracken’s Thunderstruck, and “the one that really got away,” Other People’s Countries […]
Best of 2014 From NYT Critics Kakutani, Maslin, Garner
The New York Times’ daily critics Michiko Kakutani, Janet Maslin, and Dwight Garner each chose their 10 favorite books of 2014. As usual, there is little intersection between these 30 titles and the NYT Book Review’s official “10 Best” list. Also as is often the case, Kakutani picks are the most aligned with that 10 Best: She concurs on Klay, Chast, and Kolbert (and Garner is in sync on Lee): Kakutani Redeployment, Phil Klay Little Failure, Gary Shteyngart A Brief History of Seven Killings, Marlon James Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, Roz Chast Duty, Robert M. Gates The […]
A Well-Read Editor’s Favorite Books of 2014
As we’re well on our way to anointing the “Best of the Best Books of 2014” (Anthony Doerr and Emily St. John Mandel continue to pull away from the crowd), here is Publishers Lunch news editor Sarah Weinman’s addition to the seasonal recommendations. In her case, these ten favorite fiction and nonfiction books published during 2014 come from a reading pace of a little over one book a day. (With one overlapping exception, she will issue a separate crime fiction list elsewhere later this week.) Fiction Molly Antopol, THE UNAMERICANS (Norton) This debut short story collection is uncommonly worldly, wise, and heartfelt about […]