A few days late: the 2013 National Book Award fiction longlist was announced. Titles include a couple I have reviewed this year:
- Tom Drury, Pacific (Grove Press)
- Elizabeth Graver, The End of the Point (Harper/HarperCollinsPublishers)
- Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers (Scribner/Simon & Schuster)
- Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland (Alfred A. Knopf/Random House)
- Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (Hogarth/Random House) (My review)
- James McBride, The Good Lord Bird (Riverhead Books/Penguin Group USA)
- Alice McDermott, Someone (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
- Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge (The Penguin Press/Penguin Group USA)
- George Saunders, Tenth of December (Random House) (My review)
- Joan Silber, Fools (W.W. Norton & Company)
Funny enough, both the Lahiri and the Kushner are sitting in my pile of to-be-reviewed books; otherwise I’m not familiar with the rest. I’m anxious to get to them—in the meantime I have finished Juan Gabriel Vasquez’s excellent newest novel, and am working through Jonathan Lethem’s Dissident Gardens right now.