Thomas Pynchon has given the National Book Awards a gift in the form of a publicity hook. He will not appear at the ceremony tomorrow night, even though his book, Bleeding Edge, (Penguin Press; Penguin Audio) is one of the five finalists, giving both the New York Times and the Washington Post a headline.

Tomorrow night, BookTV.org will stream coverage of “red carpet arrivals and interviews,” live on their Web site at 6 p.m., followed by the awards ceremony, hosted by Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, broadcast on C-SPAN2 beginning at 7:40.

For an insider’s look at the crazy process of creating the P&L for one of the fiction finalist’s books, George Saunders who is up for Tenth of December, (Random House; RH Audio; BOT), read Dan Menaker’s “What Does the Book Business Look Like on the Inside?,” New York magazines’s excerpt from his memoir, published today, My Mistake, (HMH). In the Daily Beast, he writes about the most under-appreciated books he’s edited, (not mentioning that the Saunders title received more attention than anticipated, beginning with the NYT Magazine cover story, “George Saunders Has Written The Best Book You’ll Read This Year“).

Washington Post critic Ron Charles, says his money for tomorrow night’s winner, is on Rachel Kushner’s “brilliant” novel,  The Flamethrowers,  (S&S/Scribner; Brilliance Audio).

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 19th, 2013 at 11:09 am and is filed under Awards. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.