Proving the fluidity of nationality these days, Jhumpa Lahiri is now a contender for two national fiction awards for her novel, The Lowland, (RH/Knopf; RH Audio; RH Large Print). She is on the Booker shortlist, limited to authors from the British Commonwealth and Ireland (she was born in London to parents who had immigrated from India). She is also on the longlist for the National Book Awards, announced today, which are limited to authors from the U.S. (her family moved to the U.S. when she was two).

The list also includes George Saunders’ collection of short stories, The Tenth of December, (Random House; BOT), which was propelled onto best sellers lists earlier this year by the  NYT Magazine cover story, “George Saunders Has Written The Best Book You’ll Read This Year.”

The entire list, with annotations and links to selected reviews and author interviews is on the Book Beast web site. Full bibliographic information for all the titles is available on our downloadable spreadsheet, Natl-Book-Awards-Fiction-Longlist.

This is the final of the four longlists; those for Young People’s Literature, Poetry and Nonfiction were announced earlier this week. Finalists will be announce on Oct. 16 and the winners on Nov. 20. 

As publisher of 3 of the 10 titles on the National Book Awards longlist announced today, W.W. Norton is tied with the much larger Random House for number of titles. They are also one of two independent publishers represented on the list; the other is Atlantic Monthly Press, with one title. (Full bibliographic information for all the titles is available on our downloadable spreadsheet, Nat’l Book Awards – Nonfiction Longlist).

As NPR’s All Things Considered noted on Monday, the National Book Awards “have been criticized for nominating obscure authors whose books don’t sell as well as winners of the Pulitzer Prize or the Man Booker Prize.” None of the titles on this  year’s nonfiction longlist would be considered esoteric, but few of them have received much attention to date. The most well-known is probably Lawrence Wright’s investigation into Scientology, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, & the Prison of Belief by Lawrence Wright, (RH/Knopf).

In an attempt to steer away from “obscure authors,” notes NPR, the judging panels have added “nonwriters, including librarians and book sellers.”  However, only one bookseller is on a panel; Rick Simonson of Seattle’s Elliott Bay bookstore on the fiction panel. The sole librarian is Lisa Von Drasek, curator of the Children’s Literature Research Collections of the University of Minnesota (and EarlyWord Kids Contributor).

The full longlist, with annotations and links to reviews, is on the Book Beast web site. The fiction longlist will be announced tomorrow morning.

Following yesterday’s announcement of the longlist for the National Book Awards for Young People’s Literature, the poetry longlist was announced this morning.

The Book Beast, which has the exclusive on the announcement, notes that the list includes “acknowledged masters like Frank Bidart, Lucie Brock-Broido, and Brenda Hillman; dynamic newcomers like Matt Rasmussen, and the decade-in-the-making follow-up to Mary Szybist’s debut, National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Granted.”

The Book Beast annotates each title, with links to reviews and author interviews. Full bibliographic information is available on our downloadable spreadsheet, Natl Book Awards- Poetry Longlist.

The nonfiction longlist will be announced tomorrow, followed by the fiction list on Thursday.

The National Book Awards committee is working to create excitement about this year’s nominees. Taking a cue from other awards, the announcements will be rolled out slowly, with a longlist for each category, followed by shortlists on Oct. 16 and the winners announced on Nov. 20.

Adding more anticipation, and more opportunity for media coverage, the longlists of ten titles for each category are being announced each day this week, on the Book Beast:

Today —  Young People’s Lit. — Click here for the BookBeast listing with annotations and links to consumer reviews. Our downloadable spreadsheet with bibliographic information and alternate formats — Nat’l Book Awards; Young People’s Longlist

Tues. — Poetry

Wed. — Nonfiction

Thurs. — Fiction

Covers of the titles on the Young People’s Literature longlist below:

The British literary world is “stunned,” reports the UK Independent, by the news that the influential Man Booker Awards will allow entries from U.S. authors next year.

The organizers say that excluding US writers is increasingly “anachronistic.” Indeed, nationalities are becoming more fluid. For instance, Ruth Ozeki, on the shortlist for A Tale for the Time Being, (Penguin/Viking), was born in New Haven CT., studied at Smith College, and now lives in both the U.S. and Canada. Jumpa Lahiri, author of The Lowland,  (RH/Knopf), was born in London to Indian immigrants, moved with her family to the U.S. when she was two, currently lives in Rome, but has said she considers herself American.

The second LibraryReads list, featuring the ten titles published in October that librarians most look forward to promoting, is now available.

The number one title is The Rosie Project, (S&S; S&S Audio; Thorndike). As we’ve reported, this debut has been building a groundswell of support from librarians for several months.

The other nine titles on the list represent a mix of genres by both well-known authors and debuts as well as nonfiction, from large and amsller publishers, in both hardcover and original trade paperback.

Download the official release here; OctoberLibraryReadslist. Download our spreadsheet with ordering information and alternate formats here; LibraryReads, Oct. The list and promotional materials will be posted on LibraryReads.org on Oct. I.

Nominate your favorites titles for upcoming lists. The deadline for the November list is Oct. 1.

The shortlist for the Man Booker Awards was announced this morning. Although U.S. writers are not eligible for this award, it has significant impact here. The Booker has made long-running U.S. best sellers of many titles, including Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and Yann Martel’s Life of Pi.

Below are the 2013 titles, with links to reviews:

We Need NewNames, NoViolet Bulawayo, (Hachette/Little, Brown)  — Consumer review links

The Luminaries, Eleanor Catton, (Hachette/Little, Brown) — coming in Oct — no U.S. consumer reviews yet; no prepub reviews listed; UK reviews — Telegraph; The Observer

Harvest, Jim Crace, (RH/Doubleday/Nan A. Talese) —  Consumer review links

The Lowland, Jhumpa Lahiri, (RH/Knopf) — coming late Sept. — no consumer reviews yet, but it is on the majority of “most anticipated” lists for the fall

A Tale for the Time Being, Ruth Ozseki, (Penguin) — Consumer review links

The Testament of Mary, Colm Tóibín, (S&S/Scribner)  — Consumer review links

The Booker Awards traditionally engender controversy: they have been regarded as too British, too male, too popular, and, conversely, not readable enough.

This year’s list seem to have been crafted to answer all those criticisms. It includes authors from Zimbabwe, New Zealand and Canada (in today’s world, though, nationality is not as clear as it once was. Jumpa Lahiri, for instance, was born in London to Indian immigrants, moved with her family to the U.S. when she was two, now lives in Rome, but has said she considers herself American). Four of the six authors are women and although the list skews towards the literary, it also includes authors who have been best sellers.

The title that leads the list, according to British bookies, Harvest by Jim Crace, arriving at the end of this month here, has been ordered in minimal quantities by U.S. libraries. If  Crace wins, it would be a fitting end to a career; the author has claimed this will be his last book.

The book most widely represented in U.S. libraries is Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland, to be published here in two weeks. Lahiri became a best seller as a result of another prize; she won the 2000 Pulitzer in fiction for her debut collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies. Both her first novel, The Namesake and her next collection of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth, were best sellers.

The one debut on the list, NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names, is also well represented in U.S. libraries, with most still showing significant holds.

The title that was ordered the most lightly by U.S. libraries is New Zealand author Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries, which will be published here at the end of October. This is her second novel; her first, published here in 2010 when she was just 23, The Rehearsal, received praise from the NYT Book Review. 

The winner  will be announced on October 15.

Oh, to be in the U.K., where people seem to care about book awards. There, they actually bet on the longlist for the Booker Prize and the recent Hugo Awards caused The Guardian to assert that, “there are few things as entertaining as the ruck that follows the announcement of literary awards, and the Hugos … are no exception.”

The winner for best novel was John Scalzi for Redshirts: A Novel with Three Codas (Macmillan/Tor; Brilliance Audio), described as a “sort of a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead for the SF crowd” because it “deconstructs the Star Trek mythos with a nudge-nudge-wink-wink” by focusing on “the ubiquitous disposable crewmen from USS Enterprise on the TV show, usually the first to die on any given mission.”

The controversy appears to be whether the Hugos should be give any credence, since, unlike the Clarkes or the Kitschies, they are voted on by the public (or, at least, those who attend the annual WorldCon); the Guardian thinks there should be room for populism.

Announcing the longlist for the Man Booker Prize yesterday, the panel of judges declared it the most diverse in the prize’s history. The Booker has been accused of a British bias; seven countries are represented this year  (U.S. are not eligible). Past lists have also  under-repreresnted women (an impetus for the creation of the Women’s Prize for Fiction); 7 of the 13 authors this year are female.

Seven of the titles have been published in the U.S. with one more, Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland, (RH/Knopf) coming in September (covers above; download our spreadsheet Booker Longlist 2013 Titles Pubbed in US).

The Booker has made long-running U.S. best sellers of many books, including Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and Yann Martel’s Life of Pi.

The shortlist will be announced on Sept. 10th and the winner in October.

Below, John Green, accepting the Indie Prize given by the American Booksellers Association to writers who best represent commitment to independent book stores, calls “bullshit” to the concept that authors like him, who speak directly to their readers via social media, don’t “need the value-sucking middlemen of bookstores and publishers and in the future … no one will stand between author and reader except possibly an e-commerce site that takes just a tiny little percentage of each transaction.”

He hates being held up as an example of an author who doesn’t need support from publishers, editors, librarians and booksellers and ends by saying,”We built … the book business, the idea-sharing, consciousness-expanding business together … and we’re going to keep building this together.”

His comment about Ayn Rand is worth an award in itself.

Called an “often breathtakingly dark and crazy satire on modern American life ” by The Guardian, AM Homes’ novel, May We Be Forgiven won the Women’s Prize for Fiction (formerly  The Orange Prize), announced in London yesterday, confounding the bookmakers (the favorite was Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel), winning against a group of  finalists that also included Zadie Smith and Kate Atkinson.

The Prize has secured a new sponsor and will soon be called the Bailey’s Prize for Fiction. Perhaps Bailey’s is courting reading groups.

The Agatha Awards were announced on Saturday, just two days after the Edgars. Among the many well-known authors and publishers picking up awards, including Louise Penny who won Best Novel for The Beautiful Mystery (Macmillan/Minotaur), was small independent Dallas publisher Henery Press, winning Best First Novel with Lowcountry Boil by Susan M. Boyer. The Childrens/Young Adult award went to the second in the Code Busters Club series, The Haunted Lighthouse by Penney Warner (Egmont).

All the winners and nominees are listed after the jump. Download our spreadsheet with ordering information and other available formats, Agatha 2012, Winners and Nominees.

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Last night, the James Beard Foundation declared Gran Cocina Latina: The Food of Latin America, Maricel Presilla (W. W. Norton) the Cookbook of the Year. It has already won acclaim, appearing on several 2012 cookbooks lists (see our downloadable spreadsheet, 2012 — Best Cookbooks) and winning the IACP Award for Best General Cookbook.

Conversely, the book that had been named  IACP’s Cookbook of the Year, was a Beard category winner, for International, Jerusalem: A Cookbook by Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi, (Ten Speed Press).

Marcus Samuelsson’s Yes, Chef: A Memoir, (Random House; RH Audio) won for Writing And Literature. It had also won the IACP’s award for a similar category, Literary Food Writing.

Inducted into the Cookbook Hall of Fame was Anne Willan, author of many titles on French cooking, including La Varenne Pratique (RH/Crown, 1989). Her next book is coming in August, One Soufflé at a Time: A Memoir of Food and France (Macmillan/St. Martin’s).

Unexpectedly, the winner in the Reference and Scholarship category is also available in audio; The Art Of Fermentation: An In-Depth Exploration Of Essential Concepts And Processes From Around The World, Sandor Ellix Katz, (Chelsea Green Publishing; audio, from Tantor— MP3 Audio Sample).

Following the jump, the full list of winners; click here to download our spreadsheet with ordering information, James Beard Cookbook Award Winners, 2012.

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Dennis Lehane won the Mystery Writers of America Award for Best Novel last night for Live by Night. In his acceptance speech, he thanked librarians for offering “a light in the darkness for the kids from the wrong side of the tracks,” reports Shelf Awareness.

Lehane won over six other nominees in that category, including Gillian Flynn for Gone Girl.

Click to download a spreadsheet of all the Edgar-Nominees-and-Winners in the book categories, with ordering information, including audio, large print and paperback formats.

Winners in the book categories are listed after the jump: (more…)

Gillian Flynn’s huge best seller, Gone Girl, did not make the cut from the longlist to the shortlist for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. Her name appears on the cover of one of the six finalists, however. In the single blurb on Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life, (Hachette/Little, Brown/Reagan Arthur), Flynn calls it “One of the best novels I’ve read this century.”

Two previous winners are on the list for their new books, Zadie Smith for NW (Penguin/Viking) and Barbara Kingsolver for Flight Behavior, (Harper).

The Guardian picks Bring Up the Bodies, (Macmillan/Holt) by British author Hilary Mantel as the one to beat, having already won two major UK awards this year, the Booker and Costa prizes. No book has won all three in one year.

Also on the list are Americans Maria Semple for Where’d You Go, Bernadette (Hachette/Little, Brown) and A. M. Homes for May We Be Forgiven (Penguin/Viking).

Previous prize winners include Madeline Miller last year for her debut novel, The Song of Achilles, (Harper/Ecco), Lionel Shriver for We Need to Talk about Kevin (Harper; 2005), Marilynne Robinson for Home (Macmillan/FSG; 2009) and Ann Patchett for Bel Canto (HarperCollins; 2002).

The winner of the £30,000 prize will be announced on June 5th.