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Driving Miss Norma: One Family’s Journey Saying “Yes” to Living by Tim Bauerschmidt and Ramie Liddle (HC/HarperOne; Harper Audio) is an inspirational travel story about a 90-year-old woman facing a cancer diagnosis who took to the road with her son and daughter-in-law in an RV.

It will not be on bookshelves until May 2, 2017 but it is already in Amazon’s Top 100, catapulting up those rankings more than a hundred thousand places to move from #103,745 to #98.

That giant leap coincides with a brief story on All Things Considered about learning to live in the moment.

Shortly after becoming a widow, Norma learned she had cancer. Rather than spend the time left to her in hospitals and treatment rooms, Norma told her doctor, “Nope, I’m not doing any of that,” and spent her last year on a great adventure.

She discovered she loved key lime pie, and traveled to places, even those near by, she had never seen.

The book is born out of blog that her daughter-in-law kept that recounts the travels and character of Norma as she lived her last year to the fullest.

She died last week at 91, celebrated by her family “on the other side of the country from where her RV adventures began.”

Driving Miss Norma: One Family’s Journey Saying “Yes” to Living:
• ISBN: 9780062664327
• ISBN 10: 0062664328
• Imprint: HarperOne
• On Sale: 05/02/2017

The 2016 Hugo Award-winning novelist, N.K. Jemisin, returns with another of her NYT‘s columns focused on Science Fiction and Fantasy.

As we have written, she is a demanding and discriminating consumer of fiction. As a critic she is vibrantly engaged and is not willing to let much slide. As a reader she is interested in meaningful content rather than plot, values beautiful language, and appreciates in-depth characterizations. Since last December she has been sharing her views on Science Fiction and Fantasy in the NYT book review column “Otherwordly,” a bi-monthly roundup.

This month she takes on four works, a space opera, a graphic novel, the return of a beloved voice in Fantasy, and creepy speculative fiction.

The work she clearly likes best is the long awaited return of Peter S. Beagle, a favorite of Fantasy readers for books such as The Last Unicorn. His newest novel in 17 years is Summerlong (Tachyon Publications), a contemporary take on the Persephone myth.

Jemisin writes that the characters are “fully textured,” the story is about “how ordinary people change, and are changed by, the numinous,” and the setting is beautifully realized:

“It’s a rare story of summer that feels like the summer — like dreamy intense passions rising and arcing and then spinning away; like beauty underlaid with a tinge of sadness because it is ephemeral. Beagle has captured that seasonal warmth here, beautifully, magically.”

She also writes favorably about Pretty Deadly Volume 2: The Bear by Kelly Sue De Connick with art by Emma Ríos (Image Comics; OverDrive Sample), saying at its core it is “a masterpiece of mythopoeism that many literary fantasists struggle to emulate.”

She describes the story as a “weird western saga [that] gleefully, dreamily fuses a Greek chorus, spaghetti westerns, American trickster tales and creepy Japanese shoujo (girls’) manga.”

She is not a complete fan of the coloring in the comic, but says “This is a minor flaw. Every other element of this tale is a perfectly balanced mixture of the macabre with pure human poignancy. New readers will need Volume 1 too, but the return on investment is more than worthwhile.”

Vol.1 is Pretty Deadly: The Shrike (Image Comics; OverDrive Sample).

The full column is online. it ran in last week’s Sunday Book Review.

Jodi Picoult appeared today on CBS This Morning to talk about her new novel Small Great Things (PRH/Ballantine; RH Audio/BOT; OverDrive Sample).

Host Gayle King opened the interview by saying the book is “thought-provoking … interesting … and so timely” and asked Picoult how a “white woman of privilege” writes a book confronting racism.

Picoult acknowledged it “was not her story to tell” and said she met with a group of women of color for over 100 hours and had them vet the voice of the character Ruth. She also met with two former skinheads to learn “why they went into a life of hate and how they came out of a life of hate.”

Asked about the title, Picoult says it is from a quote by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and means that racism is perpetuated and dismantled by individual acts.

Charlie Rose asked her how to engage in a meaningful conversations about race. Picoult answers that, while it is hard to have such discussions without offending someone, choosing not to talk about racism in itself perpetuates the issue.

Saying that racism is not just about prejudice but also about power, she talks about the headwinds of racism that impede success but also the tailwinds of racism that power the success of the privileged.

Despite fears about Hurricane Matthew closing many theaters, Girl on the Train rolled to its expected major box office opening over the weekend. On the other hand, The Birth of a Nation, about a slave uprising, considered a major Oscar contender, did not do as well as expected.

Next week, two film adaptations open, one in theaters and the other on TV, and a new BBC series begins on PBS Masterpiece.

Set in Montana and opening in limited release on Oct. 14 is Certain Women, which the Toronto Film Festival site describes as “a tripartite portrait of striving, independent women whose lives intersect in suggestive and powerful ways.”

It is getting strong reviews. Calling the director among the “great American filmmakers,” Variety said few “can do quite as much with quiet as Kelly Reichardt. Superficially empty soundscapes are layered so intricately with the rustle of nature, the brooding of weather and the breathing of preoccupied people that her films come to seem positively noisy to a sympathetic ear. So it is in the marvelous Certain Women, where the storytelling has a similarly latent impact.”

It stars Laura Dern, Kristen Stewart, Michelle Williams, and Lily Gladstone and is based on short stories from Maile Meloy’s collection, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It (PRH/Riverhead, 2009), specifically, says Variety “Tome,” “Native Sandstone” and “Travis B.”

A tie-in edition has not been released.

Coming to Masterpiece, The Durrells in Corfu. It is a six-part adaptation of Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals and its two sequels says PBS.

It airs Sundays, October 16th through November 20th and stars Keeley Hawes from Upstairs Downstairs “as the an intrepid widow who decamps from dreary England to a sun-dappled Greek island with her four recalcitrant children, ages 11 to 21.”

A hit across the pond, ITV reports the show will run in the UK for its second season.

There is a tie-in:
My Family and Other Animals, Gerald Durrell (PRH/Penguin).

Also airing on TV is The Julius House: An Aurora Teagarden Mystery, based on the Charlaine Harris character of a crime-solving librarian. The series began in 2007 with Real Murders, the most recent is the 2016 title All the Little Liars.

Hallmark has previously aired episodes based on the first three novels in the series: Real Murders, A Bone to Pick, and Three Bedrooms, One Corpse.

The newest adapts the fourth novel, The Julius House. All star Full House alum Candace Cameron Bure.

New tie-ins have not been issued.

Already high on Amazon’s sales rankings Small Great Things by Jodi Picoult (PRH/Ballantine; RH Audio/BOT; OverDrive Sample), jumped even higher, rising from #54 to #36 on the strength of NPR Weekend Edition Saturday‘s feature.

Interviews by Scott Simon, the author of the LibraryReads pick which addresses the insidious effect of racism, opens with a gripping plot summary:

“Ruth Jefferson, a labor and delivery nurse at a hospital in Connecticut … is barred from tending to a newborn baby by the baby’s parents. Ruth Jefferson is African-American. Brittany and Turk Bauer are white supremacists. But Davis, their baby, goes into cardiac distress while Ruth is on duty, briefly alone in the nursery. Should she disobey the order she’s been given by the hospital or touch the baby to try to save him? And does her slight hesitation doom the newborn boy?”

Picoult says the story was inspired by a Flint, Michigan case and her desire to tell the story from different points of view,  “the African-American nurse, the white public defender and the skinhead father, as they all confronted their beliefs about power and privilege and race.”

Simon asks about the timeliness of the novel and Picoult responds “any time in the past 200 years would have been timely.”

The Supreme Court Justice who has become an unlikely cultural icon, complete with her own Rap nick name, the Notorious RBG (also the title of a  best selling book), has published  My Own Words, Ruth Bader Ginsburg with Mary Hartnett and Wendy W. Williams (Simon & Schuster; S&S Audio; OverDrive Sample).

It is a collection of writings and speeches on a wide range of legal and social issues, such as gender equality, but also her life, such as her love of opera and being Jewish.

Jane Pauley, who just taken over as the hots of CBS Sunday Morning, interviews the justice, calling her life one of “achievement and loss.” Just two days before she graduated from high school her mother died, leaving Ginsburg with advice she has never forgotten, “She said two things: Be a lady and be independent. Be a lady meant don’t give way to emotions that sap your energy, like anger. Take a deep breath and speak calmly.”

Perhaps part of being a lady as well are the collars RBG is so famous for wearing. She shows Pauley a few, including her “dissenting collar — It’s black and grim.”

After graduating first in her class from Columbia law school she got no job offers. She says, quoting another overlooked female law expert, “my dear colleague, Sandra Day O’Connor, put that very well. She said, ‘If Ruth and I came of age at a time when there was no discrimination against women, we would be retired partners in a major law firm.’”

Her achievements are many but her first national test came in 1972 when she wrote the first Supreme Court brief on gender discrimination. She is also remarkably collegial. She calls the Court the most collegial place she has ever worked and is famous for her friendship with the late Antonin Scalia.

A workaholic, she says “I will do this job as long as I feel that I can do it full steam. At my age, you have to take it year by year. So this year I know I’m fine. What will be next year or the next year? I can’t predict.”

Ginsburg will also be featured on CBS This Morning, PBS’s Newshour, and Charlie Rose.

Ever attuned to trends, James Patterson releases his first true crime title next week, complete with two co-authors and a double subtitle, Filthy Rich: A Powerful Billionaire, the Sex Scandal that Undid Him, and All the Justice that Money Can Buy: The Shocking True Story of Jeffrey Epstein, with John Connolly and Tim Malloy (Hachette/Little, Brown; Hachette Audio; Hachette Large Print; Hachette Audio; OverDrive Sample). In picture books, Jon Klassen ends his hat trilogy (I Want My Hat Back, 2011, and This Is Not My Hat, 2012) with a story about two turtle friends who find their relationship threatened when they both covet a white cowboy hat, We Found a Hat (Candlewick). Reviews promise a surprising twist at the end. In YA, a popular trilogy also concludes with Marie Lu’s The Midnight Star (PRH/Putnam Young Readers; Listening Library; OverDrive Sample).

In addition, Vince Flynn releases a new thriller and Laurell K. Hamilton the next title in her vampire series. All these titles, along with other notable titles arriving next week, are listed with ordering information and alternate formats on our downloadable spreadsheet, EarlyWord New Title Radar, Week of Oct. 10, 2016.

Media Attention

Hungry Heart: Adventures in Life, Love, and Writing, Jennifer Weiner (S&S/Atria, S&S Audio; OverDrive Sample).

The description of the newest Oprah pick sounded so much like her own upcoming book that Jennifer Weiner happily prepared to see the magic sticker on the cover of her new book. Her hopes were dashed when the pick actually turned out to be Love Warrior. As Jezebel.com reports, she tweeted her disappointment, and later withdrew it, apologizing for being “petty.” She said she’d been going through a rough time because a film deal recently fell through (she doesn’t name the deal. Perhaps it is the one that was recently reported by Hollywood trades, for her just released middle-grade book, The Littlest Big Foot).

People magazine has covered aspects of the book, including, “Why Author Jennifer Weiner Chose to Reveal Her Father Died from a Drug Overdose” and “Author Jennifer Weiner Reveals Why She Had Weight Loss Surgery.” She is scheduled to appear on CBS This Morning on Monday.

Award Contender

Do Not Say We Have Nothing, Madeleine Thien, (Norton; OverDrive Sample; Recorded Books audio coming in April).

On the Man Booker shortlist as well as the Carnegie Medal longlist, and, just recently announced, the lists for Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Award and Giller Prize, the author’s third novel is just being released in the US. There have been no consumer press reviews here yet (in a pre-pub review, Publishers Weekly gave it a star). Earlier this summer, Canada’s The Globe and Mail wrote that the book “cements Madeleine Thien as one of Canada’s most talented novelists” and that the story is a “gorgeous intergenerational saga, stretching as far back at the 1940s and traversing China” told from the perspective of a woman living in present-day Vancouver, who begins the book with the story of her father’s suicide.

Peer Picks

After last week’s overflow of peer recommendations, October 10th brings just four, but they include two October LibraryReads selections: one of the buzziest debuts of the year and the return of a reader-favorite.

The Mothers, Brit Bennett (PRH/Riverhead; Penguin Audio/BOT; OverDrive Sample).

“In a contemporary Black community in California, the story begins with a secret. Nadia is a high school senior, mourning her mother’s recent death, and smitten with the local pastor’s son, Luke. It’s not a serious romance, but it takes a turn when a pregnancy (and subsequent cover-up) happen. The impact sends ripples through the community. The Mothers asks us to contemplate how our decisions shape our lives. The collective voice of the Mothers in the community is a voice unto itself, narrating and guiding the reader through the story.” — Jennifer Ohzourk, St. Louis Public Library, St. Louis, MO

Additional Buzz: Bennett was recently named one of The National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35,” selected by Jacqueline Woodson, writing that Britt’s debut is “a stellar novel — moving, thoughtful. Stunning … [she is] the real thing.” It is the #1 Indie Next pick for October, with Jamie Thomas, Women & Children First, Chicago, IL, writing “The Mothers is an honest, modern, and triumphant book.” Essence says “Bennett’s hypnotic writing hooks you from the very beginning and never lets you go in this spine-tingling study of destiny.” BuzzFeed ran an excerpt and Vogue ran a profile. It earned starred reviews from Booklist, Library Journal, and Publishers Weekly and made the Fall Reading lists of Amazon’s Editors, BuzzFeed, New York Magazine, and WSJ.

Small Great Things, Jodi Picoult (PRH/Ballantine; RH Audio/BOT; OverDrive Sample).

“A black neonatal nurse is charged with causing the death of a white supremacist’s newborn baby. The story is told from the points of view of the nurse, her attorney, and the baby’s heartbroken father. As always, Picoult’s attention to legal, organizational, and medical details help the tale ring true. What sets this book apart, though, are the uncomfortable points it makes about racism. The novel is both absorbing and thought-provoking, and will surely spark conversations among friends, families and book clubs.” — Laurie Van Court, Douglas County Libraries, Castle Rock, CO

Additional Buzz: It is an October Indie Next selection and a Fall Reading pick by Amazon’s Editors and USA Today. In Style selected it as one of the “5 Books You Need to Read in October 2016” and Canadian librarians picked it as one of their Loan Stars titles. The author is scheduled for an interview tomorrow on NPR’ss Weekend Edition Saturday and many reviews are in the works.

Two additional Indie Next picks also pub this week:

The Clay Girl, Heather Tucker (ECW Press).

“Ari Appleton has been dealt the worst hand ever in terms of parents: her dad is an incestuous pedophile who is both charismatic and cruel, and her mother is an incredibly egocentric addict who bore six girls and has not one iota of love for anyone but herself. Ari moves away from the drug culture and sexual revolution in Toronto in the 1960s to Pleasant Cove, an idyllic place where she is surrounded by love and nurturing. This novel is full of take-your-breath-away writing, and Ari joins the ranks of heroines who take the worst society has to offer and turn it into strength and kindness.” —Linda Sherman-Nurick, Cellar Door Books, Riverside, CA

The Life-Writer, David Constantine (Consortium/Biblioasis; OverDrive Sample).

“Occasionally tragic and always tender, Constantine’s novel is a moving exploration of the ways in which we relate to the people we love. After the death of her husband, Katrin — a literary biographer who has dedicated her career to recording the lives of obscure and largely unsuccessful writers — finds herself drawn to a new project: telling the story of the early life and first love of the man she would later marry. A remarkable story of grief, rediscovery, and reconciliation.” —Sam Kaas, Village Books, Bellingham, WA

The Singing Bones, Shaun Tan (Scholastic/Arthur A. Levine Books).

This new take on Grimms’ fairy tales earns the coveted all-star status this week, getting starred reviews from Booklist, Kirkus, and Publishers Weekly. It is also a Fall Reading pick from Amazon’s Editors.

Tie-ins

Two additional tie-ins for Trolls arrive this week:

Trolls Graphic Novels #1: Hugs & Friends, Dave Scheidt, Tini Howard, and Kathryn Hudson (Macmillan/Papercutz; also in trade paperback).

The Art of Trolls, Jerry Schmitz (PGW and Legato/Cameron + Company).

The movie opens Nov. 4.

Read our earlier coverage here and here and follow the tie-in link below for an extensive list of additional titles.

There is also a new tie-in for Moana:

The Story of Moana: A Tale of Courage and Adventure, Disney Book Group (Hachette/Disney Press).

The newest Disney animated film opens Nov. 23.

Read our earlier coverage here and here and find an extensive list of additional titles by following the tie-in link below.

For our full list of upcoming adaptations, download our Books to Movies and TV and link to our listing of tie-ins.

“Some Pig” declared Charlotte the spider in E.B. White’s classic children’s book, Charlotte’s Web. Melissa Sweet, a Caldecott Honor-winning illustrator, borrows that line to title her new biography of the beloved author, Some Writer!: The Story of E. B. White (HMH Books for Young Readers).

The title is rising on Amazon’s sales rankings, jumping from #1,275 to #160, the result of coverage on NPR’s All Things Considered.

Sweet, a collage artist, created the booking letters, manuscript drafts, photos, illustrations, and more, offering readers, young and old, layered, detailed, and colorful images to investigate.

All Things Considered calls it “delightful” and outlines how White came up with his two most famous story ideas, “Stuart Little came to him in a dream,” says Sweet, “one he had on a train. He woke up and wrote it all down … The beginning of Charlotte’s Web was because he had a sick pig that died and E.B. White wanted redemption. He wanted to find a way to save the pig’s life.”

The book, which Sweet calls a “176-page picture book biography” earned starred reviews from Booklist, Horn Book, Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, and School Library Journal.

The NPR page features some of the wonderful illustrations, more can be seen in the book video below and in this feature by PW.

The live chat has now ended. You can read it below.

Join us for the next live chat with Alex George, author of Setting Free the Kites, on Wednesday, Nov. 16, 4 to 5 p.m., ET.

To join the program, sign up here.

Dogs have the ability to create “a picture of the world through smell” says Alexandra Horowitz in her new book Being a Dog: Following the Dog Into a World of Smell (S&S/Scribner; S&S Audio; OverDrive Sample). It is rising on Amazon’s sales rankings after a feature on NPR’s Fresh Air, bounding up the charts to #94 from #8,258.

During the program Horowitz discusses how dog’s snouts work, that they can smell what time of day it is, and their work conducting search and rescue, bomb and drug detection, and cancer diagnosis. They can even smell electronics law officers want to locate. So amazing is their ability that they can smell a trace sent at a measurement of a trillionth of a gram.

Horowitz explains that dogs breathe differently than humans and their exhale, through the side of their nose, helps them hold onto scents longer, “It’s like a circular breathing of smelling. It also creates a little puff on the ground, a puff of air that might actually allow more odor molecules to come up toward their nose to be sniffed.”

She also discusses how important dog’s interactions with different smells are, warning, says NPR, “that pulling dogs away from smell-rich environments, such as fire hydrants and tree trunks, can cause them to lose their predisposition to smell.”

When we force dogs away from their smelling time and into the visual world we recognize, Horowitz says dogs “start attending to our pointing and our gestures and our facial expressions more, and less to smells.” She continues:

“I really am trying to counter what I and lots of owners have done our whole lives, which is discourage smelling. In fact, instead I’m trying to embrace it. So on a ‘smell walk,’ I just let the dog choose what we’re going to do, where we’re going to go, and how long we’re going to stay there. … I just let the dog take charge. Sometimes our walks are pretty much standing around, actually, but I think the dog is enjoying himself.”

The interview connected with listeners, so much so that an older book by Horowitz also saw a jump. Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know (S&S/Scribner; Tantor Media; OverDrive Sample). It  rose from #8,761 all the way to #302 on Amazon’s rankings.

For those who prefer cats, a report published yesterday in the The Wall Street Journal [subscription may be required] says watching cute cat videos makes people feel “significantly happier, more content and more energized … as well as less anxious, less annoyed and less sad.” Do yourself a favor and watch this:

Back to the dogs, here is the Fresh Air interview:

The first trailer for the Netflix adaptation of Daniel Handler’s (aka Lemony Snicket) A Series of Unfortunate Events (HarperCollins) has just been released. In keeping with the books’ tongue-in-cheek tone, it is not a traditional trailer. Rather than building anticipation with a litany of exciting scenes and major stars, just one character appears, Patrick Warburton as Lemony Snicket, wandering through the dimly-lit stage set, warning people to “look away.”

The entire series will be available on Netflix beginning January 13, 2017 (which happens to be a Friday).

Watch closely, several visual jokes are embedded in the teaser.

According to Neil Patrick Harris, who plays Count Olaf in the show, the series is Netflix’s most expensive production to date. While co-hosting Live! with Kelly last month, he described the new adaptation as “super dark … a much darker take on the material than has been seen before”  but also “fun” and “exciting” and said it’s been planned as a “four-quadrant show,” to appeal to kids, teens, 20-somethings, and adults. The eight-episode first season will cover the first four titles in the 13-book series.

So far, no tie-ins have been announced.

Below is an archived version of the October GalleyChat, featuring librarians discussing their favorite forthcoming books.

Join us for the next live chat on Tuesday, Nov. 1 (details here).

Winston Groom has just published first novel in nearly 20 years, a Western, inspired by a story about J.P. Morgan and Pancho Villa,  El Paso (Norton/Liveright; Recorded Books; OverDrive Sample).

In an interview on NPR’s All Things Considered, Groom says he gave up writing fiction after Forrest Gump because he could not find a subject that captured his interest:

“I think that every novelist of the kind of novels that I write has in them maybe one really good book … but the trouble with so many novelists is that they keep on writing novels even when they run out of ideas. … So I was thinking, after the commercial success of Forrest Gump, that I didn’t really have any ideas that really grabbed me.”

He wrote nonfiction instead, on the history of the Civil War and WWI and WWII. He also wrote books about the West, all of which might have helped him imagine his next novel.

He tells NPR that a friend of his, “Eddie Morgan (a distant relative of the late J.P. Morgan), used to talk about his family’s million-acre cattle ranch in northern Mexico, and how Pancho Villa attacked it in 1916 … had the ranch manager sabered to death and then kidnapped his children.” Groom thought he could make a story of that.

The result says NPR is “a sprawling, 400-plus-page novel [that] takes place during the Mexican Revolution and follows a railroad tycoon on a manhunt across the High Sierras to rescue his kidnapped grandchildren from Pancho Villa. The book’s made-up characters interact with historical figures a lot like they did in Forrest Gump: Lt. George S. Patton … the cowboy movie star Tom Mix, the Socialist journalist John Reed and the Civil War writer Ambrose Bierce.”

In their review, Kirkus says “It’s not Lonesome Dove, but Groom’s Searcher’s-like rescue pursuit and his allusive homage to Treasure of the Sierra Madre make for an entertaining Western story.” Publishers Weekly calls it a “historically vivid and marvelously complex tale.”

El Paso is running at a rough 2:1 ratio, but Forrest Gump did not break big until after the film was made so keep an eye out for another possible sleeper hit.

Many major book awards will be announced soon. The New York Times offers a guide to the contenders, beginning with the Nobel Prize in Literature, to be announced a week later than usual this year, on Oct. 13. It’s the most difficult to predict, both because the voting process is secretive and because the prize is often awarded less for literary excellence than for political reasons. As Philip Roth, a perennial contender, once remarked, “I wonder if I had called ‘Portnoy’s Complaint’ ‘The Orgasm Under Rapacious Capitalism,’ if I would thereby have earned the favor of the Swedish Academy.” With so little to go on, the NYT reports on betting in the U.K., which is led by usual suspect Haruki Murakami and the Syrian poet Adonis.

The Man Booker Prize, which will be announced on Oct. 25, is easier because the judges have announced a shortlist of six titles. The two U.S. contenders were published here in 2015 (as a U.K. award, eligibility is based on U.K. publication dates) and have track records. The Sellout by Paul Blatty (Macmillan/FSG, 3/3/15; OverDrive Sample) won the National Book Critics Circle Award last year and Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen (PRH/Penguin; OverDrive Sample; 8/18/15) was on the shortlist. On the other hand, David Szalay’s  All That Man Is (Macmillan/Graywolf; OverDrive Sample; 10/4/16) has just been released here and is just beginning to receive consumer reviews. The NYT does not hazard a guess at who will win.

The U.K.’s Guardian offers analyses of the list from the perspective of one of the judges, who claims to love them all, and from the odds makers who put Deborah Levy in the lead for Hot Milk (Macmillan/Bloomsbury USA; OverDrive Sample; 7/12/16), described by the judge as “like Virginia Woolf with good jokes.” Don’t take much stock in the odds, however, as the Guardian notes, “the frontrunner hardly ever wins.”

The fiction and nonfiction longlists for National Book Awards are also analyzed, but not the poetry and young people’s lit. longlists. The shortlists will be announced on Oct. 6.