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Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.
2024 NBCC Awards Longlist: Fiction
With the PEN Award, the NBCC often has the most unexpected end of year finalists, but this year’s list is probably as a consensus of a lists from them as I can recall. Only two here stand out as unusual: Sister Deborah and Us Fools, though this might be the highest profile list out this year that does not include All Fours. I am also of the opinion that if you are going to make a big show of announcing finalists ahead of the award, some description or explanation of what makes each book special is appropriate. Sure there was language from some review of this body of critics that would have illuminated, contextualized, or otherwise made the case for the excellence of these book, especially for the ones from whom this is the most major spotlight they have, or ever will have, to enjoy.
62 Books ‘The Ezra Klein Show’ Guests Recommended This Year
Just when end of year list are hitting the “yea I have seen all of these before” point, I found this list of the books recommended by guests on the Ezra Klein podcast really browsable. Frontlist, backlist, heavily non-fiction and specific. It feels different because it is different.
Abolish the Categories
Yasmin Zaher writes in The Drift about the insufficiency of literary categories–really of any kind. Having read her novel The Coin, and the lead paragraph here, I can understand why extant, and to some extent even hypothetical categories, feel to her constraining. This is not a particularly new case and I would imagine that each writer would very much like the chance, however possible, to make their case to readers on their own, specific terms. This wave breaks, though, on the reef of reality. There are too many books to take them one by one and learn about the eccentricities, concerns, and worldview of each writer and book before having read it. Categories exist not because they are true or right or immutable; they exist because they are useful. Mashups and multi-genre are more accepted now that at any time I can think of, the word and sales of Romantasy shows this incontrovertibly. The only solace I can offer a writer, perhaps one like Zaher, is that it is almost always the unclassifiable and strange that become literary monuments. Beloved and Ulysses and Moby-Dick and Crime & Punishment and Invisible Man and Mrs. Dalloway and Love in the Time of Cholera: their gravity was such that new galaxies of understanding formed around them.
Taking Stock of the Year in Adaptations
Rebecca and I look back at what literary adaptations had on offer in 2024, and in at least one case whether or not it actually was a literary adaptations. Pretty eclectic year already, with several major releases still to come before the calendar flips.