It Shant Leave my Hands
I just received my galley of the new Thomas Pynchon novel in the mail today, a nice way to kick off the weekend reading. Aside from its size (1100 pp), and the fact that its author is one of the most inventive, funny and beautiful writers in the world, I won't be losing track of this book. Why? Because my name is in the book. That's right, there on the title page printed in block letters is my name. Penguin no doubt did this so that a conveyor belt from review outlets to rare book rooms doesn't develop, which is what happened the last time Pynchon published a novel. Unread galleys immediately turned up at rare book dealers selling for around $300 each. This one, I promise, will be broke-backed, sat on, schlepped, rifled through, underlined and exclaimed upon. When I'm done I suspect it'll look not unlike other large galleys of yore, such as the Susanna Clarke novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, or Tony Judt's Postwar, which became like wet pie with no crust. Impossible to move from one place to the next in one piece.
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posted by John Freeman 2:43:00 PM
9 Comments:
You're lucky. I was told by our Penguin sales rep that there would be no galleys. Perhaps they're just not sending them to booksellers.
Well, the NBCC deadline for our fiction award is December 1st, so there's no way we could have read the book and judged it by then if we didn't get copies now...
That makes sense. I'm just disappointed to have not received one. I suppose they're keeping this one close to their Penguin chests.
It is understandable. Another related question: is it NBCC policy to make the submission lists for all awards public? Mystery Writers of America does that, and it's damn helpful to remember what books were published over the course of the year...
Well, actually, we work in a slightly different fashion than most awards. There's no submission fee (hence our blogger account and cashless prizes), and while we welcome submissions, the committee members generally recommend books they've already read to one another, so the lists we build during the year (and then shave down to 5 finalists), are generated from within, with publishers helping out of course by sending recommended books to the entire committee. Occasionally, there is a book that no one has read and reviewed and that gets submitted (at publisher discretion) and becomes a finalist when people discover it that way. It's how I stumbled across Ellen Meloy's book of last year. But a submission list in our case would be slightly misleading. In the NBCC newsletter which precedes the selection of the finalists we do publish a list of notable books, and that be of use.
John: Is there a date yet to announce the finalists?
Thanks for the reply, John. I do wonder if that particular method of operation means losing sight of a potentially worthy book that might have flown under the critical radar all year - but then there might be less chance of this happening this year because of the blog's availability.
For comparison's sake, the link to the MWA's submission list can be found here. It's no fun to be on the Best Novel or Best Short Story committees...
The finalists will be announced on January 20th, the winners will be announced in New York on March 7th and 8th. As for whether we miss stuff, I'm pretty confident we've prespackled all the cracks in this bathtub. There are 24 of us on the board, and about half of those people are assigning editors, which means they are screening books already from very, very large pools (some get 200 a day at the newspaper), and there is usually at least one of our judges double-dipping on another prize committee, like the Pulitzer. We also come from a variety of backgrounds, cultural, class, religious, etc., as well as different states, genre and non genre tastes, and our deadline is late enough that we can take one last look back through the stacks. Our committee lists balloon as high as 100 titles at some points before winnowing so if it's out there, we've usually seen it, touched it, sniffed it, etc. Or held on to it. I have a wall of bookcases that's about 25 feet long that holds about 1000 books that's pretty much dedicated to keeping things for exactly this reason.
Just so all our members know, we'll be including a full description of our awards procedures with our December ballot. So NBCC members who haven't quite understood how the awards are decided will get a full, official explanation then.
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