Guardian first book award: the longlist 2012

Katherine Boo’s Behind The Beautiful Forevers is one of 11 titles on the Guardian first book award 2012 longlist. Photograph: Graeme Robertson for the Guardian

Big US hits line up against British poetry and Irish short stories for this year’s £10,000 prize.

By Alison Flood

Chad Harbach’s highly praised debut The Art of Fielding is competing with an Iraq veteran’s “raw, visceral” novel about the impact of war and a journalist’s account of the time she spent living in a Mumbai slum on the longlist for the Guardian first book award.

Eleven titles have been chosen for the £10,000 prize, from Mary Costello’s collection of Irish short stories The China Factory, released by small publisher Stinging Fly Press, to Harbach’s novel, which follows the story of baseball player Henry Skrimshander and arrives garlanded with praise from Jonathan Franzen and John Irving. For the second year running, Guardian readers nominated a title, this year choosing Sarah Jackson’s “assured and mysterious” poetry collection Pelt.

Publishers submitted 94 titles for the prize, and judges Ahdaf Soueif, Kate Summerscale, Jeanette Winterson and Guardian deputy editor Katharine Viner, chaired by Guardian Review editor Lisa Allardice, called in many more. Army veteran Kevin Powers was chosen for The Yellow Birds, a novel about a soldier’s return home after a year in Iraq, Patrick Flanery for his book about the fictional great South African writer Clare Wald, Absolution, and Charlotte Rogan for The Lifeboat, in which an ocean liner capsizes in 1914, stranding passengers in a lifeboat for three long weeks.

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Book Cover Clones: Why Do So Many Recent Novels Look Alike?

  By Ashley Fetters

There’s a new fad in book jackets—and it might have something to do with e-readers.

When Little, Brown released the cover art for J.K. Rowling’s forthcoming novel The Casual Vacancy earlier this month, with a snow-white, hand-lettered title draped lazily across a red jacket, it was hard to deny that the Mario J. Pulice design looked a little… familiar.

There was something recognizable about those looping, seemingly handmade cursive letters. Was it déjà vu, or had we seen this cover someplace else before?

Maybe not this very cover, but several notably similar ones. Handscript-titled book covers with simple handmade illustrations have been used lately all over the upper echelons of fiction: Last year, Chad Harbach’s divisive baseball bildungsroman The Art of Fielding had its title curlicued across the front, like the franchise name on an old-style home-team jersey; meanwhile, Pulitzer Prize winner Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot introduced itself to the world in a disarmingly dressed-down fashion, its name hurriedly jotted down over a comic-book graphic of a wedding band. Similarly, John Green’s 2011 book The Fault In Our Stars, Mark Haddon’s new release The Red House, Maggie Shipstead’s June debut Seating Arrangements, and Giorgio Faletti’s forthcoming Italian-import sensation A Pimp’s Notes all feature hand-scrawled titles that largely dominate their covers, accompanied by only minimal artwork.

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Books and words: Another year, another apocalypse looming

Chad Harbach: the wonder boy of 2011 Beowulf Sheehan

By Bob Hoover

It’s the custom (or stubborn habit) around newspapers to reflect on the 11 months gone by when December arrives. “Best of” lists occupy the attention of many writers, including this one (see mine here), so their creation does force us to be reflective in a business where reaction usually trumps reflection.

But changes don’t come gift-wrapped in tidy 12-month packages. In the world of American book publishing, 2011 flowed gradually from 2010 without sudden shocks or change, the nature of the passing year shaped by the inevitable progress of movements in the business that started years before.

One image captured the direction of that movement concisely — Daniel Clowes’ cover for the Dec. 5 New Yorker titled “Black Friday.” The cartoon shows a store with shelves filled with T-shirts, caps, bags and figurines of famous authors and a table displaying e-readers. Only a bottom shelf carries a row of print books.

It’s the bookstore of tomorrow, if you can find an actual bookstore (cognoscenti call them “bricks and mortar”) these days. The traditional business model, which is at least 200 years old, centers around new hardcover books prominently displayed in a bricks-and-mortar outlet where shoppers browse looking for familiar names or interesting covers.

That model is slowly slipping away, to be replaced by versions of the one on the New Yorker cover. Eventually, the new plan envisions a small space where only the covers of available books will be displayed along with that small digital square.

You’ll scan the square with your phone, buy the book online and then you’ll choose if you want an ebook or tell the store to print on paper no less, a real book on its copier/binder machine.

Cartoonist Clowes is no great seer. It seems clear he was inspired by an article in another magazine, “The Book on Publishing” by Keith Gessen in the October Vanity Fair.

Mr. Gessen, a young novelist and journalist, tells us he is a close friend of Chad Harbach, the “wonder boy” of 2011 who sold his novel, “The Art of Fielding,” for $665,000 advance to Little, Brown. For a first-time (or anytime) author it’s like getting one of those multimillion-dollar bonuses paid to executives of bailed-out banks.

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Big-League Payday

(Photo: Beowulf Sheehan)

Debut novels are big business again. But what are publishers shelling out for?

By Boris Kachka

Poor, lucky Henry Skrimshander: The rangy, corn-fed hero of The Art of Fielding, Chad Harbach’s debut novel, is a freakishly gifted shortstop who tries to take a brainy Wisconsin liberal-arts college to the top of Division III baseball. But come senior year, the scouts arrive on campus promising bonuses of up to $600,000—enough pressure to make any champion choke. Will Henry survive the commodification of his talent?

His creator is doing nicely so far. Harbach was, until March 2010, an under­employed freelancer whose biggest job, co-editing the journal n+1, was unpaid. He’d recently been laid off from a gig copy-­editing for McKinsey, the consulting firm, when, after nine long years, Harbach ­finally decided his first novel was ready for the market. The market agreed: Little, Brown beat seven other bidders and paid $650,000 for it.

Harbach, 35, isn’t the only novelist who’s made six figures for a well-hyped debut due out this fall, but he may be the only one to have written an article critiquing the very system responsible for his payday. In “MFA vs. NYC,” which ran in last fall’s n+1, Harbach argued that literary culture has split along two tracks: one dominated by timid writers teaching MFA students in the heartland, the other a New York–based scrum of hyperambitious would-be Great American Novelists fighting over publishers’ kitchen scraps. The first is secure but cloistered, the second unfair and unsustainable. “The rich get richer,” he wrote of the New Yorkers, “and the rest live on hope and copy-editing.”

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