In The Guardian they get a decent number of big-name authors to suggest their Best holiday reads 2014.
Tucked in here is also some information I haven't heard elsewhere yet: one of those recommending is Sarah Churchwell, who writes:
As longtime readers know, one of my biggest issues with the Man Booker (and many other literary prizes) is that they don't reveal the names of the submitted titles (a major issue since, given the strict limits on how many titles each publisher can submit, means that inevitably some (and possibly many) worthy titles are not even in the running).
Of course, this year is also the one where they've fairly dramatically changed the rules, both allowing books published in the UK by non-Commonwealth authors writing in English to be considered (i.e. opening the floodgates to US fiction) and changing the formula as to how many titles each UK publisher can submit; see my previous discussion for more about all that.
Tucked in here is also some information I haven't heard elsewhere yet: one of those recommending is Sarah Churchwell, who writes:
As I am a Man Booker prize judge this year, my summer reading list consists of 160 new novels that I can neither name nor (currently) endorseAs best I can tell, no one has made public the number of titles being considered for this year's Man Booker Prize -- presumably saving the announcement for the 23 July longlist announcement. So is Churchwell's number her guesstimate (we've had judges tossing those out in previous years -- many of them seem to have a bad head for numbers) or is it the actual number ?
As longtime readers know, one of my biggest issues with the Man Booker (and many other literary prizes) is that they don't reveal the names of the submitted titles (a major issue since, given the strict limits on how many titles each publisher can submit, means that inevitably some (and possibly many) worthy titles are not even in the running).
Of course, this year is also the one where they've fairly dramatically changed the rules, both allowing books published in the UK by non-Commonwealth authors writing in English to be considered (i.e. opening the floodgates to US fiction) and changing the formula as to how many titles each UK publisher can submit; see my previous discussion for more about all that.