Yes, they've announced the longlist for the Man Booker Prize.
They selected twelve titles (they can select twelve or thirteen), from 145 titles they considered (but whose names they won't tell us; see my previous mention ...) -- it's unclear what Booker Prize Foundation Literary Director Ion Trewin was babbling about last week when he claimed there were 147 novels in the running (get your stories straight, people -- better yet: just tell us all the titles, and we'll be happy to count for ourselves ...).
Eleven titles were 'called in'; they're required (rule 4(d)) to call in between eight and twelve publisher-recommended titles (but can also call in additional titles not suggested by publishers (4(e)).
Fourth Estate did phenomenally well, with three longlisted titles, but some smaller publishers (Myrmidon Books, And Other Stories, and Salt) also had titles make the longlist.
Quite a few big-name authors fell short with their entries, including Peter Carey (his The Chemistry of Tears), Ian McEwan, John Banville, and Zadie Smith (all of whose books were automatically eligible for consideration, because the authors had previously been shortlisted for/won the prize); the never shortlisted (and hence not automatically eligible) Martin Amis' Lionel Asbo also didn't make the cut (and is the strongest contender for the title of high-profile-title-that-wasn't-one-of-the-145, Jonathan Cape presumably deciding to risk not wasting one of their automatic entries on this and trusting that the judges would call it in if they thought it was worth the trouble (which I doubt they did); amusingly and embarrassingly, Jonathan Cape was completely shut out of the longlist.
Only one longlisted title is under review at the complete review -- and I didn't expect to find it there: Skios, by Michael Frayn (though his Headlong made the shortlist, back in the day).
Early newspaper reports include:
They selected twelve titles (they can select twelve or thirteen), from 145 titles they considered (but whose names they won't tell us; see my previous mention ...) -- it's unclear what Booker Prize Foundation Literary Director Ion Trewin was babbling about last week when he claimed there were 147 novels in the running (get your stories straight, people -- better yet: just tell us all the titles, and we'll be happy to count for ourselves ...).
Eleven titles were 'called in'; they're required (rule 4(d)) to call in between eight and twelve publisher-recommended titles (but can also call in additional titles not suggested by publishers (4(e)).
Fourth Estate did phenomenally well, with three longlisted titles, but some smaller publishers (Myrmidon Books, And Other Stories, and Salt) also had titles make the longlist.
Quite a few big-name authors fell short with their entries, including Peter Carey (his The Chemistry of Tears), Ian McEwan, John Banville, and Zadie Smith (all of whose books were automatically eligible for consideration, because the authors had previously been shortlisted for/won the prize); the never shortlisted (and hence not automatically eligible) Martin Amis' Lionel Asbo also didn't make the cut (and is the strongest contender for the title of high-profile-title-that-wasn't-one-of-the-145, Jonathan Cape presumably deciding to risk not wasting one of their automatic entries on this and trusting that the judges would call it in if they thought it was worth the trouble (which I doubt they did); amusingly and embarrassingly, Jonathan Cape was completely shut out of the longlist.
Only one longlisted title is under review at the complete review -- and I didn't expect to find it there: Skios, by Michael Frayn (though his Headlong made the shortlist, back in the day).
Early newspaper reports include:
- Booker prize 2012: new guard edges out old in wide-ranging longlist by Alison Flood in The Guardian
- Mantel's sequel survives as big names miss out on Booker by Nick Clark in The Independent
- The Booker 2012 longlist tells a story about the landscape of fiction by 'head of books' Gaby Wood in The Telegraph