This is the Book Right Podcast. I'm Jeff O'Neill.

And I'm Rebecca Shinsky.

And today we are trying to guess the books that will appear on the 2024 long list for the fiction prize of the National Book Award.

Why this list, why this award,

we're going to get into that in a second.

Rebecca, we don't know anything.

We do this for a living and we're staring this and we are constantly Rebecca, we don't know anything.

We do this for a living and we're staring this and we are confidence level and any of our picks,

well probably save one, which we get into a minute.

Yes.

Are pretty rough.

So why are we doing this exercise? Is it, this is just for giggles are we trying to learn something like what are we doing here

I mean it's largely for giggles welcome to podcasting but we have been

increasingly I don't know, puzzled by fist shaking at the national... Dismaid, yes, dismayed, confused, which is I guess just a synonym for puzzled, by the National Book Award selections

for the last several years.

That one of the goals of the national book awards is to bring reading to a larger public

platform and to interest more people in picking up more books and the selections for the long list and the, you know, narrow down short list and

winners over the last several years have been looking like they've been increasingly

artsy kind of MFA driven. We've talked about how this is maybe a reflection of the

judging panels, a very likely a reflection of the judging panels which are often

populated by the kinds of writers who do artsy MFA stuff. It's pretty uncommon to have an

NBA panel that's led by a more commercial writer or someone even who straddles

...