National Book Award nominees: Lahiri, Pynchon, Wright already winners to me

I mean, who cares if the entire country is going into default and world crisis and all that, but the nominees for next month's National Book Awards were released this morning. In Fiction Jhumpa Lahiri and Thomas Pynchon will be duking it out with George Saunders, James McBride and relative newcomer Rachel Kushner -- really, there are no losers here. In Nonfiction, Lawrence Wright's Scientology expose GOING CLEAR faces Jill Lepore's biography of Jane Franklin (sounds fascinating based on the New Yorker excerpt), BEA darling HITLER'S FURIES (by Wendy Lower, about Nazi women), George Packer's new-economy tome THE UNWINDING and Alan Taylor's THE INTERNAL ENEMY: SLAVERY AND WAR IN VIRGINIA.

See poetry and YA categories here. Ready your library requests!

BEA 2013: Fall Buzz Books to Watch

Live from BEA, the publishing industry's conference/bonanza.

One much anticipated conference session at BEA every year is the Editors' Buzz panel, in which editors present six hotly anticipated fall books. Its track record isn't perfect -- of last year's adult books, one became a huge commercial breakout and two critical darlings -- but the curiosity renews itself anyway.

My laptop was long dead by the time yesterday's panel rolled around but I took copious notes on this year's picks, including "X meets Y" Hollywood-style descriptors and other stray comments. Click to embiggen: