The 2023 LA Times Book Prizes Announced
Plus: The PEN Awards Ceremony has been cancelled, is literary tourism peaking, and more.
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The 2023 LA Times Book Prizes Have Been Announced
I just realized that The LA Times is the only major newspaper that does awards in this pretty-standard-sort-of-a-way. The best-of-the-year-list format dominates for a couple of reasons. First, you get to mention way more books. Second, you don’t have to do all that much of the messy business of categorization. Third, you don’t have to do the even messier work of selecting a winner in each category. This year’s winners from The LA Times are not just more of what we saw on 2023 year-end lists, though, and that’s refreshing. Side note: of the winners here, I can second Company by Shannon Sanders and Same Bed, Different Dreams by Ed Park.
Inside the Literary Travel Boom—What, There is a Literary Travel Boom?
I am not a journalist by training or sensibility. I have always been fascinated, though, about why/what/how something gets designated a trend or a fad or a boom or a wave or insert-word-that-signifies-a-signicant change in direction of popularity for something. Case in point: this piece in Esquire identifies a “boom” in literary travel with a handful of examples of bookish travel activities and destinations. But a boom? There are no indications about whether or not anything of these things are successful, only that they exist. No quotes from eager lodgers or raves from hosts catering to tote-bag-carrying clientele. This is not to say that there isn’t a boom; there just isn’t evidence of one here.
The PEN Literary Awards Have Been Cancelled
In the culmination (or maybe not, I’ll get to that in a moment) of several months of turmoil, the 2024 PEN America award ceremony has been canceled, and the finalists and winners announced. Multiple nominees proactively declined being considered for nominations, presses were making public statements, prize jurors were voicing their displeasure, and more than 1300 members had signed an open letter calling on PEN to make an official statement about the writers, playwrights, and journalists who have been killed in Gaza. LitHub has the best coverage of all that has gone on—and continues to develop. I would not be booking my plane tickets to the Seth Meyers-hosted PEN gala in May, let me just say.
Stop Asking BookTok for Recommendations. Start Asking a Librarian.
Good piece from
on the difficulty of recommending books, to which I will add one point. BookTok, and other algorithms, tend to favor content related to conent that is already popular (if you have ever seen #ACOTAR being used as a prop, it is because that person knows that even the image of some of the most popular BookTok books has juice with the machine). This means that the recommendations are motivated (consciously in some cases, unconsciously in others) by that recommendation’s ability to reap the attention-whirlwind.