Goodness. First it’s the Oregon Book Awards, then it’s the Booker Prize. Shortlists for both arrived today; in the words of Bookslut, “Tonight, fans of world literature symbolically lock Salman Rushdie back in a closet and inwardly dread the prospect of working through 5,000 pages of something called ‘The Northern Clemency’.”

Booker Shortlist
Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger
Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture
Amitav Ghosh, Sea of Poppies
Linda Grant, The Clothes on Their Backs
Philip Hensher, The Northern Clemency
Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

Oregon Book Awards Finalists make for a long list; see the whole thing here. But special congrats to the locals: Ehud Havazelet (Corvallis), a fiction finalist for Bearing the Body; Lauren Kessler, a creative nonfiction finalist for Dancing with Rose: Finding Life in the Land of Alzheimer’s; and Cynthia Rylant, a double finalist in children’s literature for Alligator Boy and Puppies and Piggies.