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Chris Bachelder’s The Throwback Special Nominated for National Book Award

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An illustration by Jason Novak for The Throwback Special.

Earlier this week, we announced that several of our writers have been nominated for this year’s Man Booker Prize, and more still for the National Book Award in poetry. Now we’re thrilled to report that Chris Bachelder’s novel The Throwback Specialwhich was serialized in The Paris Review and won our Terry Southern Prize for Humor this year—has been longlisted for the National Book Award

The Throwback Special appears in the Review in four installments, beginning with our Summer 2015 issue. Each installment is illustrated by Jason Novak. Minneapolis’s Star Tribune calls it “2016’s first Great Book … A wise, patient examination of American culture.” The Los Angeles Times praises its “poignant comic magic … powerful, intelligent, and entertaining.” And the New York Times Book Review writes that it “conjures the rewarding melancholy of Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe novels.”

Our congratulations to Chris. And we’d be remiss in omitting Garth Greenwell, whose novel, What Belongs to You, is also on this year’s National Book Award longlist. Garth contributed a story to our Summer 2014 issue.

If you enjoy trivia: this isn’t the first time a novel first published by the Review has been nominated for a National Book Award. In the late sixties, our book imprint Paris Review Editions published two NBA nominees: Joy Williams’s State of Grace and Louis Zukofsky’s A. When the imprint was reinstated in the late eighties, it published Stephen Dixon’s Frog, also a finalist for the National Book Award.