It’s like a sleight of hand, but without a magician or artificial intelligence. And which repeats itself every year. While until December 31, you were still extolling the merits of literary prizes and refining the gift packages for beautiful books, you are now faced with a drastic change of scenery. Imagine, almost overnight, you have to evacuate the “undesirable” 2023 vintages to welcome the new ones from 2024. A headache for bookstores with modest dimensions and limited staff – the big brands having at their disposal muscles and adequate square meters. According to our colleague Weekly Books, There are 482 novels to be released between January and February this year – not counting the 1,319 essays and documents. This is less than at the start of the winter school year in 2023 (and much less than in 2022, which saw an explosion of novel publications after the end of confinement, which amounted to 545). But that’s already a lot.
Because it is not enough to pile them up, you also have to read them, or at least have a panoramic vision of the production, with its headliners, its first novelists, its stars from abroad… Not sure, However, let readers flock from January 4, the date of the first office of 2024, especially as, for once, it falls in the middle of school holidays. But then, why publish so early? To have primacy, of course, and ensure a place in the sun of displays and storefronts.
Without being a great soothsayer, we can already predict the presence in majesty of the books of David Foenkinos, Philippe Besson, Marie Darrieussecq, Michel Bussi, Sylvain Tesson, Régis Jauffret, Boualem Sansal, Olivier Rolin, Jean-Marie Rouart, Nathalie Azoulai, Abnousse Shalmani , Magyd Cherfi, Julia Malye, JM. G. Le Clézio… French-speaking side. And Colum McCann, Russell Banks, Jon Kalman Stefansson, Shehan Karunatilaka, Alex Schulman… for the translations. As for the 2023 winners (Andrea, Sinno, Sapin-Defour, Koenig, Scott), who triumphed at the end of the year, they will certainly put up resistance.