NYTBR Notable Books of 2008 Missing Essential Gay Titles

Next Sunday's NYT Book Review names one hundred notable titles of 2008 and though no such list can ever capture a year's riches, this list is noticeably weak on important books by gay writers. Among the missing are National Book Award winner Mark Doty's poetry Fire to Fire, National Book Critics Circle Award winner Daniel Mendelsohn's essay collection How Beautiful It Is And How Easily It Can Be Broken, NBCC winner Edmund White's Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel, Benjamin Taylor's novel The Book of Getting Even, David Ebershoff's The 19th Wife, and Scott Heim's We Disappear. Confoundingly, the editors also omit a spectacular not gay work of fiction called Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout and Louise Erdrich's novel The Plague of Doves, which Philip Roth calls "her dazzling masterpiece."

If you're interested in the craft of literature, read Ben Taylor's new interview with Carlin M. Wragg at Open Loop Press. It's called "Fiction as Fibbing" and is insightful, erudite, and self-effacing in his signature style. Discussing creativity and the inadvertent, he says:

I think you pay for whatever it is you find out in the course of writing a novel by not finding out so much else, by not realizing everything. It really is a way of knowing without knowing all.

UPDATE: Charlene reminds me I forgot Andrew Sean Greer's novel The Story of a Marriage. Overnight I remembered John Rechy's memoir, About My Life and the Kept Woman. There must be many others. Please comment or email me.

Comments

[Ivan Sondel]

Elizabeth Maguire's "The Open Door" and "Alain Claude Sulver's "A Perfect Waiter" are two novels that come to mind, and Lee Israel's "Can You Ever Forgive Me? Memoirs of a Literary Forger" - these three + the Mendelsohn and Taylor books should be on any list of top 100 books of 2008.