Among the missing: AWAY by Amy Bloom (What are they, crazy? Leaving this one off was a mistake.)
and LOVING FRANK by Nancy Horan. Hard to believe this novel about Frank Lloyd Wright's lover, Mama Borthwick Cheny, wasn't included. It was a commercial and critical success...an absorbing, thoughtful read. Too much femine self-acutalization on a man-heavy list, perhaps?
As Liesl Schillingein wrote her review for the NYT in September:
"Loving Frank, an enthralling first novel by Nancy Horan, is set at the same time as Doctorow's modern classic — the decade before World War I — and recreates its weld of fact and fiction, wrapped around the core theme of female self-actualization.... Mamah Borthwick Cheney wasn't just any woman, but Horan makes her into an enigmatic Everywoman — a symbol of both the freedoms women yearn to have and of the consequences that may await when they try to take them."
On the other hand, I was glad to see several books I love on the list:
THE MINISTRY OF SPECIAL CASES by Nathan Englander.
A novel set in Buenos Aires in the 1970's.
THE RELUCTANT FUNDAMENTALIST by Mohsin Hamid
a novel "narrated by a Pakistani who tells his life story to an unnamed American after the attacks of 9/11."
THEN WE CAME TO THE END By Joshua Ferris.
a "funny first novel, set in a white-collar office."
and WHAT IS THE WHAT. The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng: A Novel. By Dave Eggers. A novel about one of the Lost boys of Sudan.
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