New York Times,November 5, 2009,
No. 1 Omission From Top 10 Book List: Women
By Dave Itzkoff

Right - Publishers Weekly The Nov. 2 issue of Publishers Weekly contains its PW Top 10 list.

The trade publication Publishers Weekly likely wanted to provoke discussion with its annual list of the year’s best books, but not like this. In its issue of Nov. 2, Publishers Weekly compiled its PW Top 10, a decidedly subjective ranking of the best fiction and non-fiction published in 2009, including the biography “Cheever: A Life” by Blake Bailey; the novel “Await Your Reply” by Dan Chaon; and the graphic novel “Stitches” by David Small. But as The Guardian reports, the ranking has drawn protests from a women’s literary group, which notes that there are no female writers on the list.

Cate Marvin, a founder of the group Women in Letters and Literary Arts, told The Guardian, “The absence made me nearly speechless.” She added: “It continues to surprise me that literary editors are so comfortable with their bias toward male writing, despite the great and obvious contributions that women authors make to our contemporary literary culture.”

In her introduction to the year-end lists, Louisa Ermelino, the reviews director of Publishers Weekly, wrote, “We ignored gender and genre and who had the buzz,” adding: “It disturbed us when we were done that our list was all male.”

Which books by women should Publishers Weekly have included on its PW Top 10 list? Should it have taken gender into consideration when the list was compiled? Post a comment and let us know.

The complete PW Top 10 List appears below:

Cheever: A Life
Blake Bailey (Knopf)

Await Your Reply
Dan Chaon (Ballantine)

A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon
Neil Sheehan (Random House)

In Other Rooms, Other Wonders
Daniyal Mueenuddin (Norton)

Big Machine
Victor LaValle (Spiegel & Grau)

The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science
Richard Holmes (Pantheon)

Stitches
David Small (Norton)

Shop Class as Soulcraft
Matthew B. Crawford (Penguin Press)

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi
Geoff Dyer (Pantheon)

Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon
David Grann (Doubleday)
From NYT.