French-Senegalese writer Marie NDiaye today won France’s most prestigious literary award, the Prix Goncourt, becoming the first black woman to do so. I find the news bolstering after hearing that the recent Publishers Weekly list of the Top 10 Books of 2009 contained exactly zero female authors.
My respect for PW just plummeted.
Re: the Prix Goncourt, it’s about time! As for Publishers Weekly, I’ve had, and have, no love for them, and it’s unsurprising, though still sad, that their list is so unrepresentative of what was best this year. Perhaps we can start redressing their inexplicably poor judgment.
Off the top of my head for the best books of 2009, I’d have to include Anne Michaels’s The Winter Vault, Mary Caponegro’s All Fall Down, Joanna Ruocco’s The Mothering Coven, Joanna Howard’s On the Winding Stair, John Haskell’s Out of My Skin, both Fugue State and Baby Leg by Brian Evenson, and Norman Lock’s Shadowplay.
I’m going to do a Best Chapbooks of 2009 thing at The Chapbook Review in January, I think.
So what’s your best of 2009 looking like so far folks?