Thursday, June 01, 2006

Kissed off the list ...

Critical Mass has information on books that received only one vote for the NYTBR's best books list: The Rest of the Best .

Lest we get too excited over this and similar lists, it is worth remembering that if you had got together all the leading critics, writers and literary scholars in America together in, say, 1880 and asked them to determine who the two greatest American poets were, they would not have named Walt Whitman or Emily Dickinson. And if they had been asked to do the same with novelists, they would definitely have missed Melville and would have probably overlooked Twain.

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