The editors of the New York Times Book Review have distilled their previous list of 100 notable books from 2008 into the ten best books of the year, and Alfred A. Knopf published seven of them—eight if you count Netherland, the Joseph P. O’Neill novel that came from the house’s Pantheon imprint.
(Even kookier: Now that Knopf has taken over the Doubleday imprint as a result of the restructuring of Random House, they technically “own” a ninth book on the list: Jane Mayer‘s The Dark Side.)
The Times does recognize that other publishers exist and are putting out good work: Farrar Straus Giroux is given credit for 2666, the posthumously published novel by Robert Bolano. But even acknowledging the talent of the authors included in the list—from Steven Millhauser and Toni Morrison to Julian Barnes and National Book Award nominee Drew Gilipin Faust—to claim that one publishing house so thoroughly dominates the industry in terms of quality seems… weird. At least to us—what do you think?