Book of the Day has issued an alternative to Best Contemporary Fiction Since 1980. The winner? Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy.

In a shocking development, Alan Greenspan has revealed that he is incapable of writing his memoir on his own! Where other writers (even Bill Clinton!) might honor their end of a multimillion dollar publishing deal, it seems that Greenspan has hit a rough patch after Chapter 18 and requires the services of one Peter Petre (whose ghostly pallor has granted succor to the likes of Norman Schwarzkopf and Thomas Watson, Jr.) to help him commit his lurid life on paper. One hopes that Petre’s “collaborations” will involve applying a Chinese fan to Greenspan’s parched form as he hunkers over a typewriter in the New York summer heat, but it’s a fair bet that foot massages and sweet bedtime stories (to say nothing of the salver of milk and cookies) will likely be upstaged by the inevitable act of covering, if not outright kissing, Greenspan’s ass.

I too can vouch for Scott and state with absolute certianty that he cooked up this idea well before Tanenhaus did. He was kind enough to ask me to offer my ten and, since Max has shared his, here’s a list of the ten I submitted. Of course, being a moron, I somehow misconstrued Scott’s request and thought that he was asking me for the best books written between 1990 and 2000. (Had I known it extended to the present day, I would have definitely selected Ian McEwan’s Atonement, one of the finest novels of the past twenty years, or a David Markson book.) So my list was a tad off and typed at a feverish clip with the first ten titles that popped into my head. If I had to do it again, it would likely be different. But here are my picks in alphabetical order:

Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
Don DeLillo, Underworld
William Gaddis, A Frolic of His Own
Richard Powers, The Gold Bug Variations
Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries
Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon
William T. Vollmann, The Royal Family
David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
Chris Ware, Jimmy Corrigan
Colson Whitehead, John Henry Days

[UPDATE: Scott has a nice list of links to other people’s lists.]

• Lest you conclude that BEA was the sole locale for publishers to unload their neuroses, the Globe and Mail reminds us that people are bitching just as ardently about BookExpo Canada. Bitching Canadians? Is it possible? One wonders whether a BookExpo Mexico or a BookExpo Germany would spawn such ennui. Is the North American publishing industry hopelessly moribund? Perhaps allowing those carefully tailored publishing execs to immolate a piñata or affording steins and tankards to panelists in an Oktoberfest-style atmosphere might make everyone a mite more jocular.
• The Lotus Lyceum: a salon for fantasy fiction. Haute couture meets orc culture? (via MetaxuCafe)
• I haven’t yet had the time to peruse the Oxford American issue that was kindly sent to me, but thankfully Scott is one step ahead of me.
• Jeff VanderMeer needs dead people.
• Nice try at a metaphor, Ms. Doughty. But unfortunately, most people want the Atkins Diet.
• Frances Dinkelspiel has been chronicling the end of Cody’s.
• We were too burned out to have any meaningful conversation with the man when he came through town, but thankfully the Villager got around to chatting with Gary Shteyngart.
• “A Life in Books” (via This Space)
• Sarah has a new story in Spinetingler.
• Kassia offers more thoughts on Google POD.
• Critical Mass continues its NYTBR contemporary fiction watch and reveals why Andrew Sean Greer chose Kavalier and Clay.
• Why Internet dating isn’t regulated.
• Forget Snakes on a Plane. Try Whales on a Date.
• Cheryl Reed is the new Sun-Times book editor.
• The Ann Arbor News talks with Mark Binelli. Our own impromptu BEA interview with Binelli will emerge in the next Bat Segundo podcast.