I wanted to take a look at the NYT’s list of the Top 25 works of American fiction for the last 25 years from another perspective. I decided to take a look at the awards that were actually handed out each year in the time span, specifically the Pulitzer for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction. Each are limited to American fiction (The National Book Critics Circle Award includes other English-speakers, mostly British). If you look at the two awards’ lists of winners from 1980 to the present, you can see a much more diverse body of work than the NYT’s. Interestingly, few of the books on The Times’ list won either award. Participation by women goes way up on my new improved list (e.g., The Color Purple, The Shipping News, A Thousand Acres). A comic book ( ! ), Maus, won the Pulitzer for Fiction. The Pulitzer also includes people with names like Hijuelos and Lahiri. White Noise makes the cut on the National Book Award list, but Underworld does not make either list. Middlesex and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay get a shout out. Even overlooked old white guys like William Gaddis and Norman Mailer make the new improved cut. Bottom line, a more satisfying list could have been developed with about ten minutes of WikiPedia-ing. Also, some people question the NYT’s moral authority to print such a list, given their scant coverage of contemporary fiction generally.