The 5% solution

Five Latin@ authors made the cut for the NY Times list of this year's 100 Notable Books (already posted on the web and running in the print edition on Sunday). One of them even made the Top Ten list. The 2006 list of 100 only had one, Gabriel García Márquez. Hurray!

But here's my little nit-picky, bah-humbuggy note: of the five, only two qualify as U.S. Latino. There's the neoconservative (in oh so many ways) Boom warhorse Mario Vargas Llosa, who has never spent much time in the U.S. (or in the present), the dourly excellent Roberto Bolaño, who died in Spain but I don't think ever went north of the Rio Bravo, and the hallucinatory Mayra Montero, who lives in the U.S. colony of Borinquen. Massachusetts-born Francisco Goldman lives here most of the time (I spotted him last week at the Cafe Tacuba concert, e.g.) and homey Junot Diaz recently purchased a nice pad in El Barrio with his lovely fiancee.

Don't get me wrong. Aside from Vargas Llosa, whose writing has never done much for me, all the writers are consistently good and these books are more than worthy. But in a U.S.-centric list (by my count, 74 of the books, including the majority of the non-fiction list are by U.S.-born or -based authors), two? two? As if we needed any more evidence that publishing is über-white.