Kate Guadagnino: To start with the most obvious question: What is a New York novel? (The group also agreed not to consider anything written by the panelists themselves or by T’s editor in chief, Hanya Yanagihara.) In some cases, suggested titles simply didn’t fit the criteria - Edith Wharton’s best-known novels (“The House of Mirth,” 1905 “The Age of Innocence,” 1920) just missed the temporal cutoff, for instance, and we decided that Gatsby was really more of a Long Island man. There wasn’t always a consensus about what was worthy and, though there were some undisputed favorites, we didn’t even attempt to rank the books - instead, they appear more or less in the order they did in conversation. These sorts of lists always come with caveats, the most obvious in this case being that this was a deeply subjective exercise shaped by reading histories and preferences. Then, on a Friday in February, they met up to debate which titles should be included in the final version. Each of them nominated 10 or so books he or she felt strongly about. To make the list, we assembled a panel of judges - the novelists Katie Kitamura and Michael Cunningham, the bookseller Miriam Chotiner-Gardner (who works at the quintessential New York bookstore Three Lives & Company in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village), the playwright and television writer Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and the journalist Mark Harris.
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