Today's Recommendations

These are the books I recommended to someone who asked me to recommend some books to her today:

Grendel, John Gardner
The Abortion, Richard Brautigan
(any short story collection by) Anton Chekov
(any short story collection by) Raymond Carver
The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison
Hiroshima, John Hersey
A Fan’s Notes, Frederick Exley
The Road, Cormac McCarthy
The Mezzanine, Nicholson Baker
The Book of Laughter & Forgetting, Milan Kundera
Being There, Jerzy Kosinski
Ragtime, E.L. Doctorow
Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut
Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut
The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon
A Collection of Essays, George Orwell
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Tom Robbins
The Dwarf, Par Lagerkvist
Snow White, Donald Barthelme
Success Stories (short stories), Russell Banks
White Noise, Don Delillo
Cassandra, Christa Wolf

The request was for fiction. For whatever reason, my list includes only two women authors. This bothers me.