Writer Dorree Shafrir at the New York Observer did it; she put together the Brooklyn Literary 100. Like the Park Slope 100, it’s sure to get slammed. Lists are silly and fun.

Neighborhood by neighborhood, she did the who’s who of the Brooklyn literati. Interestingly, it’s not just authors but agents, editors and others.

And I love the Map!

Do I agree with her list? Of course not. Well, she does have some of the essential names for Park Slope. But there are so many others that she left out.

List making; it’s reductive thing. But hey, that’s what it’s about. It was interesting to read the names in all the other Brooklyn nabes, too. The who’s who and where they live. You know me, I love this sort of thing. It’s fun to hate. It’s fun to love.

The idea of a Brooklyn literary “scene” is one that has become so ingrained in the city’s consciousness that, in true Brooklyn style, it has now become fashionable to consider writerly Brooklyn in an ironic manner, to comment on the ridiculousness of the idea that a place can, in fact, be said to help define a literary community. Take, for example, Colson Whitehead’s cheeky New York Times Book Review essay—“I Write in Brooklyn. Get Over It”—from last month, in which he questioned the very idea that the borough could be said to inspire any kind of literary imagination. He wrote: “There was the famous case of the language poet from Red Hook who grew despondent when the Shift key on her MacBook broke. She couldn’t write for weeks. Overcome by melancholy humors, she jumped into the enchanted, glowing waters of the Gowanus Canal, her pockets full of stones. And … she was cured! The metaphors came rushing back. With eccentric spacing between the letters, but still.”

Here’s the Park Slope list:

Park Slope
Paul Auster, author
Jonathan Safran Foer, author
Mary Gannon, editor, Poets & Writers
Ben Greenman, editor, The New Yorker; author
Colin Harrison, editor, Harper’s; author
Kathryn Harrison, author
Steven Berlin Johnson, author; blogger
Edward Kastenmeier, editor, Knopf
Porochista Khakpour, author
Nicole Krauss, author
Megan Lynch, editor, Riverhead
Sarah McGrath, editor, Riverhead
Suketu Mehta, author
Elissa Schappell, contributing editor, Vanity Fair
John Sellers, author
Darin Strauss, author
Alexandra Styron, author
Bill Wasik, editor, Harper’s; author
Larry Weissman, agent, Larry Weissman Literary