Stop Saying That Men Don’t Read Women

It holds woman writers back, and it’s just not true.

By Ester Bloom

It has become a truism that “men don’t read women.” The assertion is taken as self-evident by feminist publications like Salon (“while women read books written by men, men do not tend to reciprocate”) and shown anecdotally by blogs. It is also perpetuated by male bastions like Esquire, which recently released a list “of the greatest works of literature ever published” featuring one (1) book by a woman out of a total of 75. (Dudes like stuff that is “plot-driven and exciting, where one thing happens after another,” helpfully explains Esquire’s editor-in-chief, who introduced Fiction for Men e-books to widespread scorn last year.)

To be sure, the inequalities of the literary world are as plain as the nose on Jonathan Franzen’s face, and many writers and readers alike remain outraged about this unbalanced state of affairs. The Women In Literary Arts numbers for 2012 (compiled annually by VIDA) have barely budged from 2010 and 2011—men still dominate the major outlets as tastemakers, reviewers, and authors whose works are deemed worthy of review. The Nation recently published a cri de coeur by novelist Deborah Copaken Kagan lamenting “centuries of literary sexism, exclusion, cultural bias, invisibility. There’s a reason J. K. Rowling’s publishers demanded that she use initials instead of “Joanne”: It’s the same reason Mary Anne Evans used the pen name George Eliot.” And a recent Salon interview with Meg Wolitzer addressing these frustrations is titled “Men won’t read books about women.”

The truth is more complicated. Of course men read books about women and have for centuries—what are Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina if not classic books about women? Those canonical examples are merely a couple of the ones explicitly named for their central character. Nobody picking up those lauded works of fiction could claim to have been misled by the title to think they were reading about Hitler’s Germany, or fishing, or fishing in Hitler’s Germany, or whatever else men are solely supposed to want to read about.

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The 10 Best Book Endings

Jessica Soffer

By Jessica Soffer

Jessica Soffer’s Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots is a novel about families, food, and facing uncomfortable truths. It also culminates in a revealing and satisfying ending that brings all its pages together. For Tip Sheet, Soffer shared 10 of her favorite endings in books.

I don’t like to play favorites. It’s not right. Sometimes, it’s an act in futility. Apples and oranges and such, especially in literature. But here we are. Ten Best Book Endings, according to me, a woman who has read as much as she possibly could during her twenty-seven years and who wishes every day for more reading time so that she could say “Ten Best,” and feel more certain. Until then, “best” is a moving target—and I’m not even in possession of all the darts.

Bottom line: the most we can look for is an end that justifies, honors, makes meaningful the means. And sometimes we might hope for an end that does more: an end that outdoes the means. Sometimes, a deftly plotted twist will do the trick, or a really grand grand finale, or a thought so moving, so appropriate that we write it down and keep it in our wallets for years. When endings work they feel both inevitable and earned, which just doesn’t happen in real life where nothing is ever still long enough to really end at all. And so good endings must do more than life: honoring what’s come before, swelling with the promise of what’s to come, and hovering in exactly the right place so that when it’s over, it’s hardly over. It’s just right.

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The Greatest Books of All Time, As Voted by 125 Famous Authors

  By Maria Popova

Why Tolstoy is 11.6% better than Shakespeare.

“Reading is the nourishment that lets you do interesting work,” Jennifer Egan once said. This intersection of reading and writing is both a necessary bi-directional life skill for us mere mortals and a secret of iconic writers’ success, as bespoken by their personal libraries. The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books asks 125 of modernity’s greatest British and American writers — including Norman Mailer, Ann Patchett, Jonathan Franzen, Claire Messud, and Joyce Carol Oates— “to provide a list, ranked, in order, of what [they] consider the ten greatest works of fiction of all time– novels, story collections, plays, or poems.”

Of the 544 separate titles selected, each is assigned a reverse-order point value based on the number position at which it appears on any list — so, a book that tops a list at number one receives 10 points, and a book that graces the bottom, at number ten, receives 1 point.

In introducing the lists, David Orr offers a litmus test for greatness:

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Just How Much Does a Pulitzer Prize Help a Book’s Sales?

By Gabe Habash

Part of the outcry over the lack of a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction selection this year relates to the sales increase that each year’s winner inevitably receives, and how that windfall will be absent in 2012. But just how big of a sales increase does a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel experience? Using Nielsen BookScan, PW took a look at the last five winners of the fiction prize—A Visit from the Goon Squad, Tinkers, Olive Kitteridge, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, The Road—and the effects the win had on sales.

The trade paperback for Jennifer Egan’s Goon Squad (Random House) was released just four weeks before its Pulitzer victory in April 2011. Weekly sales of the book immediately tripled following the announcement—in the week leading up to the announcement, the book sold 3,800 copies; the next week, after the announcement, the book sold 9,578 at the outlets tracked by BookScan (about 70% of print sales). Sales then hovered around 10,000 copies per week until June, and the book finally dipped under 5,000 copies per week in the week ending September 11, 2011. On average, following the Pulitzer, Goon Squad’s weekly sales for a three month period were triple what they were before the prize. To date, the book has sold 280,000 copies in trade paperback at outlets followed by BookScan. It should be noted that none of these figures includes e-book sales, which would’ve likely figured into Egan’s novel’s sales most prominently out of all the past winners.

Paul Harding’s Tinkers perhaps benefitted the most from winning the Pulitzer. Published in early January 2010 by Bellevue Literary Press, the book had only sold 1,120 copies at BookScan-tracked outlets before the Pulitzer announcement. To date, it has now sold 360,000 trade paperback copies in outlets followed by BookScan. The weekly spike is also astounding: in the week before the announcement, Tinkers sold only 40 copies. The next week, immediately following its Pulitzer victory, it sold 1,042 copies, doubling its total sales in a seven-day span. The following week, sales continued to climb, reaching 6,131 copies, and weekly sales remained steady around 5,000 until January 2011, 10 months after it won the Pulitzer.

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The Greatest Books of All Time, as Voted by 125 Famous Authors

By Maria Popova

Tolstoy holds a 11-point lead over Shakespeare in these literary opinion polls.

“Reading is the nourishment that lets you do interesting work,”  Jennifer Egan once said. This intersection of reading and writing is both a necessary bi-directional life skill for us mere mortals and a secret of iconic writers’ success, as bespoken by their personal libraries. The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books asks 125 of modernity’s greatest British and American writers—including Norman Mailer, Ann Patchett, Jonathan Franzen, Claire Messud, and Joyce Carol Oates—”to provide a list, ranked, in order, of what [they] consider the ten greatest works of fiction of all time- novels, story collections, plays, or poems.”

Of the 544 separate titles selected, each is assigned a reverse-order point value based on the number position at which it appears on any list—so, a book that tops a list at number one receives 10 points, and a book that graces the bottom, at number ten, receives 1 point.

In introducing the lists, David Orr offers a litmus test for greatness:

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Review of the Year: Brilliant books of 2011

The best fiction proved that, when it comes to capturing the way in which time toys with us, there’s no greater form than the novel say Gaby Wood.

This time last year, one of my favourite American authors had a book due out in the UK from a relatively small publisher. I wondered why she was not better known here – her novels had been highly praised and widely sold in the US, and this new one had had a sweeping success there.

Well, it didn’t take long for Britain to be crowded with converts. Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad became possibly the most talked-about novel of the year. Quite apart from the critical plaudits and mentions on the reading lists of luminaries it received, I heard more people bring it up in conversation than I saw pulling David Nicholls’s One Day out of their handbags on the train. Egan’s new fans will be delighted to hear that Corsair have plans to publish her backlist in 2012.

Ostensibly set in and on the fringes of the music business, Goon Squad uses pop music, with its fast fading fashions, as a way of showing the effects of time. Characters look at themselves, and each other, and wonder how they got “from A to B”. In fact, one dying musician wants to call his last album A to B: “That’s the question I want to hit head-on,” he explains. “How did I go from being a rock star to being a fat f–k no one cares about?” A 13 year-old boy is obsessed with timing the pauses in pop songs, and when his exasperated father eventually shouts at him about it, his mother explains on the boy’s behalf: “The pause makes you think the song will end. And then the song isn’t really over, so you’re relieved. But then the song does actually end, because every song ends, obviously, and That. Time. The. End. Is. For. Real.”

Over the course of the novel, we witness a drowning, kleptomania-in-progress, addiction recovery, betrayal, anger, regret, desire, and the violence of all these things. There is a virtuosic formal inventiveness to Goon Squad – it is composed of interlocking stories with segues embedded in them like small shiny coins – and there’s a playfulness in the voices that at first suggests an ironic view of the world. Yet this is combined with a breathtaking range of empathetic gifts on Egan’s part.

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Room leads longlist for Impac Dublin award

Emma Donoghue. Photograph: Andrew Bainbridge

Emma Donoghue’s novel receives most nominations in 147-strong field for €100,000 prize

By Alison Flood

Emma Donoghue’s disturbing tale of an imprisoned boy, Room, is at the forefront of the 147 titles competing for one of the world’s most lucrative literary prizes, the €100,000 (£85,000) Impac Dublin literary award.

With novels nominated by libraries around the world, this year’s award pits some of the biggest names in international fiction against each other, from the UK’s Howard Jacobson, picked for his Booker-winning novel The Finkler Question, to American novelist Jennifer Egan and her Pulitzer-winning A Visit From the Goon Squad and Israeli author David Grossman’s To the End of the Land.

Chilean-American novelist Isabel Allende, Germany’s Bernhard Schlink and Norway’s Per Petterson are also competing for this year’s Impac, with a host of different genres also represented on the longlist, from South African author Lauren Beukes’s Arthur C Clarke award-winning science fiction novel Zoo City to Suzanne Collins’s dystopian young adult novel Mocking Jay, Justin Cronin’s vampire blockbuster The Passage and Irish author Tana French’s thriller Faithful Place.

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Goodreads, First Book want kids to read more this summer

By Carol Memmott, USA TODAY

Want more kids reading books this summer? Two forces in the reading community want that too. First Book, a nonprofit that provides low-income children with books, is working with Goodreads, one of the world’s largest online communities of readers, to do just that.

Reading of A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, the first pick of the new Goodreads Book Club, is already underway. Here’s how book club participants can help kids. For every 10,000 members of the Goodreads community who add this title to their shelves on the site, Goodreads will donate 1,000 books to kids in need through First Book. So far, 25,000 people have already added Goon Squad to their shelves. The initial goal is to donate 5,000 books by Aug. 2, when the Book Club concludes with a live video chat with Jennifer Egan. If more than 50,000 people add the book before the end date, they will honor their pledge and donate up to 10,000 books.

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The 2011 TIME 100

Meet the most influential people in the world. They are artists and activists, reformers and researchers, heads of state and captains of industry. Their ideas spark dialogue and dissent and sometimes even revolution. Welcome to this year’s TIME 100.

Franzen, Jennifer Egan and Patti Smith are the writers on Time’s list of the 100 most influential people of the year.

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Jennifer Egan takes Pulitzer prize

A Visit From the Goon Squad adds prestigious fiction award to haul of honours.

By Alison Flood

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An experimental novel inspired by Proust and The Sopranos and featuring a chapter written entirely as a PowerPoint presentation has won the Pulitzer prize for fiction. Jennifer Egan’s widely acclaimed novel A Visit From the Goon Squad beat books by Jonathan Dee and Chang-rae Lee to win the $10,000 (£6,000) award, the most prestigious in American writing.

 Judges called Egan’s novel “an inventive investigation of growing up and growing old in the digital age, displaying a big-hearted curiosity about cultural change at warp speed”. The interlocking story, which has already won the National Book Critics Circle award for fiction, follows the lives of ageing punk rocker and music mogul Bennie Salazar and his young PA Sasha, moving from the 1970s to the near future, from New York and San Francisco to Naples and Africa.

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