A couple of months ago there was an online kerfuffle after Bitch Magazine posted a list of 100 feminist YA books, and then removed three books from that list after a few commenters complained about them, for various reasons. Then other commenters cried censorship, including some other authors on the list who asked to be [...]
A few weeks back, I blogged about the AOL purchase of the Huffington Post and the questions and ethics of when writers choose to write for free.
Yesterday, GalleyCat reported that Visual Art Source publisher Bill Lasarow has ceased to post his content for free on the HuffPo site and calls for a more general bloggers’ [...]
Recently, I wrote about literary cameos on The Simpsons. In response, Charlotte wondered, “Are they tweaking on the Franzen gender controversy by only having literary cameos by men?”
This is a timely question. A recent study by VIDA: Women in Literary Arts showing that male writers vastly outnumber female writers at many major literary [...]
New South Books, an Alabama publisher, plans to release a version of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn wherein the n-word is replaced by the word “slave.” 219 times. The professor who originally approached the publisher with the idea did so because he himself felt uncomfortable using the word in class. I, of course, feel [...]
Anyone with a television set (by no means a given anymore) and network reception (ditto), has probably not escaped the fact that this is Oprah’s last season. Her most recent Book Club selection – announced during her show featuring Jonathan Franzen, post-controversy – were not one, but two novels by Charles Dickens.
The Oprah Book [...]
With the 2010 Man Booker Prize announcement just over a week away, let’s take a quick look back. The Booker is one of world’s top literary prizes, and Booker prize winners are regarded as highly influential books. So what effect did last year’s winner, Hilary Mantel’s wildly popular Wolf Hall, have?
First, [...]
fter all the Franzen-Freedom hoopla, Jennifer Weiner and Jodi Picoult imply yes. NPR’s Linda Holmes has some great reflections on the dustup, while Slate tries to break it down by the numbers:
Of the 545 books reviewed between June 29, 2008 and Aug. 27, 2010:
—338 were written by men (62 percent of the total)
—207 were [...]
Since the death of The Virginia Quarterly Review’s Managing Editor, Kevin Morrissey, at the end of July, there has been much discussion in the literary, academic, and publishing communities about what led up to this tragedy. Some of the reporting has been sensational, some praised as investigative journalism. Frequently, both have been said of the [...]
he more MFA programs spring up, the more people seem to look down on them—as if some kind of MFA-inflation and devaluation were taking place. Novelist Lev Raphael, however, recently wrote about why he found his MFA program valuable:
I was at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst MFA program for two and a half [...]
onathan Franzen is on the cover of the August 23 issue of TIME Magazine, with an article marking the publication of his latest novel, Freedom. Since he’s the first living author to be so featured in over a decade (the last being Stephen King), it’s caused quite a stir in the lit world. [...]
