Thursday, June 02, 2011

Charming!

Nobel Prize-winning author V.S. Naipaul has announced that there is no female writer whom he considers his equal. He specifically dismisses Jane Austen's claim to literary fame, saying he "couldn't possibly share her sentimental ambitions, her sentimental sense of the world".

Yes, Jane Austen—a woman who once wrote "Mrs. Hall, of Sherborne, was brought to bed yesterday of a dead child, some weeks before she was expected, owing to a fright. I suppose that she happened unawares to look at her husband..." in a letter to her sister—was a master of sentiment, wasn't she?

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Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Sage advice for the young'uns

Ah, satirical advice from Disney's cartoon princesses! Check out these words of wisdom from "Belle" and "Ariel":





To be fair, I feel like cherry-picking objectionable messages from Disney films is like looking for potentially offensive stuff in the Bible: sure, it's there, but that's not really the whole story...

...although that nuanced viewpoint didn't stop me from grinning over these videos. Somebody should embroider "The lesson here is that beauty is in the eye of the beholder ... as long as the woman is good-looking" on a pillow!

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Thursday, December 17, 2009

Behind (way behind) the times

In a little bit of magazine news, Salon.com's Broadsheet points out that Time magazine's annual "Person of the Year" coverstory hasn't featured a standalone female pick since 1986(!!!). They go on to suggest options ranging from Lady GaGa to Hillary Clinton, but I'm still reeling from the whole "1986" thing.

[Note: For serious, Time: you picked Ted Turner and Jeff Bezos. Why not J.K. Rowling?]

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Friday, November 06, 2009

Books for girls

People are all up in arms over the fact that Publishers Weekly's "Best Books of 2009" list features no female authors. I'd care, but I'm too busy shaking my head over the fact that they've got "best of" lists for mystery, sci-fi/fantasy, poetry, and comics, but not one for romance*, despite the fact that romance novels make up a huge percentage of total books sold.

*Romance novels are included, but they're shelved under the "Mass Market" section.

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Friday, December 19, 2008

No books for teenage boys?

Roger Sutton, editor in chief of The Horn Book, recently wrote an essay for the Times about two buzzworthy young adult titles—John Green's Paper Towns and Kevin Brooks’s Black Rabbit Summer. I'm only mildly interested in these specific titles, but I was intrigued by what Sutton had to say about young adult books for boys: basically, that there aren't many.

I don't quite agree. Sure, the books featured in your local chain store's teen section might be overwhelmingly aimed at female readers, but I've always thought that was because publishers like to consider books about young men's coming-of-age "universal literature", and books about young women's coming-of-age "fluffy, sophomoric trash". That doesn't mean there aren't any books about teenage boys; it means that most of 'em are shelved in the regular fiction section. One of my all-time favorite books is Chris Furhman's The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys (about a group of eighth-grade boys in a Georgia Catholic school in the 1970s), and you know where that's shelved?

That's right: the general fiction section, where the books for grown-ups live.

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Tuesday, May 27, 2008

I think we're reading these titles a little differently.

Check out this blog post on Guardian.co.uk about the sexism faced by female fantasy authors. I have no doubt female writers encounter considerable sexism*, but I'm not sure I agree with such statements as "[a] subtle mechanism is operating here, clanking into gear to restore the dominant man-worshipping default mode while reserving a few token high-priestess places for the ladies", nor do I think such an inflammatory article will do anything but preach to the converted. (Seriously, she describes the Lord of the Rings books as the story of a "club of white men [fleeing] a big burning vagina". I'm fully prepared to complain about how boring these books are, but I'm just not sold on the "Big Bad as a Flaming Ladypart" concept.)

*And female-oriented genres face even more sexism, but has this author ever written a passionate defence of romance novels? Has Harvard ever asked a romance novelist to deliver their commencement address? Where's the outcry about THAT?
[Via Read Roger]

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