Lee Kottner writes a letter to Tanenhaus about the NYTBR‘s well-documented lack of women nonfiction coverage and receives a response. Tanenhaus claims, “The truth, at least as far as we can tell, is that there remain areas in which women authors tend to be less well (that is, less numerously) represented than men: science, philosophy, economics, politics, public policy, foreign policy, to name some obvious ones.” But, as Kottner demonstrates with a list of books, this isn’t the case at all. As Kottner puts it, “hat it’s not that women are underrepresented anywhere in publishing (except perhaps in science, which I’ll get to later), it’s that the topics we write about are not ‘important,’ e.g., interesting to men.” (via The Other)
As to Tanenhaus’s recent claim that litbloggers are sloppy writers, I would suggest that Tanenhaus, with a team of roughly ten, is sloppier than ten litbloggers put together. This site, with its blog and podcast (which came well before the NYTBR‘s rigid weekly offering), is run by one person. That means one person moderating discussions, making calls, responding to emails, reading the books, setting up equipment, cleaning up the audio, and getting the word out. And all this with a full-time job, freelancing on top of that, and a social life. Give ten litbloggers full-time jobs and the resources to run a book review section and I suspect it would be filled with more passion, more enthusiasm, more controversy, more excitement and more grammatical precision than Tanenhaus has in his left pinkie.
I hereby withdraw Rachel the Hack. The point has been made. But if Tanenhaus is going to call litbloggers “sloppy” without evidence, then the time has come to reinstate the NYTBR‘s grand measure.
The Call by Yannick Murphy: The always interesting author of Here They Come and Signed, Mata Hari returns with a novel that whips up a worldview from a rather quirky set of limitations: namely, the call logs that a veterinarian maintains as his son is unexpectedly put into a coma and an unforgiving economy denies him work. What emerges is a surprisingly optimistic, often funny, and very moving account on how one family uses acceptance and forgiveness as a way to atone for hard knocks. (
Birds of Paradise by Diana Abu-Jaber: Forget Franzen and Eugenides. If you're looking for a social novel that counts, Diana Abu-Jaber is the author you're looking for. Building from the free-form exploration of consciousness and identity in Crescent and the gripping procedural structure of Origin, Abu-Jaber's latest novel is her finest, equally fluent with gutterpunk culture and smarmy real estate men. It has been suggested by The Washington Post's Ron Charles that you will likely gain some pounds while reading this novel. This is certainly true. Abu-Jaber's description of food is so precise that it often made me want to do more cooking. But I very much admired the way in which Abu-Jaber presents all her characters as unwitting victims of rough capitalism, which permits them some dignity even as they perform terrible acts.
The Last of the Live Nude Girls by Sheila McClear: This memoir isn't so much about the decline of the Times Square peepshow, as it is about one young woman's efforts to pull herself up by by her bootstraps when presented with few economic options. Filled with self-introspective candor and a quiet dignity, McClear's story is one that might befall any of us in these volatile times. While McClear does get back on her feet, her book leads one contemplating the terrible fates of other young women now moving to New York and falling into deadlier vocations. (
Bizarre. In Australia, the women dominate, at least in literary journalism. There’s Susan Mitchell, Helen Garner, Antonella Gambotto, Chloe Hooper, Geraldine Brooks. And now Jane Crawford has just won a prize. And that’s just off the top of my head. I can’t believe there aren’t plenty of women writing this sort of stuff in the U.S. What about Jane Kramer and Susan Orlean?
Sorry, I meant Kate Crawford.