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From VIDA, The Count 2012[/caption]
Myself, authors Amanda Rea, Jenny Shank, and author/editor Michael Nye will be talking about what seems to be the hot literary topic of the moment on June 19, 8:00 p.m., at the Salon: The Scent of a Woman's Ink -- The Question of Gender Bias in Publishing.
In Francine Prose’s manifesto for Harper’s, “Scent of a Woman’s Ink,” she tried to unpack Norman Mailer’s contention that he could “sniff out the ink of the women.” (He didn’t like what he smelled.) Every year the statistics are pretty bald: women get published less than men, reviewed less than men, and yet they’re the ones overwhelmingly buying books and reading them. What’s the story, here? Are fewer women writing? Are fewer submitting? Or are they treated differently by readers and the industry alike? Come with your own opinions and listen to our esteemed panel hash out this timeless question.
Among ourselves we have exchanged a few e-mails with links to articles on the topic, and I thought we should share them with you, too:
- The sure-to-make-you-outraged VIDA Count 2012
- Francine Prose's Scent of a Woman's Ink (Harper's). Not recent, but a classic of the genre, and our salon's namesake.
- My So-Called Post-Feminist Life in Arts and Letters, by Deborah Copaken Kogan
- Wikipedia's Sexism Toward Female Novelists (NY Times)
- On the Rules of Literary Fiction for Men & Women (NY Times)
- Jennifer Weiner's response to the Claire Messud "likeability" dustup
- Laura Miller's takedown of male critics' responses to Rachel Kushner's The Flamethrowers
- And Amanda Rea's blog post, On Being a Woman, Being a Writer, and Cringing Sometimes (one of the most viewed posts on this blog, ever).
If you have a link to a must-read article that I've missed, please do post it in the comments below. And we hope to see you at the salon, but if you can't be there for the discussion and there's something that you wish someone would stand up and say about this topic, please let us know in the comments!
