MB Civic

Pollitt in The Nation …

Plenty of women writers get excellent reviews, but it is very rare for them to get the kind of excited, rapturous high-cultural reception given to writers who are “white and male and living in Brooklyn” or, since [Jonathan] Franzen lives on the Upper East Side, are named Jonathan. “Girl genius” is not a phrase in our language. Indeed, men get more reviews, period. The editors of DoubleX, Slate’s women’s blog, found that over the past two years 62 percent of the fiction reviewed in the New York Times had male authors, as did 72 percent of the books that got both a daily and a Sunday review

I’m reading Franzen’s new book, Freedom, btw – its really great! – mab .. read more