Remember way back in November when Publisher’s Weekly came up with a list of the top 10 books (not best selling books) of the year and not a single one was written by a woman? Lo and behold the National Book Critics Circle disagrees a bit and has nominated many different women for its 2009 awards. Clearly, we gotta do better in biography, criticism and non-fiction. Wolf Hall is on my reading list.
Here are the female nominees:
Autobiography:
Diana Athill, Somewhere Towards the End (Norton)
Debra Gwartney, Live Through This: A Mother’s Memoir of Runaway Daughters and Reclaimed Love (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Mary Karr, Lit (Harper)
Kati Marton, Enemies of the People: My Family’s Journey to America (Simon & Schuster)
Biography:
Martha A. Sandweiss, Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line (Penguin Press)
Criticism:
Eula Biss, Notes From No Man’s Land: American Essays (Graywolf Press)
Fiction:
Bonnie Jo Campbell, American Salvage (Wayne State University Press)
Michelle Huneven, Blame (Sarah Crichton Books/FSG)
Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall (Holt)
Jayne Anne Phillips, Lark and Termite (Knopf)
Nonfiction:
Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History (Penguin Press)
Poetry:
Rae Armantrout, Versed (Wesleyan)
Louise Glück, A Village Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Eleanor Ross Taylor, Captive Voices: New and Selected Poems, 1960–2008 (Louisiana State University Press)
Rachel Zucker, Museum of Accidents (Wave Books)
Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing
Joan Acocella
Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award
Joyce Carol Oates
National Book Critics Circle Finalists
Tags: Kati Marton, Mary Karr
I read this interview yesterday and it totally cracked me up. I haven’t read 
Here are the women who were nominated for the National Book Awards. Winners will be announced on November 18,
Let’s start with the good news.
Michelle Pfeiffer opens in Cheri on Friday (I am helping to promote the film) and the folks who publish Colette’s books that the film is based on have offered 3 copies of the books to Women & Hollywood readers.
Everybody knows that women are the ones that buy books. I’ve heard statistics that say that women buy upwards of 60% of all books. But the NY Times Book Review has always been a boy’s club. Happily, this week the section was actually readable and interesting. It actually started on Friday with Janet Maslin’s piece
Sullivan was also reviewed in the
I knew nothing about Vendela Vida before I spoke with her a couple of weeks ago in conjunction with the release of her first film Away We Go which she co-wrote with husband Dave Eggers. (The film opens Friday and I liked it very much.) I very much enjoyed the conversation and am now going to make sure I read all her books which includes
Beating out lots of talented, towering literary figures including Mario Vargas Llosa, VS Naipaul, and Peter Carey, Munro was named the third recipeint of the Man Booker International Prize.
News comes this week that there will be two new mini-series on the early years of Hollywood. The first from Turner Classics Movies will be a documentary series entitled Moguls and Movie Stars: A History of Hollywood. The second from Sopranos creator David Chase entitled A Ribbon of Dreams will follow two characters (I’m sure men) men as they make their way in the business.
I’ve been waiting years! for someone to adapt Patricia Cornwell’s novels into films or even TV films. I mean, every single one of Danielle Steel’s books have adapted, but no Patricia Cornwell. Then I see in Variety this morning that two of her books At Risk and The Front have been optioned by Stanley M. Brooks and Jim Head and Tandem Communications to be produced for Lifetime.
I don’t know if you’ve read The Time Traveler’s Wife, but if you haven’t you should. It rocks. I am psyched for the film to come out. It’s been done for a while and stars Rachel McAdams and Eric Bana.
It is interesting to note that the piece refers to how Charles Frazier got $8 million for his second novel Thirteen Moons after the success of Cold Mountain. His second book did not sell well. He was able to get the $8 million based on an outline and she has completed the book so folks are confident that it will work.
Molly Haskell is the shit when it comes to writing about women’s films with a feminist perspective. There is no one better. Her book From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies is one of the best books about women in film and it was written in the 70s. (There is an additional chapter that covers the 70s and 80s in the paperback.) That just goes to show you how few books have critically looked at this issue (from a non-academic perspective.)
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