Archive for the 'Books' Category

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

Unlike the Publishers Weekly year end list which included no women, the NY Times has included a bunch of women on its 10 best list of 2009.  In fact, 4 of the 5 fiction books are by women.

Here they are.  Full list will appear in the December 13 book review.

Fiction

Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It by Maile Meloy
A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore
Half Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel by Jeanette Walls
A Short History of Women by Kate Walbert

Non-Fiction

LIT: A Memoir by Mary Karr
Ramond Carver: A Writer’s Life by Carol Sklenicka

The 10 Best Books of 2009 (NY Times)

I read this interview yesterday and it totally cracked me up.  I haven’t read Scottoline’s books but I am now adding them to my list.  I guess I must be the only one who hasn’t read them because there are 25 million in print.  She now has a non-fiction book out Why My Third Husband Will Be a Dog which is based on her “Chick Wit” column from the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Here are some of the answers she gave to Time Magazine:

You’ve been called the female John Grisham. How do you feel about that?
…But the truth is, more so than ever before, I have my own voice, and it’s not a girl version of a man. By the way, do you ever see any man called [that]? You never see that kind of a description. You’ll never see, “He’s a guy version of Lisa Scottoline.”

So let’s get down to the business of your new book. What are Spanx?
You know what? Spanx are a sham. Spanx are an evil hoax perpetrated upon womanhood. It happened to me when I was in a store. I don’t have time to shop so I grabbed a pair of tights and figured I would try them on at home. I put them on and I can’t get them on. I try to put these on and it’s like a tourniquet … So I thought, what is this garment? I started to do the research. It is in fact body-shaping underwear and it says things on the website like, “It’s power panties.” The only thing I could think, truly, is that if women had power, they wouldn’t need Spanx.

Spanx are evil.  I wonder if it was a woman or a man who invented Spanx?  Anyone know?

Update: Thanks to reader Elizabeth, we know that a woman, Sara Blakely is that one who created this hateful garment.

Q&A: Best Selling Author Lisa Scottoline (Time)

The editors of Publishers Weekly have thrown down the gauntlet picking the top 10 books of the year and SURPRISE they are all by guys.

Here’s what Louisa Ermelino said about how they chose the books:

From more than 50,000 volumes, we valiantly set out to choose 100, and this year we’ve upped the ante with a top 10 list. A usually cooperative, agreeable bunch, we gave ourselves a reason to fight. We wanted the list to reflect what we thought were the top 10 books of the year with no other consideration. We expect you’ll be surprised: there’s a graphic novel, an adventure story, possibly the next Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a delicious biography that could bring Cheever back into the literary firmament. We ignored gender and genre and who had the buzz. We gave fair chance to the “big” books of the year, but made them stand on their own two feet. It disturbed us when we were done that our list was all male.

I guess it didn’t disturb them enough.  But it has caused quite a stir and again points out the issue of why these lists matter and why women just never seem to make the grade.

Cate Marvin who started a new organization WILLA (Women in Letters and Literary Arts) said to the Guardian:

It continues to surprise me that literary editors are so comfortable with their bias toward male writing, despite the great and obvious contributions that women authors make to our contemporary literary culture.

Co-Founder of Willa Erin Belieu said:

when PW’s editors tell us they’re not worried about ‘political correctness’, that’s code for ‘your concerns as a feminist aren’t legitimate’”. “They know they’re being blatantly sexist, but it looks like they feel good about that,” said Belieu. “I, on the other hand, have heard from a whole lot of people – writers and readers – who don’t feel good about it at all.

I personally believe that it is bullshit that the top 10 books of the year are all by men (and by the way 9 out of the 10 are by white men.)  People who make these lists need to look at their own inherent and internalized biases.  Wonder how those women who didn’t give a crap about political correctness yesterday are feeling this morning.

Fury after women writers excluded from ‘books of the year‘ (The Guardian)

Best Books of 2009 (Publishers Weekly)

Here are the women who were nominated for the National Book Awards. Winners will be announced on November 18,

Fiction
Bonnie Jo Campbell, American Salvage (Wayne State University Press)
Jayne Anne Phillips, Lark and Termite (Alfred A. Knopf)

Non-Fiction
Adrienne Mayor, The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy (Princeton University Press)

Poetry
Rae Armantrout, Versed (Wesleyan University Press)
Ann Lauterbach, Or to Begin Again (Viking Penguin)
Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, Open Interval (University of Pittsburgh Press)

Young People’s Literature
Deborah Heiligman, Charles and Emma: The Darwins’ Leap of Faith
(Henry Holt)
Laini Taylor, Lips Touch: Three Times (Arthur A. Levine Books/Scholastic)
Rita Williams-Garcia, Jumped (HarperTeen/HarperCollins)

Full list

Let’s start with the good news.

Women dominate the long list for the Canadian award the Scotiabank Giller Prize.  (The prize is named for former reporter Doris Giller.) On the list of 12, women make up 10 of the nominees.

The list includes:

Margaret Atwood – The Year of the Flood; Anne Michaels – The Winter Vault; Jeanette Lynes – The Factory Voice; Annabel Lyon- The Golden Mean; Martha Baillie – The Incident Report; Kim Echlin – The Disappeared; Claire Holden Rothman – The Heart Specialist; Paulette Jiles – The Colour of Lightning; Kate Pullinger -  The Mistress of Nothing; Shani Mootoo  Valmiki’s Daughter

Here’s what the organization said when addressing the issue of how they got so many women nominees:

“The only instruction the jurors get is to pick good books,” she said. “[One of the jurors] Russell Banks told me that he was startled to see that most of their picks were female and only two male. He said they hadn’t given any thought to gender while reading the books at all.”

Winners receive $50,000.

And now for the bad news.

A new collection of interviews of horror writers done by the British Fantasy Society failed to include a single female author and women are pissed accusing the guys of sexism.  Surprisingly, the guys admit that the women are right.  Writer Maura McHugh got mad and posted this on her blog Splinster:

There are no excuses for this omission. That it happens, and it was allowed to happen, speaks to the deeply cultured disregard for women’s opinion in the world. I see it every day. We are marginalised, silenced, side-lined, forgotten, conveniently dropped, patronised, under-represented, dismissed, subtly intimidated and ignored.
I never want to see an all-male anthology or collection or essays/interviews in the speculative field again. Enough. It’s the 21st century. Women exist, we work in this field, and we deserve recognition. It’s that simple.

Here’s the apology from Guy Adams of the The British Fantasy Society

It was disgustingly simple for a man not to notice these things, a blindness to the importance of correct gender representation that I feel embarrassed to have fallen into. I can only apologise and hope that the discussion has made other editors and publishers realise that this kind of lazy sexism is unacceptable and to watch their own lists in future.

And from the editor of the book James Cooper

I’d like to stress that it was by no means intended, though I appreciate that this is perhaps the weakest kind of excuse one could offer.

It’s quite awesome that these guys accepted responsibility and admitted their sexism quickly but the biggest lesson for me here is the fact that Mr Cooper was able to pick out authors “who had influenced him over the last 25 years” and not a single woman came to his mind.  That’s the problem.

Women dominate 2009 Giller long list (Globe and Mail)

British Fantasy Society admits ‘lazy sexism’ over male-only horror book (The Guardian)

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.

Here are a couple of questions you need to answer to win:

1- What year was Cheri published?

2- Who is the director and screenwriter of Cheri?

3- What actress who is now starring in Broadway in a major revival has a small part in Cheri?

Rules:

1- Submit your answers to melissa@womenandhollywood.com

2- Include your mailing address

3- contest ends at 5pm on June 26

Cheri opens nationwide on Friday June 26.

Official site
Trailer

Purchase the book

Film synopsis: Synopsis: Léa De Lonval is a woman on the verge of aging – but she’s not going to give in without a spirited fight.  Strong willed, sexually savvy and fiercely independent she remains a much-desired courtesan of breathtaking beauty and wit.  Yet, she can’t help but conclude that, at the age of 49, now is the time to end her career on a high note.   Set at the very tail end of France’s Belle Epoque – literally the “Beautiful Age,” when the upper classes lavished in leisure and wealth just before the world-altering onset of World War One – the film deals with issues of changing gender roles, sexuality, money, aging, and society.  The film also stars Kathy Bates as Charlotte Peloux, Lea’s former rival and the mother of Lea’s lover, Cheri, a woman jealous of Lea’s enduring beauty.  Cheri offers an alternative to the big budget blockbusters of the summer, two mature women in control of their power and lives.

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 The Girls of Summer.  I was psyched to add some of these books to my list especially J. Courtney Sullivan’s Commencement which if it is better than Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep (which I loved) will be a treat.  Here’s a quote from the book:

The “Commencement” characters are savvy about, among other things, feminism and publishing. “When a woman writes a book that has anything to do with feelings or relationships, it’s either called chick lit or women’s fiction, right?” one of them asks. “But look at Updike, or Irving. Imagine if they’d been women. Just imagine. Someone would have slapped a pink cover onto ‘Rabbit at Rest,’ and poof, there goes the … Pulitzer.”

What an awesome line.

The prolific Jennifer Weiner who has a great blog and tweets too also has a new book Best Friends Forever out this summer.

Sullivan was also reviewed in the Sunday Book Review (I think she works at the Times but that should not take away from what seems to be a great book) and the main book featured on the cover was A Short History of Women by Kate Walbert.  (I love the photo they used)  The book also has feminist themes. From the review:

What is that history? What are its implications? And why should we care about them? Consider Virginia Woolf’s dictum: “This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing room.” If you think this belief is dated, think again. Just two months ago, Joyce Carol Oates told The New York Times Magazine why violence is so often the subject of her fiction. “If you’re going to spend the next year of your life writing,” she explained, “you would probably rather write ‘Moby-Dick’ than a little household mystery.”

And the money quote:

Her writing wears both its intelligence and its ideology lightly. No manifesto, this is a gorgeously wrought and ultimately wrenching work of art.

Makes me excited to read some good books this summer.

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 And Now You Can Go and Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name.  She also co-edits The Believer magazine.

Women & Hollywood: Talk about how the idea for writing this film came about.

Vendela Vida: It started in 2005 and I was pregnant with our first (we now have 2 children) and I basically started taking notes. As a writer that’s how I process the world.  I go out and take notes of things that have happened.  I was basically surprised when I was pregnant at how much it was an invitation to start talking to me about their experiences with pregnancy and birth and give me advice that I hadn’t necessarily asked for on how to raise my child.  It was basically my way of processing other people’s reactions to pregnancy and also my own reaction.

I was taking these notes and a lot of them were about funny stuff I had overheard, conversations I had or things I read in books and didn’t quite know what to do with.  I would come home and tell Dave and we would laugh about it and say that would be a funny scene in a movie so we just started experimenting with dialogue for these two characters.  We knew the material lent itself more to a movie than a novel because there was so much dialogue.  It felt very cinematic to us.  We started writing scenes not expecting it to evolve into something we were just trying to make each other laugh.  It kind of just went from there.

W&H: Had the two of you ever written together before?

VV: No.  The screenplay format seemed to lend itself to the collaboration much more so than obviously a novel.

W&H: Did you write Verona intentionally as a mixed race woman?

VV: Yes we did and we wrote her with Maya Rudolph in mind.  It was important to me that she be mixed race and it was also important that she and her partner not have any conversations  between the two of them of her being mixed race.  Other people could comment on it but it’s never an issue between Burt and Verona.

W&H:  What’s the difference between writing fiction, non-fiction and film?

VV: I love writing dialogue and with film the pleasure and difficulty is that you are constricted by space.  In a film you have to make sure the dialogue is advancing the plot.  With a screenplay you are writing a skeletal outline and you know that the director and actors are going to bring so much more, whereas when you are writing a novel it is all on you.  Every period is one you.  Every quote is on you.  It’s fun to do a collaboration especially because when you are writing a novel you are spending so much time with yourself in your room with your thoughts.  I do love novels and they will always be my first love but this was a great experience especially because we started writing after I finished my novel Northern Lights Erase Your Name which is set in the Arctic circle.  It’s kind of a dark novel in many ways so it was refreshing to write something more lighthearted.

Continue reading ‘Interview with Vendela Vida: Novelist and Co-Writer of Away We Go’

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.

This is what judge Jane Smiley said about Munro:

“Her work is practically perfect. Any writer has to gawk when reading her because her work is very subtle and precise,” said Smiley. “Her thoughtfulness about every subject is so concentrated.”

The 77 year old author will receive her honor in Dublin on June 25th.  Congrats on a well deserved honor.

Alice Munro wins Man Booker International prize (The Guardian)

Another slow weekend for women at the box office. The only wide release is the family film Hannah Montana starring Miley Cyrus.  I bet there will be a lot of pretty happy 10-year-old girls (and hopefully boys) this weekend.

Films Currently in Theatres
Sunshine Cleaning
Forbidden Lie$
Duplicity
Everlasting Moments
Coraline
Pray the Devil Back to Hell- Salina, KS; Amherst, MA
Last Chance Harvey
Wendy and Lucy
The Reader

Women Directed Films
Sugar
Enlighten Up

Opening Next Week
American Violet
The Lemon Tree

I love listing awards that focus on women cause we always get exposed to so many women we otherwise would probably never hear of.  Here’s this year’s longlist for the Orange Women’s Fiction Prize.  Clearly you can tell from the list there are some women you’ve heard of, but most are new names, at least to me.

Toni Morrison- A Mercy

Deirdre Madden – Molly Fox’s Birthday

Marilynne Robinson- Home

Kamila Shamsie- Burnt Shadows

Gaynor Arnold- Girl in a Blue Dress

Debra Adelaide- The Household Guide to Dying

Lissa Evans- Their Finest Hour and a Half Continue reading ‘Orange Women’s Fiction Nominees’

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.

Wonder how women will figure in these stories because if you know your Hollywood history, you know that women were vital contributors to its early success.

Hope they all read Cari Beauchamp’s biography of Frances Marion Without Lying Down: Frances Marion And The Power Of Women In Hollywood which is an amazing overview of early Hollywood, as if women mattered.  Turner Classics made the book into a doc so hopefully one of the researchers will check it out.

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.

At Risk and The Front?  Sigh.  Isn’t the lead of those books a guy?  Cornwell in my mind is best known for her amazing series of Kay Scarpetta forensic crime novels.  Kay Scarpetta is one of my favorite characters.  She’s smart, complicated and so totally interesting.  Knowing Cornwell, I’m sure there are strong female characters in both At Risk and The Front but I can’t help but be a little sad that the first Cornwell books to make it to TV will not have Kay Scarpetta in them.

My vote for casting Kay Scarpetta: Kate Mulgrew

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.

Niffenger she sold her second novel Her Fearful Symmetry in a “highly contested” auction to Scribner for close to $5 million, and it will be released at the end of September.   Awesome.

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.

Question, why would they give $8 million to a guy based on an outline?  Seems a bit reckless.  And, do you think that Niffenger would have gotten her $5 million with just an outline?  I doubt it.

Audrey Niffenegger Receives $5 Million Advance for Second Novel (NY Times)

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.)

Haskell has taken on one of the most beloved films Gone with the Wind in her new book Frankly My Dear which is out now.  The book has gotten stellar reviews and including in the NY Times this weekend.

Haskell’s argument is mounted on feminist principles that at first glance seem antithetical to a film widely regarded as prefeminist fluff. She contends that “themes centering on women” are “always an inferior subject matter to socially conscious critics of literature and film.” After 70 years of “GWTW” bashing, a creditable critic finally says, “Not so fast!”

Haskell gave up regular reviewing in the early ’90s, leaving criticism that seriously examined the big-screen image of women and the popular representation of female social roles to go underground — into academic studies where abstruse, tenure-seeking jargon is used to rebuff popular taste. That makes “Frankly, My Dear” all the more remarkable. It’s Haskell’s feminist perspective that provides insight into a movie most academics won’t touch and current critics dismiss. She disentangles the film’s qualities from the confounding issues of misogy­ny, racism and intellectual snobbery.

I’ve added it to my list of things to read.

What the Wind Blew In (NY Times)

Buy Frankly My Dear

Buy From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies