Hi there and welcome to this week’s Lez Liberty Lit!
Books written by women are priced 45% lower on average, according to a new study.
The Nobel Prize in Literature this year was cancelled due to a sex scandal.
Saying that a woman only wrote one good book is usually a great way to bury her more subversive works. At LitHub, Joanna Russ writes:
“I think it no accident that the myth of the isolated achievement so often promotes women writers’ less good work as their best work. For example, Jane Eyre exists, as of this writing, on the graduate reading list of the Department of English at the University of Washington. (This is the only PhD reading list to which I have access at the moment. I mention it not as a horrid example, but because it is respectable, substantial, and probably typical of first-rate institutions across this country.) Villette does not appear on the list. How could it? Jane Eyre is a love story and women ought to write love stories; Villette, ‘a book too subversive to be popular,’ is described by Kate Millett as ‘one long meditation on a prison break.'”
New Amazon bookstores are driven by data, but they can’t compete with curated independent bookstores (at least, for now).
Buying “cool” books is a lie you’re telling yourself.
Fifty works of classic literature have been reimagined with pulp covers.
Why not write analog?
Here’s why everyone is reading Samantha Irby’s Meaty. And what to read if you want to read funny women.
Read these 11 books by women this spring. And these 19 books in May. And then these. Read these 10 books if you love Drag Race. Read Percival Everett. Read feminist graphic novels. Read more poetry. Read these six books if you’re obsessed with Dirty Computer. Read these Black British essayists. Read these food books if you’re not hungry.
I have so many tabs open now
Regarding the article on analog writing: part of the way through writing my last dissertation chapter this spring, I decided to print out my detailed outline and switch to turning the notes and quotations into prose by hand. I enjoyed the process much more that way, not only because it was an excuse to use a fountain pen and see the products of my work more tangibly, but also because it reduced distractions and was easier on the eyes.
RE. the Nobel prize item, I realize that “sex scandal” is the wording used in the headline of the linked article, but the guy in question appears to actually have sexually assaulted a ton of people. Calling these types of things “sex scandals” always seems really diminishing of the gravity of the harm caused.
My first thought on reading the LitHub article was that it was depressing to see how many authors I thought of in the limited way she described or had never even heard of in the first place – including the author herself, who was apparently a major science fiction writer, and I love sci fi.
I am deciding instead to take advantage of the fact that she conveniently gathered in one place a whole bunch of recommendations for who & what I should read next. And likewise, thank you for your work on this series, I could go full-time just trying to catch up on all the good things to read that I did not know about.