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The Outsiders writer and former tomboy S.E. Hinton says, "I didn't think like a girl, so it's always been easier to write from a male point of view." More »
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Esquire put up a slideshow of 75 books every man should read, and it is indeed a very good list. However, it's a very good list that's also extremely myopic. It relies way too heavily on the old white dude cannon (particularly the WASP angst end of it) with books by Updike, Cheever, Kingsley and Martin Amis, Hemingway, McPhee, Joyce, Roth, Mailer, and the token Russians. There are only four non-white men on the list (Ellison, Rushdie, Haley, Wright) and just one woman, the incomparable Flannery O'Connor with her classic book of short stories, A Good Man is Hard to Find. The only really offensive choice on the list is Bukowski. I've read Bukowski, and even though he's an old cuss, I like his writing. However, I would never call something so unapologetically misogynistic something men "should" read. Anyway, in light of Esquire's myopia, we decided to curate a list of 20 books every woman should read. You should fill in the other 55 in the comments! More »
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The inimitable Jane Smiley reviewed chick-lit doyenne Jennifer Weiner's new novel, Some Girls for the Philadelphia Inquirer over the weekend, and she wonders why the cover is so goddamn pink. "The pinkness of the novel implies to me that Weiner herself has given up seeking a wider audience, and so given up developing her fictional premises from lots of different perspectives," writes Smiley. Smiley believes that "American fiction has split again, into the boys' team and the girls' team. Certain Girls demonstrates that this works to impoverish both sides." (USA Today notes that the male characters in Certain Girls, "lack substance and exist only as foils for the women.") More »
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