Jezebel: jane smiley

S.E. Hinton Dishes On Porn, Gender, & Matt Dillon

Anna N. — Mon, 04 May 2009 15:30:00 EDT

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."

In what sounds like a pretty fun conversation, she also told Jane Smiley at the LA Times Festival of Books that she enjoyed writing soft porn scenes for her first novel for adults, Hawkes Harbor, and that a class on Jane Austen at Tulsa University was "one of the highlights of my life." "And believe me," she says, "I've been hugged by Matt Dillon and that wasn't as good!" [Publishers Weekly]

75 Books Every Woman Should Read

Jessica — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 16:40:00 EDT

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!

One note about the choices. Of course there are many, many books by men that "should" be read, but just like Esquire's list, most of the extant rosters of must-read classics are full of old white dudes. So our list is going to be mostly women. Anyway, here goes!

The Lottery, Shirley Jackson
To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton
White Teeth, Zadie Smith
The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende
Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion
Excellent Women, Barbara Pym
The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys
The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri
Beloved, Toni Morrison
Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
Like Life, Lorrie Moore
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
The Delta of Venus, Anais Nin
A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley
A Good Man Is Hard To Find, Flannery O'Connor
The Shipping News, E. Annie Proulx
You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down, Alice Walker

Now you go!

75 Books Every Man Should Read [Esquire]

Jane Smiley Wonders: Has Writer Jennifer Weiner Thrown In The Towel?

Jessica — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 17:00:00 EDT

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.")

While any novel is better when it considers the perspectives of both men and women, how many examples of classic literature have the reverse problem — that the female characters lack substance and exist only as foils for the men? Any Hemingway novel suffers from this malady; Philip Roth's female characters are a joke and even the more modern Romeos of literary wunderkinds like Ben Kunkel have trouble creating fictional women with any staying power. And yet these novels still manage to get to the pinnacle of the literary pantheon, while any female writer who writes mostly about women and their issues is relegated to the pink ghetto with a fuschia cover and a pair of heels.

And anyway, it's a widely accepted fact that men don't buy books in the first place. Are women more likely to buy something because it's pink? I want to believe that this is untrue, but then again Confessions of a Shopaholic, that carnation-hued mess, was purchased by millions so what do I know?

Weiner Is Talented Enough To Aim Higher [Philadelphia Inquirer via Galley Cat]
'Certain Girls': It's Not A Sure Thing [USA Today]