From a tiff that begun on Twitter to the calling out of the New York Times Book Review, literary circles are questioning the how gender affects not just authorship, but how it may change the very genre of a given book.
New statistics (crunched by the Double X staff) show a gender imbalance in books considered by the NYT (and other elite publications), but the question of where to lay the blame of sexism remains unclear: is it the taste of the average American reader (gauged best by the average stack of books at Costco), the publishing industry, or the critics themselves that create the male majority in the world of literary criticism? Or are men, as they ever have, simply writing more books than women? Ruth Franklin explores the questions and more in her article, “Franzen Fallout.”
