Although plenty of critics and academics have done a wonderful job reinterpreting what it means to be “the canon,” there are still many readers in the US who, consciously or…
As VIDA’s annual stats have made very clear, most publications favor male writers reviewing books by other male writers. Our inimitable essays editor Roxane Gay has also talked about the…
Novelist Jennifer Weiner has long been an outspoken critic of literary sexism, vocally demanding respect for herself and other female authors and pushing back against stodgy heavyweights like Jonathan Franzen.…
We’ve blogged before about the issue of representation in children’s and young-adult literature. This post by Soraya Chemaly looks at the numbers and finds that kid-lit books feature twice as…
In “honor” of David Gilmour’s comments to a Hazlitt interviewer about how he refused to teach books by female authors, Rumpus contributor Michelle Dean rounded up some other literary men’s contributions…
Yesterday, Slate announced the death of the patriarchy at the age of several thousand years. The Cut’s Kat Stoeffel has honored the dearly departed, which will be mourned by civilizations across the globe,…
“Do you feel pressure to have children before it’s too late?” “There aren’t a lot of photos out there of you. Is there a reason for that?” Read these and…
As we’ve documented pretty extensively before, arts organization VIDA has done a lot to expose gender inequality in the writing world with its annual count comparing female bylines to male ones in a…
At a relatively slim 3700 words, Moira Weigel’s and Mal Ahern’s essay “Further Materials Toward a Theory of the Man-Child,” sparked by less-than-enlightened political text Preliminary Materials for a Theory of…
We’ve written a fair amount about this year’s VIDA numbers. We even featured an essay by Andrew Ervin, a writer who realized he was part of the problem—only 23.5% of the…