From the New York Times Arts Beat blog (the new home of their book blog Paper Cuts), here’s a reading list for the crisis in Egypt. Meanwhile, Atlantic contributing editor and Bookforum regular Graeme Wood continues to file blog posts from Cairo; in his most recent dispatch, he describes being dragged down the street by an Egyptian mob.
The New York Times previews its e-books bestsellers list, slated to appear in print next weekend.
The literary arts website VIDA has released a 2010 count of how often women are published and reviewed in a variety of large and small literary magazines, and the charts show that women are vastly underrepresented in nearly every category at every publication (an informal count shows that Bookforum is not an exception to the trend). As Meghan O’Rourke writes in Slate, “Even if you might have expected the gender ratios to be skewed, the results are a little surprising. After all, writing isn't a field historically dominated by men, like theoretical physics; women in the United States have long had pens in hand.” On blogs such as the Rumpus, people are disputing the way the stats are tallied; they're asking if women publish less books, or submit less material to magazines, which might skew the results. Yes, by all means, get more data and clarify these queries, but as Jim Behrle writes at the Hairpin blog: “The pressure to defend counting pales in comparison to the pressure that ought to be put on these publications going forward.” Perhaps magazines can learn from Wikipedia: Though a recent survey shows that women write less than fifteen percent of articles in the online encyclopedia, Wikipedia is now actively recruiting women writers.
Tonight Brooklyn’s BookCourt is hosting “Great Philosophers who Failed at Love,” a discussion with Andrew Shaffer, Simon Van Booy, and Todd Colby.
