At the New Republic, Ruth Franklin answers some of the questions raised by VIDA’s recent survey, which shows an alarming disparity in the number of women reviewed or published in literary magazines. Franklin finds that the problem begins with the fact that book publishers release many more titles by men than women, and so actually, “magazines are reviewing female authors in something close to the proportion of books by women published each year.” And at Bookslut, Alizah Salario offers an engaging first-person commentary on the issue: “Twenty-Three Short Thoughts About Women and Criticism.”
In a nearly unprecedented technological breakthrough, Kindle e-books now have “Real Page Numbers.”
Do bad reviews matter? Emily St. John Mandel, a novelist who has had the traumatic experience of having her work publicly panned (and lived to tell the tale), considers the question at The Millions, recounting Norman Mailer's instructive example: "Norman Mailer received countless laudatory reviews; but we’ll remember these less vividly, I think, than we’ll remember his decades-long feud with Michiko Kakutani."
Poet Elizabeth Bishop would have been 100 years old today. In honor Bishop's birth, Bookforum surveys three recently published collections of her work, and tonight, Cooper Union will host a free event where twenty contemporary poets, including John Ashbery, Jonathan Galassi, and Katha Pollit (among others), will read their favorite Bishop poem.
