![]() ![]() ![]() In the essay, Wolitzer recounted a bitterly amusing anecdote in which a man she met at a party, after hearing her describe her novels-“Sometimes they’re about marriage. It’s packaged respectfully, reviewed widely, and marketed to people of all genders.īut books by Franzen’s and Eugenides’s female colleagues tend to be relegated to what Wolitzer called the “lower shelf.” Their covers suggest domesticity, their spines are slimmer, and their contents are dismissed by some male readers as “one soft, undifferentiated mass that has little to do with them.” The distinction is significant in many ways, but particularly for sales: Both men and women read books by men, but books by women are far more likely to be read by women than by men. ![]() ![]() When a well-regarded male novelist such as Jonathan Franzen or Jeffrey Eugenides publishes a new novel-even one preoccupied with relationships, like Freedom or The Marriage Plot-publishers and readers automatically take the book seriously, Wolitzer argued. This couldn’t have been lost on Wolitzer, who published an essay in The New York Times Book Review in 2012 lamenting that literary fiction by men tends to be received differently from literary fiction by women. Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read. ![]()
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