About when I turned ten I began crafting my library checkouts, hoping I’d look smart. I’d balance my Nancy Drew with a biography of Abraham Lincoln so the librarian thought well of me. (It seems my self-esteem problem enacted early.)

Jodi Picoult, following the NYT doubled coverage of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, recently weighed in on the Times overwhelming coverage of white male authors. Men telling domestic stories are writing art, while women covering similar ground are crafting women’s fiction. Jennifer Weiner agreed and twitterized the issue with the hashtag #franzenfreude.

Weiner’s directness started a new frenzy, and the issue veered from Picoult’s premise to the age-old battle of literary fiction being weighed against (more…)

Eight great posts, essays, reviews, and factoids I read this past week:

1. Brilliant writer, Janet Fitch, author of White Oleander, writes her 10 Rules of Writing in the LA Times.

2. There is far too much about the language of publishing misunderstood (or never understood) by readers and writers. Thank goodness we have Eric at Pimp My Novel and reveal and define the terms we have to know (stripped book? Neilson Book Scan? Co-Op?)

3. What makes a library be chosen as Library of the Year? It sure makes me want to visit Columbus, Ohio and read at one of their libraries.

4. Are authors in New York jockeying for the best places for book signings? An article by the Wall Street Journal tells us so.

5. In a fascinating New York Times review of a William Golding biography The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies: A Life by John Carey, we learn that Golding “confessed to a friend that he resented the novel because it meant that he owed his reputation to what he thought of as a minor book, a book that had made him a classic in his lifetime, which was “a joke,” and that the money he had gained from it was “Monopoly money” because he hadn’t really earned it.”

6. According to The Christian Science Monitor, “after waiting After waiting 100 years at the author’s request, this November the University of California Press will publish the first of three volumes of the Autobiography of Mark Twain.” Among other fascinating tidbits, Twain reveals his distrust of editors and shows where and how a piece of his was incompetently edited.

7. The world is plugging into “I Write Like” to find out which author they resemble. Apparently, Edgar Allen Poe writes like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

8. Instincts, the past, cultural trends: these and more are included in what literary agent Rachel Gardner tells us are what enter into how agents and publishers make decisions.