PowellsBooks.Blog

• The Wonder Year: Publishers Weekly released its list of the ten best books of 2009 (remember?), and the editors probably clapped their hands and collectively thought, Welp, that's all 'til next year!

  Little did they realize they had unleashed an earthquake of controversy that would drown them in a tsunami of outrage. See, the thing is, all ten of their books... are written by men!

  The New York Times' ArtsBeat blog notes:

  Cate Marvin, a founder of the group Women in Letters and Literary Arts, told The Guardian, "The absence made me nearly speechless." She added: "It continues to surprise me that literary editorsare so comfortable with their bias toward male writing, despite the great and obvious contributions that women authors make to our contemporary literary culture."

  In her introduction to the year-end lists, Louisa Ermelino, the reviews director of Publishers Weekly, wrote, "We ignored gender and genre and who had the buzz," adding: "It disturbed us when we were done that our list was all male."

  What's this? I hear some among you shouting, "Well, so what? Maybe this is the one year women didn't write any good books. Or maybe they wrote plenty of them, but none were among the PW editors' ten favorites for the year. That's no biggie, right?"

  You can't even imagine.

Book News Round-up:

• Poor Stephen King. He's finally earned enough respect from the establishment to get his new novel, Under the Dome, featured in The New York Times Book Review — but even the NYTBR can't resist mentioning the plot of The Simpsons Movie.

  Something tells me King is going to be shouting "D'oh!" an awful lot in the coming weeks.

• NPR has nice words for (and an excerpt of) Paul Auster's new novel, Invisible: "[Auster] is superb at illuminating the ongoing reinvention of the self, and the subtle ways in which we collaborate with those who would seduce, deceive and betray us."
• The Huffington Post considers the state of the crime novel. A handful of prominent critics weigh in.
• The Today Show takes a look at that other Sarah Palin book.
• Is Tim Powers coming to a theater near you — riding on a pirate ship from the Caribbean?
• The title says it all: "Publish your own book for fun and profit!" Can there be any doubt that this piece comes from USA Today?
• How did I miss Tina Brown's all-too-rare video interview with Philip Roth for his latest novel, The Humbling?

  Why, here's Roth talking about writing sex. (If this gives you the dirty-old-man creeps, well... it probably should.)

  Philip Roth on Writing About Sex from The Daily Beast Video on Vimeo.

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Brockman is the head writer for the daily Book News posts on the Powells.com blog. In his free time he's hard at work on his fictional memoir, which changes titles daily.

The views and commentary posted by Brockman are entirely his own, and are not representative of the whole of Powell's Books, its employees, or any sane human being.

Books mentioned in this post

1. 
   $40.00 New Hardcover add to wish list

   The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science

   Richard Holmes
2. 
   $17.95 Used Hardcover add to wish list

   Under the Dome

   Stephen King
3. 
   $18.35 New DVD add to wish list

   The Simpsons Movie (Widescreen)

4. 
   $25.00 New Hardcover add to wish list

   Invisible

   Paul Auster
5. 
   $22.00 New Hardcover add to wish list

   The Humbling

   Philip Roth