Male authors rarely recommend books by the opposite sex, while customers are reportedly bragging in bookshops about avoiding female writers – when will this be corrected?
Lauren Groff did something brilliantly subversive last week. In her New York Times By the Book Q&A – an interview in which authors are asked such questions as “What’s the last great book you read?” and “What book by somebody else do you wish you had written?” – she named only women authors. You may not notice it at first, but about halfway through it clicks – perhaps because naming only women in a discussion about great books is so unusual, a point that she hammers home when asked about her ideal literary dinner party:
“I would invite every woman writer I have mentioned here, plus hundreds of others I did not have space to name. I would serve unlimited quantities of excellent wine and we would get blitzed and the conversation may eventually meander to touch on that most baffling of questions: When male writers list books they love or have been influenced by — as in this very column, week after week — why does it almost always seem as though they have only read one or two women in their lives?”
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