Carol Ann Duffy has commissioned war poetry for the Guardian

I haven't written up my visit to Lewes yet - but note the description here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jul/02/thomas-paine-festival-lewes

Gakked from
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Read, unfinished, hated (I don't do much hating, but the second and third groups meld). Note some series as series, and Banks. 145 titles; 24 read, mostly between the ages of 18 and 25.

Kobo Abe, The Face of Another (1964)
Louisa May Alcott, Little Women (1868)
Kate Atkinson, Behind the Scenes at the Museum (1995)
Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye (1988)
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Charlie Brooker: Let them eat cake. But first, bark a calorie count into their ears till their heads ring with shame

Irvine Welsh reviews Murakami Ryū's latest novel in today's Guardina - "The dustjacket of Ryu Murakami's latest novel, Audition, somewhat pompously describes the author as a "renaissance man for the modern age"." Except that I saw Audition, the film based on this novel, some point around 2000 and it came out in about 1999. It's based on a novel by ( Read more... )

Is the books world short-changing its bright young women?

Do men have an unfair advantage in our literary prize shortlists?

A variation on why don't women write books with big ideas (to which the answer is, I suspect, if they do it doesn't get counted as a big idea) which also then takes in why don't women present big documentaries ( Read more... )

Charlie Brooker gets it:

So it's here at last. The dawn of the dumb has broken in earnest. Two mistakes occur - first Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross overstep the mark with an ill-advised bit of juvenilia, then someone decides to broadcast it. Two listeners complained, but that's by the by: it shouldn't have gone out. But then the Daily Mail - not ( Read more... )

So I'm googling for images for a lecture on comedy and sexism, when I stumble across:

The Nympho Librarian"The prim miss took off more than her mask of respectability behind the stacks ... to any man who asked"

And that led me to:

The Image of Librarians in Pornography"Librarians are always concerned about their image, and much attention has ( Read more... )

Where are the books by women with big ideas?

Books like Freakonomics, defining significant cultural or economic trends with a punchy title, never seem to be produced by women. But why?
Apparently Naomi Klein and Susan Faludi don't count; nor Greer, Russ, Millett, Carter, Woolf, Wollstonecraft, Rowbottom, Paglia, Rubin, Dworkin, Gilbert and Gubar, ( Read more... )