Books/Literary

Countdown to 2014: Amy Poehler is Writing a Book

Get your phone alerts ready, Amy Poehler is writing a book that will drop in 2014. This should also be known as your new favorite book of all time. Poehler signed with It Books, an imprint of Harper Collins and will be writing an “illustrated, nonlinear diary full of humor and honesty and brim...

Canada Establishing Rosalind Prize for Women Fiction Writers

During the Vancouver Writers Fest, frustration turned into creation. A panel of five women, including the founder of the U.K.’s Orange Prize for fiction, discussed the current state of women’s representations in literature. And the statistics provided by panel member, novelist Susan Swan...

Lena Dunham Gets A Big, Big Book Deal

Current megastar Lena Dunham is smartly trading on her success and wide name recognition and sold her first book, a book of advice to young women, entitled Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s Learned for a whopping $3.7 million.

Women Donors Save the Orange Prize for Literature

A group of female donors including Cherie Blair, Martha Lane Fox and the novelist Joanna Trollope have come in at the last minute to keep the Orange Prize for women's fiction in existence.  The prize will now be known at the Women's Prize for Fiction.  The committee is hoping to ha...

Talking to Penny Marshall

A new memoir by actress and director Penny Marshall hit bookstore last week.  Marshall was a big star in the 70s and 80s appearing on multiple TV shows and hanging out with the rest of Hollywood TV royalty.  Her stories about Hollywood are hysterical and tragic (she was friends with John B...

Quote of the Day: If a Man Writes About a Family, It's Like, Oh, He's Really Writing About America. If a Woman Writes About a Family, It's Just Assumed That She's Writing About Herself.

So says Jennifer Weiner who is now on her book tour for her 10th book The Next Best Thing.  All of Weiner's previous nine novels have been incredibly popular and best sellers.  She's sold 11 million books in 36 countries.  But she's pissed because the NY Times doesn't ...

Author Jennifer Weiner Keynotes BookExpo America's 2012 Bloggers Conference

Guest Post: A Feminist Defense of 50 Shades of Grey

50 Shades of Grey is happening, it's happening big, and it's happening for women. I jumped on the band wagon after reading that the books were initially created as Twilight fan-fic (Twilight being the subject of my Masters thesis...) and immediately gave up three days of my life to obsessively read ...

The Continuing Conversation About the Marginalization of Female Writers

I opened the NY Times book review this past weekend and lo and behold there was an essay by the divine Meg Wolitzer called The Second Shelf about how books written by men and women are treated differently.