Jennifer Howard

The other day, meeting with a publicist from a scholarly publishing house, I asked her a question: Does the press she works for think about the gender breakdown of its authors?

I asked because I often do an informal VIDA-style count of the number of male and female authors represented in book catalogs. I do the same thing with magazines, whose tables of contents and contributors' lists I will often scan to get a sense of how near or far they are to a more or less even split.

This is often--I could say usually--an exercise in frustration. I don't insist on an absolute 50-50 split. But when the numbers are lopsided, as they too often are, it makes me wonder what's going on. It can be depressing as hell if you let it get to you. (Which you can't, honestly, because that will only get in the way of getting your work out there. But by all means get mad or, better still, get even by publishing everywhere you can.)

Why were there more men than women on this particular press's list of authors? In response to my question, the publicist said that the gender breakdown had been a topic of conversation around her office. Nobody seemed to know for sure. Then she raised a question: Do women just not write as many Big Idea books as men do?

The conversation moved on. But her question has been vexing me ever since. I don't believe that women don't have Big Ideas or that we don't write ambitious books. But are we publishing fewer of them than our male counterparts? Are we writing them in such a way that they don't get labeled Big? Or is this another gender-related blind spot in the publishing world? What makes a book a Big Idea book anyway? Is it a ridiculous category altogether? When I floated the Vexing Question on Twitter, I got some intriguing responses that suggested all of those possibilities.

Let me know what you think, and please share your favorite Big Idea books--however defined--by female authors.

…surprising things happen. For instance, lexicographers can track word lookups and peg them to news. A celebrity death or political debate now becomes a “vocabulary event.” I spent the last few weeks talking to lexicographers about how dictionary-making changes when it goes digital (“In the Digital Era, Our Dictionaries Read Us”). For dictionary makers, going electronic opens up all kinds of possibilities. It’s not just that digital dictionaries can be embedded in the operating systems of computers and e-readers so that they’re always at hand. They can be updated far more easily and often than their print cousins, and they… Read more...

Never has a literary genre been more zombified than the short story. It’s dead! It’s alive! Dead, alive! Here are the latest conflicting diagnoses: The New York Times’s Leslie Kaufman says that short stories are alive and kicking, souped up by digital delivery (“A Good Fit for Today’s Little Screens: Short Stories,” Feb. 15, 2013): Story collections, an often underappreciated literary cousin of novels, are experiencing a resurgence, driven by a proliferation of digital options that offer not only new creative opportunities but exposure and revenue as well. Not so fast, says Salon’s Laura Miller (“Sorry, the short story boom… Read more...

Rage, rage against the verbing of the noun (and the adjective). I’m sorry to have to tell you that at a recent publishers’ confab I heard speakers talk about “solutioning” and “obsoleting.” “Innovate” as a transitive verb is bad enough. (The dictionary says it’s okay, and I’m not going to argue with the dictionary.) But don’t let’s go verbing more perfectly good parts of speech that are happy the way they are. Coming up with fresh approaches to, say, publishing or higher education or whatever doesn’t require abusing the language. If you’ve come across other examples of egregious verbing, please… Read more...

We spend a lot of time at our local public library, which happens to be the D.C. Public Library’s Southeast branch, near Eastern Market. We check out books, of course—armfuls of them, because my offspring don’t believe in the one-book-at-a-time approach to reading. We also like to drop by the used-book sale the library has every month or so. It’s not like we need more books in the house—except that we always need more books in the house. There’s a certain SPCA impulse that kicks in, too: I can’t leave this one behind because if I don’t buy it nobody… Read more...

When you look at this picture, what do you see? People reading, yes. Are they reading together or alone? I get a sense of alone-together from this group. Each is absorbed in his reading but it’s a companionable solitude, or so it looks to me. In a sense, though, every reader is always a solitary reader. A good book generates a force field that keeps the world out, whether you’re on a park bench or in a library or in Grand Central Station. That’s part of the fun, yes? At least it is for me. When I read, I… Read more...