Male Characters Dominate Fiction, A Recent Study Finds

Fiction, it appears, may be yet another area where women aren't treated equally to men.

I recently wrote about a recent study that, by means of computer analysis, compared 200 novels written by graduates of Master of Fine Arts (MFA) programs to an equal number of those written by authors without MFAs. You can find that post here. The point of that posting was to take another look at whether getting the time and cost of getting a graduate degree in creative writing is worth it or not.

But the study also came up with another interesting finding: that authors write more about men than about women, perhaps because publishers find such books sell better.

Listicles and the Addictive Nature of Lists

Jonathon Sturgeon, in an article about how and why people chat about books online, mentions in derisive terms a listicle he received not too long ago.

"The day after the last Paris attacks, after viewing streams of dejection online, I received an email from BuzzFeed, a listicle featuring 31 books that promised to restore my faith in humanity."

Not Just All About Me, But All About My Angst

The New York Times just carried a lengthy obituary on Anita Brookner, an English writer who, early in her late-in-life writing career, won the Booker (now Mann Booker) Prize for fiction.

Reading this brought to mind an Elle magazine article about contemporary Twitter maven, poet and soon-to-be novelist Melissa Broder. The article came to my attention thanks to "Literary Hub," an on-line font of all things having to do with writing.

Eliot & Barnes: Why The Past Belongs In What's New

In his 1919 essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T.S. Eliot famously argued that great poets are distinguished not by the degree to which their work differs from the past, but rather by the manner in which they incorporate and acknowledge prior achievements.

It is a prejudice of critics that they search for those aspects of a poet’s work that least resembles the work of other writers, and pretend to find therein the essence of the poet and that which readers can most enjoy, Eliot said. “Whereas if we approach a poet without this prejudice we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously,” he continued.

How Much Of A Book Do You Actually Read?

In the age of Big Data, publishers increasingly want to know just how much of a book purchasers actually read, or so says a story in the March 15 New York Times.

Amazon, Apple and other purveyors of e-books apparently already have a lot of such data when it comes to people reading books in electronic form, but that is roughly only about 25% of the market and readership of e-books is, at best, leveling off at present, various reports have suggested. Readership data for books on paper is another matter.

To fill the gap, The Times reported, a London-based firm named Jellybooks has a device readers can use, in exchange for free books, to track their reading activity and transmit that data to the company, which then provides it to participating publishing companies, presumably for a fee.

A Memorable Way of Putting Something

"His beauty had startled her, until she'd met both parents -- Vietnamese mother, Polish father -- and then he'd seemed like the solution to something."

That sentence jumped out and stuck with me as I was reading "Buttony," a story in the March 7, 2016 New Yorker  by Fiona McFarlane. It's about the dangers of an addiction to beauty and it reads like a fable even though the characters are humans as opposed to animals.

Edvard Munch: Storytelling in Art

One artist I have long admired is the Norwegian expressionist Edvard Munch and, as such, he figures in the first chapter of my novella, "Manhattan Morning."  Indeed, that chapter is entitled "A Particular Girl in the Frieze of Life" -- a reference to a series of paintings Munch made that are rich in psychology.

"The key to Munch's originality is storytelling with a potent pictorial rhetoric of rhythmic line and smoldering color," Peter Schjeldahl said in the Feb. 29, 2016 issue of The New Yorker. He was reviewing an exhibition of Munch works of art that recently opened at the Neue Galerie on Manhattan's Upper East Side, not far from the Metropolitian Museum.