Joan Smith in the March Literary Review magazine assesses two books that claim – with lap-dancing, pornography and sex-trafficking rife – that there is still work to be done.
"Publishers have a big problem with feminism. Editors tend to subscribe to the notion that feminists are dreary and not to be bothered with, but every now and then a feminist book is a spectacular (and enviable) success.
People are still reading The Second Sex - even my local Waterstone's, which does its best to disguise the fact that it sells any books at all, has a copy on its shelves - and The Female Eunuch remains one of the most famous publications of the 20th century. Publishers have an uneasy feeling that they might be missing something, and a key text in this state of affairs is The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf". More here.
There are a number of other interesting online reviews in this issue, including:
Who was Pearl Buck?
Very few people now read the Nobel Prize winner from 1938. Elaine Showalter contemplates a woman whose lifelong connection to China invigorated her writing. Read it here.
Money Makes the World Go Round
Alan Ryan, the former Warden of New College Oxford, relishes a history of capitalism that both admires the swashbuckling drive of its titans and spells out the dangers that accompany the untrammelled free market. Find it here.
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The Great British economy disaster
John Lanchester in the latest edition of the London Review of Books writes that his will be a "Very Good Election to Lose" in Britain.
‘Whatever the political hue of the new government,’ Lanchester writes, ‘it has to walk a fiscal tightrope. It is probably going to be a very good election to lose.’ Officially, for now, the British economy is out of recession. But only just, and there’s no guarantee the recovery will last. Even if it does, it may prove as painful as the slump – if not more so. Then there’s the problem of the massive deficit: if the government doesn’t raise taxes and/or cut spending to reduce it soon, the bond market will get twitchy and people will stop buying British debt – cue total collapse of the economy. But the electorate won’t stand for the necessary tax hikes or spending cuts. Inflation would offer a way out, but the Bank of England is committed (by rules set by Gordon Brown in 1997) to keeping inflation low: more important, were inflation to get too high it would upset the all-powerful bond market. There is, it would seem, no way out".
More here.
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Prickles of disquiet
John Coetzee enthusiastically launched Peter Goldsworthy's provocative new collection of stories at the Adelaide Writers' Week. Murray Waldren is "pleasantly discomforted by Gravel" which he terms "droll, dark and poignant" stories.
Read the full review here.
In the same issue, there is a piece by Patrick Allington, who finds the matey tone of General Peter Cosgrove’s Boyer Lectures unnerving, and the former head of the Armed Forces’ commentary to be spread too thin over too many topics.
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Publishing: The Revolutionary Future
Publisher and commentator Jason Epstein has a cogent piece in the March 11 issue of the New York Review of Books.
"The transition within the book publishing industry from physical inventory stored in a warehouse and trucked to retailers to digital files stored in cyberspace and delivered almost anywhere on earth as quickly and cheaply as email is now underway and irreversible. This historic shift will radically transform worldwide book publishing, the cultures it affects and on which it depends. Meanwhile, for quite different reasons, the genteel book business that I joined more than a half-century ago is already on edge, suffering from a gambler's unbreakable addiction to risky, seasonal best sellers, many of which don't recoup their costs, and the simultaneous deterioration of backlist, the vital annuity on which book publishers had in better days relied for year-to-year stability through bad times and good. The crisis of confidence reflects these intersecting shocks, an overspecialised marketplace dominated by high-risk ephemera and a technological shift orders of magnitude greater than the momentous evolution from monkish scriptoria to movable type launched in Gutenberg's German city of Mainz six centuries ago."
Much more here.
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Peter Carey on the origins of Oscar and Lucinda
The Guardian has been running a series on Oscar and Lucinda, one of which sees Carey explaining how a very secular kind of religious experience provided the spark for his novel.
More here.
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Odd book title
Carrots Love Tomatoes. By Louise Riotte. Charlotte, Garden Way, 1981.
Debbie Campbell from the National Library of Australia reports that the full title is: Carrots Love Tomatoes: secrets of companion planting for successful gardening. It’s on Trove here.
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