heh ... Nora Roberts is funding a program to offer a minor in romance.
Literary Buffistas 3: Don't Parse the Blurb, Dear.
There's more to life than watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer! No. Really, there is! Honestly! Here's a place for Buffistas to come and discuss what it is they're reading, their favorite authors and poets. "Geez. Crack a book sometime."
So VS Naipaul thinks he's a better writer than any woman writer ever (including Jane Austen). And he's sure that he can tell if something's written by a woman within a paragraph.
So the Guardian came up with an online test: [link]
I failed it: it told me quite snarkily that I clearly need to read more books by men. *grins*
I read that earlier, and my eyes spun around faster than a teenage boy at a topless beach.
WTFEVER.
I wish to god someone would give him one of James Tiptree's stories. And not something obvious like "The Women Men Don't See". "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?" might do.
I thought it was pretty obvious a woman had written "Houston, Houston," it's so rabidly anti-male.
Maybe "Shambleau" by CL Moore would be a good alternative.
One day, I will find a collected works of Moore. Shambleau is the only one of her shorts I've read and she's so interesting.
My prof in my feminist lit class (all SF/fantasy written by women) used The Best of C.L. Moore, edited by Lester Del Ray, for the two stories we read (Shambleau and Black God's Kiss). I spent the next ten years looking for that collection, and literally squealed in delight when I found it at a Friends of the Library book sale in Lake Zurich in the mid-90s.
There are two separate collections currently in print--Black God's Kiss has all the Jirel of Joiry stories, and Northwest of Earth has all the Northwest Smith stories.
OMG, that sounds like such a fun class, Kathy!
We started out with some Utopian novel from the 18th century that was very forgettable, but then moved right into Frankenstein and then some really great stuff (she tossed in "The Yellow Wallpaper" for its psychological horror), including Moore, Tiptree, and lots of others. I still have the short-story collection we used as our reading material on one of my shelves--I'll have to pull it out tonight and see what else is in there.