In early 2011, Emma Straub released a collection of wonderful short stories through the book publishing arm of the online literary magazine Five Chapters. A lot of people fell in love with those stories over the following months—one of them was Megan Lynch, an editor at Riverhead Books. Lynch was so impressed after hearing Straub read at a bookstore event that she didn’t just buy a copy of the book, she bought the book… and now, almost a year to the date after its original publication, Other People We Married has an even greater opportunity to impress itself upon readers. (Riverhead will also be publishing Straub’s first novel later in 2012.) Sometimes it’s hard for a “Selling Shorts” to pick just one story to write about, and that’s how it was for Straub. She’s got a list of great stories that helped awaken her to the possibility of writing in this genre, and she’s still discovering amazing stories by new writers. And I won’t be surprised if, some day, another writer comes along who talks about stories like “Fly-Over State” or “Puttanesca” or “Marjorie and the Birds” the way she talks about her favorites.

I didn’t write a short story until I was twenty-six, and already in graduate school. Up until then, I’d fancied myself a novelist and a poet. My writing could either be plot-driven or language and image-centered, with character-driven human emotion itself falling somewhere in the chasm between them.

People may love to mock the proliferation of MFA programs, but I can say without hesitation that my MFA experience, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, introduced me to the subtlety, epiphanies, and to the millions of minute shifts in feeling. Of course, I wasn’t actually being introduced to these concepts, not having been born a robot, but I was given a much better language for understanding and describing them.

Some of the stories I read during those first six months or so will always stay with me, no matter how many stories I read and love. I suppose it’s something like remembering your first kiss, even though you’ve been kissed better a thousand times since. They include Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” and Toni Cade Bambara’s “Raymond’s Run.” They include Michael Cunningham’s “White Angel,” and Richard Ford’s “Rock Springs.” They include Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral,” and Lorrie Moore’s “You’re Ugly, Too.” Sometimes your first kiss is an epic one. I went on to read famous stories and obscure ones, anthologized classics and stories by my friends. I was obsessed.

And some obsessions, like kissing, never go away. This last year I fell hard for stories by Stuart Nadler, and Dan Chaon, and Caitlin Horrocks, and Megan Mayhew Bergman, and Adam Wilson. Short stories make me feel, even more than poems or novels, that some things are still possible: that there are other languages out there for me to learn, other geographies to traverse. And when I get there, to the other side of some rocky shore, I will be able to tell you all about it.

The stories in Lysley Tenorio’s Monstress cover a wide range of Filipino and Filipino-American experiences, from a teen’s confused efforts to help his Imelda-fixated uncle exact revenge against the Beatles for a perceived offense during their 1960s visit to Manila to two elderly men who’ve spent their adult lives together in San Francisco’s International Hotel, from an actress in grade-Z monster movies who follows her husband on a desperate trip to Hollywood and discovers an unforeseen opportunity to a contemporary young man struggling to come to terms with the death of his transsexual younger sibling. There’s also a fantastic story, “Superassassin,” in which a teenage boy schemes to exact vicious revenge against his tormentors while caught up in his comic book-inspired fantasies. Tenorio comes by his portrayal of comics fandom honestly, as we’ll discover in this essay, and it’s also played an interesting role in shaping his literary vision.

I loved a girl once. For almost ten years. She was kind and selfless, a girl of unmatched courage, stronger than anyone I knew.

Then, when I was twelve years old, she died.

Her name was Kara. Kara Zor-el.

You might know her as Supergirl.

It was 1985. DC Comics had released Crisis On Infinite Earths, a 12-part series designed to streamline the overstuffed and overcomplicated DC Universe of multiple and parallel earths. In issue #7, Supergirl squares off against the Anti-Monitor, an all-powerful ruler of an Anti-Matter universe determined to destroy our own. It was a battle for the ages: just as the Anti-Monitor is about to kill her cousin, Superman, Supergirl swoops in, pummels the crap out of the Anti-Monitor, but on the verge of victory, she makes one fatal mistake: she looks away. With that, the Anti-Monitor unleashes his deadliest force-blast, killing her. But for the meantime, Supergirl has managed to disable his weapons, temporarily foiling his plans. “Thank heavens…” Supergirl says in her final breaths, “…the worlds have a chance to live…” Then, in Superman’s arms, she dies.

I finished reading it inside the comic book store, paid for it, then went with my sister to Pizza Hut. But I couldn’t eat. I felt numb. I felt dizzy. Across the table, my sister looked at me like I was an idiot, mourning a make-believe character, a girl of two dimensions. But I knew: This was grief. It had to be.

Lately, there has been a lot of dying in my classroom. In my freshmen fiction workshop, my students have been killing off their characters with cancer, brain tumors, car crashes, hit men, and comas from which they never awake. And they render these deaths with a gusto that’s admirable: they know the effect they want, and they go for broke, indulging every tear, breakdown, and bloodspurt. But for the most part, it doesn’t work. Reading these stories, we might find something recognizable or familiar (“Someone died at my high school too!”), but at most we understand these spectacular deaths, but we don’t feel them.

The problem isn’t necessarily the death itself; death is an intriguing and potent subject for fiction. The problem is the lack of life preceding it, the absence of that singular life force that every fictional character must possess in order to earn the right to die. We can only feel so much from the summarized life.

When I read these stories, I want to tell them about Supergirl. I was a living witness to the destruction of her home, Argo City (a sort of final city-remnant of Krypton, which exploded years before). I knew her as Linda Lee, the alias she assumed at the Midvale Orphanage, and that she had two pets: Comet the Superhorse and Streaky the Supercat. And when she wasn’t Supergirl, when she was simply Linda, she had the ambition and aimlessness of young adulthood—she was a high school counselor one day, an aspiring TV reporter the next, a soap opera actress soon after. I knew her powers and weaknesses, her losses and loves, her allies and nemeses, her victories and defeats. All that super-living, measured against a gloriously epic death scene. No wonder it worked. No wonder I mourned her.

I don’t assign my students Crisis on Infinite Earths #7 to demonstrate models of good dying. Instead, we read Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain” to see how the death of the loyal but reckless Jack Twist silently—by necessity—devastates his life-long lover, Ennis Del Mar. I assign Alice Elliot Dark’s “In the Gloaming,” which details the last days shared between Janet and her son, Laird, who is dying of AIDS, and how Janet comes to understand her life because of them (“Suddenly she realized: Laird had been the love of her life”). Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” is a fine example of how a life, when simply represented by one’s personal possessions, can make a sudden and violent death even more wrenching. And death needn’t be defined as simply tragic: We read Donald Barthelme’s “The School” to examine the ways a writer renders the absurdity of dying, of mortality—all those school kids and their dying classroom pets. Whether we get the sweep of an entire life, or just a handful of its defining moments, these stories illustrate perfectly how to effectively and convincingly kill off a character. Their deaths shock us, rattle our heads, punch us in the gut. They make us grieve.

The students in my writing workshops are allowed to write whatever they want, whatever gets them excited about writing. But for my next freshman level workshop, I’m thinking of instituting a new policy: no killing off your characters. No cancer or brain tumors. No out-of-the-blue hit men, fatal teenaged drunk driving accidents, or coma-inducing blows to the head. No fatal force-blasts from all-powerful rulers of anti-matter universes.

At least, not until they’ve had a chance to live.

I mentioned, back in January, that I had big plans for 2012, and it’s time to unveil one of them: a new podcast series called Life Stories, in which I will be interviewing memoir writers about their lives and about the art of telling a story about those lives. The idea began with a chat on Twitter late in 2011, thanks to an invitation from Anna David, the author of Falling for Me, to moderate a conversation with about half a dozen different memoir writers. We all thought the Twitter chat went well, we hoped we could do it again, maybe make a regular thing of it… and, over December, I thought about some other things I would like to do with the concept, including an audio podcast. Anna was gracious enough to give her blessing, but I don’t think I would have recognized the opportunity it presents without her pointing me in this direction, and I’m truly grateful to her for that (and to all the authors who took part in that first chat, with whom I hope to talk again as part of this series eventually).

So: The first episode of Life Stories is a conversation between me and Heather Donahue about Growgirl: How My Life After the Blair Witch Project Went to Pot. In it, as the subtitle suggests, she writes about how, after deciding to recognize the end of her acting career, she moved to a small town in northern California and started growing medical marijuana. During the interview, I discovered not only that she’d been writing much of this story every day in her journal, long before she ever considered the possibility of Growgirl, but that writing was her first passion, even above acting:

“I came to acting from writing… I was reading and writing from the time I was really small. But I don’t really come from a family of readers, so acting sort of made more sense. It was a thing that my family could relate to more, so that’s what I got praised for more, and I think that’s why I ended up following that path. I think kids will generally go in the direction in which they’re praised, right? So for me Blair Witch was a blessing because it got me back to where I really wanted to be. This feels so much better to me. It feels great to have those long periods of solitude…”

(Donahue is currently teaching memoir writing at The Grotto; if you’re in the San Francisco area and serious about memoir writing, I’d suggest you look into her workshops.)

Listen to Life Stories #1: Heather Donahue (MP3 file); or download the file by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click).

PLUS: I mentioned up above that this podcast is one of the ways I wanted to work with the Life Stories concept. Here’s another: I’m aiming to record select episodes in front of a live studio audience. We’ll be recording a “pilot” of the live show in Manhattan on Wednesday, February 22, at Wix Lounge (10 W. 18th Street), a great writers’ space just a few blocks from Union Square, and in addition to recording audio from the show, we may even have some video highlights thanks to friends at the multimedia production company Arcade Sunshine Media.

The February 21 taping will have two guest stars: Rachel Shukert, the author of Everything Is Going to Be Great, and Reverend Jen, the author of Elf Girl. Join us at Wix Lounge at 7:00 p.m. that evening; RSVP on Facebook if you can, so we can estimate how many chairs we need to set out.

In the meantime, keep a look out for new Life Stories episodes here, and coming very soon to iTunes!

The protagonists of the short stories in Omicron Ceti III are a pretty screwed-up bunch: There’s the high school senior who takes his frustration about his sexual attractions out on his English teacher, the young mental patient who finds one of his few forms of emotional solace in an old Star Trek episode, the art professor whose sexual addiction threatens to drive his family into debt. Thomas P. Balázs gets inside these characters’ heads and latches onto those moments in which they recognize that things have gotten well out of hand, but they can’t quite see the way out… and yet, whether it’s out of perseverance or perversity, they refuse to give in to despair. In this essay, Balázs talks about a classic Lorrie Moore short story that may help you understand a bit more about the tone you’ll find in his own work—which, by the way, you can hear online.

I’m prone to depression, and at its worst, my writing reflects that disposition toward self-obsession, self-loathing, to a dreary black outlook that threatens to turn my prose into the kind of dull, inward-looking meditations that bore even me as I write. A good therapist and a good antidepressant can do much to alleviate such a temperament in daily life, but when it comes to writing, I’ve found only one truly effective treatment—humor. And, as a result, most of my work tends to exhibit a comic tinge even when I’m not trying to be funny because practically the only way I can keep my fingers moving on the keyboard is by poking fun at the very problems that make me want to shut off my screen and go back to bed.

And it’s probably for the same reason that the writers I most admire, Lorrie Moore, David Foster Wallace, Philip Roth, Tim O’Brien, have a gift for comedy and in particular for comedy infused by pain, what we sometimes call black comedy.

The link between humor and pain is undeniable, and writers know this instinctually. It’s no coincidence that the masterpiece of a writer who was so depressed he hung himself on his patio is titled Infinite Jest. Wallace, I’m sure, used humor as a tool to keep the demons at bay, or at least manage them in his fiction. Sadly it wasn’t enough for his non-writing life.

One of the best, and for me most influential, examples of humor as a tool for staving off despair in fiction lies in Lorrie Moore’s short story “People Like Us Are the Only People Here.” This story, which first appeared in The New Yorker, tells the tale of a mother (simply described as “the Mother”) coping with her toddler’s diagnosis and treatment of kidney cancer. Funny stuff, right? Certainly, this is not a laugh-out-loud piece, but it is funny in a weird kind of way.

Take the opening paragraphs when the Mother discovers blood in her boy’s diaper. She describes the clot as “a tiny mouse heart packed in snow” with a “khaki-colored vein”—a little repulsive, yes, but such an unexpected combination of images may well provoke an uncomfortable smile. The Mother tries to deny the blood clot’s reality, speculating her child found it and put it in his diaper for “demented baby reasons.” And when she calls the hospital and tells them what she’s found and is directed to come in right away, she remarks “Such pleasantly instant service! Just say ‘blood.’ Just say ‘diaper.’ Look what you get!” There’s pain and anger here, but also a good deal of, to paraphrase Moore herself, collateral humor.

The rest of the story tells of the various tests and procedures both baby and Mother are subjected to, punctuated with oddball moments such as a lounge in the child’s cancer ward endowed by the eccentric 1960s one-hit wonder Tiny Tim or the moment when the Mother (who is a writer), wonders, shortly after getting her child’s diagnosis, why the attending doctor bought the paperback, instead of the hardcover edition, of one of her books. The humor is subtle and unsettling, pleasurable and painful at once. Just the sort of thing I like.

I also like it because it “cuts close to the bone.” Although she has been private about the origins of this story, it’s commonly known that Lorrie Moore’s child (who apparently survived) suffered from some manner of kidney disease. So maybe the humor doesn’t just help the writing but the writer as well. Most of the comic writers I admire write close to the bone. Roth and O’Brien both go so far as to name troubled fictional protagonists after themselves. The disturbed genius and tennis prodigy of Infinite Jest is surely not a far cry from Wallace’s own adolescent self.

It may be for this same reason that I’m less enamored of more satirical comic writers such as George Saunders or T.C. Boyle, because the object of their ridicule is typically at some comfortable distance from themselves. I guess I find it funnier to hear someone talking about themselves slipping on a banana than to hear their description of a third party doing the same. Sure, there are plenty of deserving targets for satire, but I generally get more out of reading writers who use humor to explore their own human shortcomings, writers who explore their own trauma and depression and pain, whose comedic target is primarily people like us.

“Relieve yourself of the illusion that you’re writing for the ages. The ages will decide who is doing that on their own; you don’t get a vote. I understand the temptation is to try to write something that will speak to the generations, but, look, in 1912 they hadn’t even yet invented pre-sliced bread…

If you must aim for relevance, try for being relevant now; it’s a context you understand. We can still read (and do read) Shakespeare and Cervantes and Dickinson, and I think it’s worth noting Shakespeare was busy trying to pack in the groundlings today, Cervantes was writing in no small part to criticize a then-currently popular form of fiction, and Dickinson was barely even publishing at all, i.e., not really caring about future readers. In other words, they were focused on their now. It’s not a bad focus for anyone.”

I’ve been bothered for a long time by the assertion that one of the reasons contemporary book review sections often cover an inordinate amount of male authors is that the critics who write for and manage those sections care less about cultural parity and more about finding, as New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus told NPR, “fiction that will really endure.” I’ve written before about my belief that such an approach is a potential dead-end for serious criticism, reducing it to what Pankay Mishra called “a self-contained realm of elegant consumption.”

Or, as Northrop Frye put it in Anatomy of Criticism decades ago, a lot of what passes for literary criticism today “belongs only to the history of taste, and therefore follows the vacillations of fashionable prejudice.”

In early 2011, as she was conceding that roughly 86% of the New Republic book reviews over the previous year had been dedicated to male authors, Ruth Franklin considered this issue:

“I, too, like to think I choose the books that I review for their inherent interest, their literary quality. But the VIDA statistics made me wonder afresh about the ways we define ‘best’ and ‘most important’ in a field as subjective as literature, which, after all, is deeply influenced by the cultural norms in any given age… It is sobering to realize that we may live and work in a world still held in the grip of unconscious biases, no less damaging for their invisibility.”

(Yes, it is sobering.)

About a month before she wrote that, Franklin had done another blog post about her literary resolutions for 2011, expressing the desire to broaden her reading horizons by, among other things, stepping out of her literary fiction comfort zone, reading more literature in translation, and having more conversations about books with other people. At the end of the year, she felt she’d done reasonably well; in 2012, she’s planning to read more children’s literature (so she can talk about it with her children) and to read at least one best-seller, because “even if their prose isn’t up to literary standards, they have something important to tell us about the mood of the moment.”

I wouldn’t be too sure about that “literary standards” judgment, by the way. Obviously, you can pick and choose to find books at either end of the quality spectrum—again, keeping in mind that what constitutes “beautiful writing” is a matter of shifting tastes—but, as I pointed out in 2010, when you compare them using various standards of readability, Jennifer Weiner and Jonathan Franzen aren’t that far apart. They both write within what’s held to be a high school senior’s capacity to comprehend written English; at least, that’s true of Freedom and Fly Away Home.

But, anyway, points to Franklin for making the effort to shake up her routine and revitalize her literary criticism; although she hasn’t addressed the long-term effects of her contemplation of the gender bias problem last year—at least not that I’ve come across—I’m betting that would be an interesting conversation. It’d also be really interesting to talk to Megan O’Grady, the literary critic at Vogue, who I recently discovered is at the Nieman Foundation, developing a thesis on “the relationship between women novelists, literary criticism and the canon, focusing on postwar American literature and the persistence of gender myths in cultural discourse.” I mean, perfect timing or what?

In the meantime, to paraphrase Scalzi, I think literary critics should relieve themselves of the illusion that they’re writing for the ages. Any attempt to find “fiction that will really endure” is essentially guesswork, although in some cases, depending on who’s doing the guessing, it’s guesswork that has the potential to perpetuate itself into an accepted “truth,” at least for some period of time. What critics who propose to ferret out “enduring” fiction are really saying, though, is that they’ve found some books that meet their own contingent standard of excellence, and honestly there’s really nothing wrong in just being explicit about that instead of convincing yourself and your audience that you’re bearing a cultural standard into the future.

So, yeah, I find literary criticism—let’s go ahead and just say cultural criticism—that says “Hey, posterity, look what we found for you!” a lot less interesting than the criticism that says “Hey, there’s something going on here, might be worth a look.” And I’d say that excusing ourselves from the quest to find some arbitrary sort of literary or aesthetic or cultural apex opens up a lot of opportunities for critics to talk about things they might otherwise overlook—things that might actually turn out to be a lot more relevant to us… and, who knows, might even turn out to be a more accurate harbinger of the future than what was expected to have endured.

When I wrote about the ways gender bias crept into my own book reviewing, the feedback encouraged me to dig deeper into the issue. As I’d noted, one attempt to undermine the argument that women writers deserve consistently better coverage than what they’re currently getting from many of America’s book reviewers is the tactic that an anonymous New Republic staffer (or maybe an intern) used against Jennifer Weiner, implying that Jennifer was looking for “affirmative action” that would artificially inflate the prestige of (presumably bad) women writers when the galleries of literary criticism ought properly to be devoted to “well-rounded meritocracy.”

Mrs. Beatrice (that’s what we call my wife here, to protect her privacy) emailed me a link to an article that ran in TechCrunch in late 2011 called “Racism and Meritocracy” that seemed particularly relevant to the discussion. It’s about the ways in which Silicon Valley, despite being ostensibly populated by non-racists, still manages to produce a largely homogenous culture of entrepreneurs. Diversity is “the canary in the coal mine for meritocracy,” Eric Ries writes. “When we see extremely skewed demographics, we have very good reason to suspect that something is wrong with our selection process, that it’s not actually as meritocratic as it could be.” Ries proceeds to draw out a larger principle which I believe might well apply to mainstream literary criticism outlets like those of The New York Times Book Review and NPR:

“What the grownups have discovered, through painstaking research, is that it is extremely easy for systems to become biased, even if none of the individual people in those systems intends to be biased. This is partly a cognitive problem, that people harbor unconscious bias, and partly an organizational problem, that even a collection of unbiased actors can work together to accidentally create a biased system. And when those systems are examined scientifically, they can be reformed to reduce their bias.”

As Ries points out, symphony orchestras offer a classic illustration of this problem: For years, women had difficulty successfully auditioning for symphonies, because many judges implicitly assumed that men were better classical musicians than women and so that’s what they heard when they saw women play. Until several orchestras began auditioning musicians behind a screen, so the judges could only go by the music they were hearing—then, suddenly, on average, women performed classical music just as well as men.

Now, you probably couldn’t make a similar effort work in the world of literary criticism. Setting aside the impracticality of stripping all identifying markers from the novels and delivering them to critics to be judged on pure literary merit (whatever that is), such an approach is in fact completely antithetical to the ways publishers promote and sell fiction, whether it’s commercial or literary. Publishers want critics to have all sorts of preconceived ideas about the books they’re receiving, at least they do if those ideas are favorable ones. For that matter, some publishers rely on critics having preconceived ideas about them—if this house or that house has a reputation for publishing “excellent” work, it’s that much more likely their books will survive the early rounds of elimination when a critic has to decide which of the dozens/hundreds of newly arriving books he’s going to review this week.

(How do new fiction writers ever break through that wall? Good question: Sometimes, it’s about comparisons to the familiar authors; sometimes, it’s about crafting a public identity for the author that plays to—or against—our cultural assumptions about creative talent or emphasizes the amount of money the publisher spent because they’re so sure this author is as good as the other big authors they publish. There are other variations on these themes.)

Relying on our preconceived notions about authors and publishers is a form of pattern recognition. And, as Ries tells us, “if you look at the research on implicit bias, you will find that bias is a necessary consequence of using pattern recognition, it’s part of how the brain works. We literally think faster when we see something that matches the pattern, and have to slow down to process something that doesn’t match.” And, let’s face it, when you’re in a deadline-driven environment, with an overwhelming array of choices, you might sometimes make quick decisions in order to spur an internal feeling of achievement and progress—you might even, I’m thinking, make decisions more quickly than you think you are, with less contemplation than you believe you’ve done.

The latest book by a familiar face, from a familiar publisher? Why, it practically demands a review. And when somebody like Jennifer Weiner comes along to point out how that kind of thinking can skew a book section’s contents, the defense is that it’s a reflection of the author’s cultural significance and prestige. But that significance and prestige isn’t shaped just by the author’s earlier books, but by all the previous decisions book critics made about those books. In other words, critics aren’t only recognizing a pattern of “fiction that will really endure” or “books that matter,” they’re perpetuating that pattern.

Let’s take a moment to emphasize that I’m not letting myself off the hook here: Obviously, if I thought that I was giving equal time to men and women writers, when the numbers show that my coverage was just about as skewed as the Times or NPR, I wasn’t giving the situation as much thought as I thought I was doing, and to whatever extent I did think about it, I didn’t follow through on those thoughts as thoroughly as I could have. The question now is: Where do I go from here?

For the world of technological entrepreneurship Ries covers, he believes that the solution is to pursue more genuinely meritocratic selection processes, processes that account for implicit biases and route around them; if we do that, he suggests, diversity is likely to follow as a result. As I noted earlier, though, book critics don’t really have that option: Even if we wanted to receive all books on equal footing, publishers don’t want to give them to us that way.

That means that book critics may need to think that much harder about every decision they make to review, or not to review, a given title, and about the criteria they’re using to make those selections. In my case, as I discussed in my previous post, I’ve already made a conscious choice to aim at recognizing writers in a way that reflects the diversity of American culture (and not just in gender). So I’ll need to check myself periodically, and determine how well I’m doing against that self-assigned goal, see if there might be things I’m missing out on because I’ve gotten into grooves a little too comfortable… or if my view of American culture has narrowed due to inertia.

Other critics, who have appointed themselves the stewards of one fine literary tradition or another, should also step back on a regular basis and ask themselves: “Why am I picking these books? And what am I saying by picking them?” (See, in this vein, my thoughts from late 2010 on Oprah’s tendency to pick male novelists.)

Whatever your assumptions and implicit biases as a book critic are, it’s important to challenge them as much as you challenge anybody else’s arguments. When we give our implicit biases the majority of the decision-making power, we perpetuate our status quo, even if we’ve managed to convince ourselves that we’re quite progressive in our way.

In the summer of 2010, the New York Times penchant for Great White Male Novelists was a major topic of discussion, spurred by vocal criticism from Jennifer Weiner and Jodi Picoult, among others, of the tendency for the Times to review certain types of writers over other types—men over women in general, but even within the “literary over commercial” framework, when the Times deigned to notice commercial fiction, it was almost overwhelmingly male-written. I’ve written about the Times‘ rebuttal to the data, which was Sam Tanenhaus’s insistence that his section is focused on “that fiction that really will endure,” and why I find that rationale less than compelling; I’ve also written about why I think what types of books get review coverage matters, along with the ways that coverage is handled.

So, in early 2012, Jennifer Weiner decided to look at the Times book coverage for 2011, to see what changes the paper might have made in its handling of women writers. The needle moved slightly; while 38 percent of the fiction covered between July 2008 and August 2010 was written by women, in the 2011 calendar year, women could now claim nearly 41 percent of the coverage. Unfortunately, when it came to the writers upon whom the Times chooses to dwell, designating them as culturally significant by virtue of coverage in both the daily arts section and the Sunday book review magazine plus some sort of profile, only one out of the eleven so blessed was a woman.

(Outside the scope of Jennifer’s analysis, but perhaps worth mentioning: Only one of those writers, Haruki Murakami, was of non-“white” ethnicity.)

The reaction to Jennifer’s statistical breakdown was predictable. Salon wrote a particularly insipid article about how male “midlist” novelists were the real victims—this article was seriously so terrible that I’m not going to give it the benefit of a link; instead, you can read John Scalzi’s explanation of why it’s “the most incoherent piece of enviously fumbly writer spew” he’d seen in some time. Later, when the Huffington Post picked up on Jennifer’s story, an anonymous female staffer at The New Republic used the book section’s Twitter account to accuse Jennifer of “[making] mountains out of molehills” and condescendingly ask if she was calling for “affirmative action” in the book pages. She then went on to declare, “Literary criticism can’t fall victim to numbers games. A review section should be a well-rounded meritocracy.” She further dismissed Jennifer’s statistics as “an anecdotal barometer, [and] not a measure of the state of criticism,” then, when I entered the debate, informed me that “evaluating the numbers is a silly way to get at the complicated business of literary crit.”

My basic point in that back-and-forth, which she first refused to acknowledge and then declared was “a much larger question than I can answer,” was that book critics, like everybody else, have culturally embedded biases which, when left unchecked, tend to reinforce the status quo. In this case, no matter how often prominent figures in the world of literary criticism insist gender plays no role in their decisions about what to review, male writers consistently get the better deal. And we’re not just talking about The New York Times—according to a Boston Phoenix article, NPR’s book coverage is even more imbalanced. As Eugenia Williamson writes:

“The truth is that major publishers put out more books written by men than women. Print publications write more about books written by men. NPR discusses more books written by men. Unsurprisingly, the best seller list is dominated by books written by men: men outnumbered women 25 to 11 on last year’s number-one-best-seller fiction charts. And to be honest, I’m not innocent of this either—in the last calendar year, of the 76 books I wrote about, 42 were by men and only 34 were by women.

Clearly, female novelists have neither the cultural capital nor the financial capital that male novelists do. When will people face up to that? And when will it change?”

Notice that Williamson concedes that she isn’t any better than the Times or NPR at this. And Williamson isn’t just a staff writer at the Phoenix, she’s also a managing editor for The Baffler: someone, in other words, whose liberal credentials are well in order.

Of course, now, the obvious question is, well, what’s your track record, Mr. Hogan?

As it happens, I’d been giving this a lot of thought lately, as I decided to map out my tentative reading choices for the weekly posts I write for the USA Network’s Character Approved writing section. Since the archive listings for this section tend to be accompanied by author headshots, I imagined what that photo gallery would look like as the months progressed. Since the site’s overall mission is to recognize “the people, places and things that are making a mark by positively influencing our cultural landscape,” it’s important to me that the books and writers I feature aren’t just great on their own merits, but that—taken as a whole—they’ll reflect the diversity of American culture (and I’m not just thinking about gender here). I don’t want to limit myself to a literature that simply reinforces my own attitudes and experiences; I want to find books that push me into unfamiliar territory. And I think I’ve done a pretty good job of finding those books for the upcoming months.

When I looked back at 2011, however, I realized that my performance so far had been somewhere between the NPR and Times percentages. How did that happen? Why, despite my intentions, which had already begun to take shape, did I tend to veer towards this book rather than that one? It’s not that I’m picking “the wrong books,” I’m pretty sure of that. If I can jump over to my Shelf Awareness reviews for an example, taking on Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son is a judgment call I don’t question; it’s an extremely well-written novel with a vision of North Korea’s totalitarian society that’s become even more relevant than it already was. But why, before I’d found that out by reading it, did I lean towards this novel rather than, let’s say, Krys Lee’s short story collection, Drifting House? I need to think about things like that as I continue to choose books to review for those outlets, as well as books to feature here.

And I can’t fall back on excuses like “these are the books that publishers send me,” or more broadly “these are the books that get published,” to justify these results, because that’s just lazy; the books are out there, and it’s my job to search for them. And I haven’t given myself the luxury of limiting myself to “fiction that really will endure,” because I’m not reviewing books to perpetuate an aesthetic canon. I like to tell myself that I’m reviewing books to hold a mirror up to contemporary culture—more often than not to celebrate it, true, but in the broadest sense to engage with it. It seems, however, that I may be at risk of holding a mirror up to myself. I say that a truly interesting critic is one who recognizes that his taste is a cultural product that needs to be ruthlessly interrogated, when the truth is that I haven’t been challenging myself as hard as I should have been in that regard. Now that I’ve become conscious of the problem, I can take steps to do something about it, and do it consistently.

On Wednesday, February 15, I’ll be participating in “Getting Published & Beyond in the 21st Century,” a panel discussion sponsored by Pubslush Press. The final lineup is still being assembled, but I’m looking forward to sharing the stage with the author Emma Straub and Amanda Pritzker, a senior publicist at Penguin’s Portfolio imprint. (There are some other folks I’m pretty sure are coming, but I don’t want to say anything before it’s official!)

In my previous role as the director of e-marketing strategy at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and in the consulting work I do for authors and publishers today, I’ve encouraged writers to familiarize themselves with the major social media tools and pick the ones that resonate most closely not just with their publicity goals, but with their comfort in being online. I’m not one of those people who thinks you have to be everywhere and do everything to promote yourself successfully online; in fact, I think one of the first and biggest problems many authors face when they try to do their own social media marketing is that they spread themselves too thin too fast. What I was hearing from a lot of authors, though, was that while they were being told that they needed to go out onto the Internet and promote themselves, they weren’t always being given much practical advice on how to go about doing that.

So a big part of my message to the audience at Wix Lounge that evening is going to be that even though social media marketing is a lot of work, it doesn’t have to be a lot of hard work. Ultimately, I don’t believe that you should be out there “selling product” to people. Instead, you want to be yourself—admittedly, a somewhat streamlined version of yourself—and make a connection with the readers to whom your work is most likely to be valuable, whether that’s because of the information you share or the entertainment you provide. And you demonstrate to those people, day in and day out, that you are an interesting person who, from time to time, has a book out they might want to read.

I’m thinking back to a keynote speech I saw YA novelist John Green give in late 2011 at mediabistro.com’s Publishing App Expo. “We did not market anything, ever,” Green said about the video blogs he’s filmed with his brother, Hank, which have accrued more than half a million fans in less than five years. (Maybe closer to a million, depending on the yardstick you’re using to measure Green’s popularity.) “It isn’t like YouTube exists so I can share my books with you.” When he does mention a new book or some other project, he says, “it’s because I’m thinking about it, not because I’m desperate to sell it.”

Okay, I think it’s hyperbolic of Green to say “I’ve never, ever, ever done marketing,” but I see where he’s coming from—I’m just a firm believer in the Seth Godin school of permission marketing, or “the privilege (not the right) of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who actually want to get them,” and of the idea that every aspect of your public presence is, in effect, a subtle form of “marketing” yourself to others.

(By the way, if you haven’t read Green’s latest, The Fault in Our Stars, yet, you really should. It’s got one of the best first-person voices I’ve seen in a long time, maybe since Matthew Quick’s The Silver Linings Playbook, which is a book it reminds me of in other, emotionally resonant ways.)

As Michael Wolf put it:

“No doubt, the vast majority of economic wealth is still distributed through large corporate media, but as new technologies enable artists to reach consumers directly through push-button creation and distribution, there is a movement afoot. Expect this movement to expand in 2012 as more artists take control of their own economic destinies and become part of the artist-entrepreneur generation.”

Or, to quote a Dean Haspiel post from early 2011:

“Bottom line: keep making original content and stop giving it away to publishers. If you’re going to give it away, then benefit from it… Exclusive content, destination points, and perceived value is the name of the game… Be armed with your stories and get ready. People love to read.”

I’m not a stranger to this territory; before I turned Getting Right with Tao into a print-on-demand paperback and e-book, I let folks download it for free from this website. And while I’ve been happy with the reasonable success of that book over the last two years, I’ve always known that much more was possible. And, in recent months, I’ve started thinking seriously about what my next steps were going to be.

Mike Monteiro’s “10 New Year’s Resolutions for Designers” offered a lot of inspiration; although I’m more verbal than visual, I’ve certainly had to think about the principles of great design since I launched Beatrice back in 1995, and the principles Monteiro discusses hold true across the spectrum of creative endeavor. Finding better problems to solve, learning to stop being your own obstacle, and staying curious enough to explore new avenues—these are the kinds of issues that I’ve been grappling with lately, and I think I’m starting to come up with some exciting answers.

One thing that I’ve circled back to over and over again during that thought process is Beatrice’s origins as a collection of author interviews, and each of the projects I’ll be unveiling over the course of the next month or so reaches back to those roots, while pushing them into new directions. I realized how much I loved not just introducing people to the writers whose books I loved, but also talking to those writers about their creative processes and about their lives. Yet I didn’t want to simply fall back on the way I used to do that in the late ’90s. For one thing, the technology’s gotten a lot better; for another, so has my comfort with public speaking, and with participating in the media. (So there’s some hints about what might be coming up soon, right?)

While all this has been going on, I’ve also been taking another look at my friend Jonathan Fields’s Uncertainty: Turning Fear and Doubt into Fuel for Brilliance, as well as picking up the just-released The Circle Maker: Praying Circles Around Your Biggest Dreams and Greatest Fears by Mark Batterson (who I’ve only met once, but greatly admire). These two books take different paths, but they’re addressing the same core problem: Whether you think of it as second-guessing yourself or second-guessing God, you need to stop the second-guessing and start the leaps of faith into projects that can change the world. And I say “you,” but I mean me, too.

On Wednesday, January 18, 2012, along with many other websites, I am “blacking out” my content as a protest against two bits of proposed legislation working its way through the United States Congress: a House Bill called the Stop Online Piracy Act and a Senate bill called the Protect Intellectual Property Act. Sarah Wendell of Smart Bitches, Trashy Books has perfectly described why we’re against this legislation, so I’m just going to quote her:

“I do not think PIPA and SOPA are the correct response, and find them to be much too large a hammer, one that serves those who funded the development of the bill than any actual progress against the relative threat of piracy. They serve to hinder development more than they could ever stop piracy.”

CNET explains what’s at stake, as does the BBC, and Reddit’s Jason Harvey really digs into the details.

Because one possible long-term effection of SOPA/PIPA, should either of them become federal law, would be to suppress both American citizens’ expressions of free speech and their access to other people’s expressions of free speech, I am joining several other websites in a temporary demonstration of what a federally censored Internet could take away from end users like you and me. Normal service will be restored at the end of the day. In the meantime, if you’re as concerned about these bills as I am, call your U.S. Senator or your U.S. representative and let them know where you stand.