According to Jason Pinter, in his illuminating article on The Huffington Post, women have taken over the publishing industry and have stopped publishing books for men. Men don’t read, he observes, because nobody is making good man-based books. Tragedy. The number one culprit in the phasing out of male readers is Random House and their women. In 2010 we’ll see new fiction from Julie Orringer, Jennifer Egan, and Aimee Bender. What’s a man to do when he walks into BookPeople and finds new works by these three phenomenally talented and interesting writers, but knows that he can’t read them? They’re written by women for goodness sakes!
Julie Orringer’s first book, How to Breathe Underwater, was well reviewed and incredibly popular. So, it went without saying that the sophomore slump would set in, and she’d come out with a real clunker of a second novel. Not so. The Invisible Bridge is a big, sprawling book that touches on modern architecture, World War II, subversive journalism, and theatre, while touching down in the Balkans, Paris, and Palestine. It’s quickly becoming the “it” book of 2010. Every year I like to predict who’ll win the end of the year awards, and I’m always wrong. A friend of mine thinks Orringer’s second book will take home the Pulitzer. I think she’s wrong.
Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad is a collection of inter-connected stories that I think will win the Pulitzer. Egan walks that line between traditional family drama and avant-garde abstractions in a way that feels fresh, clean, and yet soulful. If you like short stories but miss the long form character focus a novel can give, you’ll love this book. The stories bounce through time, and bound through genres, but never get too far away from the inner dialogue of Sasha’s kleptomania, or Bennie’s nostalgia for the young days of the Northern California Punk scene. All music and sex and drugs and America, this is my favorite book of 2010, so far. Oh, and I should mention two things: (1) an animal dies in one of the stories, it’s not brutal, but if you’ve read too many books with dead animals lately, skip that part (2) my favorite story is told through a power point slide presentation. Wonderful.
Aimee Bender is very good at writing. Very, very good. You’ve seen her published under the Eggers umbrella in the McSweeney’s Quarterly and The Believer, traditional literary venues like The Paris Review and Harper’s; she’s even been on This American Life. On a list of young American writers, she’d be near the top. Her newest book The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake is inventive, fun, poignant, and smart. Really smart. The conceit is simple, Rose Edelstein is a typical nine year old whose life is as perfect as can be expected, then she takes a bite of the birthday cake her mother baked and realizes she can feel her mother’s emotions through the cake. The book follows Rose through her teenage years, burdened by things she doesn’t want to know. This is a perfect book for anyone interested in food, family, teen angst, and the supernatural. A wonderful book.
It’s sad that Random House refuses to publish books that would appeal to men. We’re forced to read these mind-blowing works of art by their female authors. Life is hard. I’m glad Jason Pinter understands my plight.
-Brian Contine
BookPeople 
or maybe books aren’t published for men because they don’t read and there’s no market.
Thank you so much for this post. I’m going to have to write my own article response to this, because I find his reasoning a little strange:
-A third of the wrestling audience is female, so assuming that the higher-ups didn’t know Jericho simply because they were women is ridiculous. Plus, a memoir is non-ficiton, an area where men have achieved plenty of ‘consumer equality’.
-That 75/25 ratio of women to men in publishing could be reversed for other industries where women are still solid consumers (take television for example and the number of new shows created by women as opposed to men).
-What exactly constitutes a book published for boys and men? As opposed to a book published based on literary merit? Telling guys that it’s okay not to read because all the books that are out there are too ‘girly’ is merely perpetuating the myth that they can’t/don’t read fiction.