There are known gender differences in book preferences in terms of both genre and author gender but their extent and causes are not well understood. It is unclear whether reader preferences for author genders occur within any or all genres and whether readers evaluate books differently based on author genders within specific genres. This article exploits a major source of informal book reviews, the Goodreads.com website, to assess the influence of reader and author genders on book evaluations within genres. It uses a quantitative analysis of 201,560 books and their reviews, focusing on the top 50 user-specified genres. The results show strong gender differences in the ratings given by reviewers to books within genres, such as female reviewers rating contemporary romance more highly, with males preferring short stories. For most common book genres, reviewers give higher ratings to books authored by their own gender, confirming that gender bias is not confined to the literary elite. The main exception is th...

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Reader and author gender and genre in Goodreads

In his essay "Failed Artists in Donald Barthelme's Sixty Stories/' Lee Upton presents "failure" as the essential the matic preoccupation of Barthelme's fiction (11). Perhaps _nowhere is this concern more evident than in the author's 1968 collection Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts, wherein a specifically masculine failure is central to the impression of aes thetic wholeness. With striking efficiency, Barthelme encircles his topic with m?tonymie arrangements of powerless, guilty, and inse cure men. Unable to act and on the verge of self-destruction, these men reveal aspects of a male consciousness that is above all in con flict with itself. Meanwhile, as the collection unfolds, a consistent view of postmodern civilization gradually emerges from its modal structure. As Michael Zeitlin notes in his essay "Father-Murder and Father Rescue," Barthelme's texts frequently contain "large-scale patterns of thought" that "draw into conceptual coherence the complex dis play of the signifiers" (188). In Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts, it is as if Barthelme seeks to paint a portrait of man-in-general?call him Barthelmean Man?from multiple perspectives, just as he had done previously with his archetypal woman in Snow White (1967). From the vantage point in the mid 1960s, this man is as yet unsure of how to respond to the new era ushered in by Masters and Johnson, the sexual revolution, and the feminist movement. Ann, Sylvia, Alice, Pia, Nancy, Barbara?these are just some of the women who appear in shrouded contexts as "love objects" and antagonists to the host of nameless and often identical-seeming protagonists that

Reconstructing Masculinity: Donald Barthelme's Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts

Although in a New York Times Book Review interview Rachel Ingalls has denied that her 1982 novel Mrs. Caliban echoes The Tempest, the parallels between the two works are too compelling to resist (Miller 7).' Ingalls's text, by intimately connecting its monster with its female protagonist, comments on the inequalities that underlie and pervade Shakespeare's text. But Mrs. Caliban is also distinctly a late-twentieth-century creation that continually questions its own premises. Is its monster real? The novel refuses to answer.2

Mrs. Caliban: A Feminist Postmodernist Tempest?

Judging by the recurrent prominence of Caliban in such titles as Gotlieb’s O Master Caliban!, Rachel Ingalls’s Mrs. Caliban, Russell Hoban’s Libretto about Caliban and Miranda, and Tad Williams’s Caliban’s Hour, one might be lured into thinking that these texts are Caliban-rather than Prospero-centered. Yet, upon closer scrutiny, it appears that even if these texts do voice a counter-discourse within the bounds of postmodernism, these voices are recuperated or ultimately controlled by Prospero-like forces. In other words, postmodern Prospero has conjured up these new Calibans in a perverted hauntology or the latter have perniciously turned into Prosperos. As a result, Calibans dream is a utopian fantasy engineered or deferred by a manipulative Prospero. Likewise, the authors’ pairing off of Caliban and Miranda, in an attempt to dismantle The Tempest’s original Miranda-Prospero and Caliban-Sycorax half-families, is ultimately killed off by Prospero’s master-narrative. In that respect, the fantasy novella Mrs. Caliban (1982), by American-born Rachel Ingalls, foregrounds Caliban and his “woman” but provides powerful reminders that Caliban is the product of Prospero’s sadistic science. Also, in its dialogue with American monster-movies and its re-inscription of the core love story within the North-South power structure, Mrs. Caliban quenches whatever feminist utopia it originally proffered.

The Other Niece of Utopia: Fantasy

Mourning Monsters: Deception and Transformation in Rachel Ingalls's Fiction

(1984). Failed Artists in Donald Barthelme's Sixty Stories. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction: Vol. 26, No. 1, pp. 11-17.

Failed Artists in Donald Barthelme's Sixty Stories

"She crossed the avenue / of creation and set the channel / changer under the couch // She kicked out the lights / on the van, wish-boned the hill peaks and / hallucinated feathers // While the vengeful battered / the walls of her adopted town / peeping and peeping // and couldn't see herself as she was […]" 

Lee Upton

Papers

Mourning Monsters: Deception and Transformation in Rachel Ingalls's Fiction

Failed Artists in Donald Barthelme's Sixty Stories

What Did Helen Do?