Katha Pollitt's Page

Last year we discussed the importance of buying books by women, and many of us went out and bought a bunch. Here's another chance to do it again, and it's a twofer: not only help a woman writer (albeit in this case writers who are already selling plenty of books!) but also, and more important, help provide classroom copies of books for the Little Wound High School on the Pine Ridge Reservation.

As you probably know, Pine Ridge is one of the poorest places in the US, with many serious problems,… Continue

Well, the hits just keep on coming, don’t they? First PW, now the NBA – this year its winners’ list was as male as the other NBA, the one with tall guys and hoops. What can be done? One group of women fiction writers that meets regularly talked about setting up a prize for fiction by women, similar to the Orange Prize, but even leaving aside the argument that it would ghettoize books by women even further, to do it properly would take a couple of million dollars.

But there’s something you can d… Continue

Anyone who has ever sat on a prize committee or a list committee has got to know , if he or she is minimally observant and self-aware, that what results are not Olympian judgments. There’s a fair amount of happenstance involved. Group dynamics are much more important than you might think. Even the claim to have read all the relevant books is a bit fictional, because it would not be physically possible to do more than glance at most of the many hundreds of books that might conceivably be deservin… Continue