Weiner is a sharp, fearless observer of literary gender politics, and she is on to something.
It embeds biographical material within layers of literary, gender and queer theory.
And because this year saw some literary gender wars, we asked a bunch of favorite female authors which male writers they've been reading and vice versa -- in order to foster peace, harmony and a love of books by all.
British-Nigerian novelist and poet, Bernardine Evaristo is not only a master of literary gender-bending but she's also adroit at subverting well-worn tropes from slavery to stifled sexuality in a way that feels new, visceral, vital.
King did point to a few publications that have "held steady or made calculable strides towards shaping a more egalitarian literary landscape via gender".
Statistics compiled by Vida, an American organisation for women in the literary arts, found gender imbalances in every one of the publications cited, including the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement and the New York Review of Books.
"The Newbery is given for literary quality; ethnicity, gender, nothing of that is necessarily taken into consideration," Pat Scales, president of the Association for Library Service to Children, which awards the Newbery Medal, said.
But why has a word that once applied to a specific literary genre become so reductive and heavily gendered when applied to music?
Among this year's conflicts, presented here in rough chronological order, a few themes emerge: clashes over the function of online literary criticism, questions about gender and literature, and struggles over who controls an artist's legacy and fortune.
Failing that, I'd at least have a nice neat list of literary characters, divided by gender and ranked by age (which I concede may not be everyone's idea of an achievement).
Her 2014 bestseller Men Explain Things To Me became a global bestseller and March 2017 will see her release a sequel, The Mother of All Questions, a book of 11 essays that examine rape culture, misogyny in the literary canon and the gender binary in the recent history of jokes about assaults on women.
