Jonathan Franzen doesn't like author videos. How do we know? He announced it—in an author video: "This might be a good place for me to register my profound discomfort at having to make videos like this."
Bill Clinton liked to read Walter Mosley. George Bush liked The Very Hungry Caterpillar. But what does Obama like (aside from Joseph O'Neill)? Here's his reading list from the past two years, which makes us ask—are women allowed? Evidently, Obama hasn't talked about a woman author since the summer of 2008, when he praised Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals.
The Awl wonders: Have authors and editors always hated each other?
Eunice Frost, an editor at Penguin who started in the late '30s, brought writers such as Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh to a large audience through her work on their paperback editions. She was also a keen writer herself, with prose that's arch, touching, and offers a look into the heart of a woman toiling in a man's world: "Oh to be Shaw – or even Graham Greene/ They are twice damned and still show on the screen/ I hear the Council's puffed you in Peru,/ That's nothing to my puffing up of YOU,/ And anyway the whole thing's just a plot/ To make us think we're someone when we're not."
