REBECCA MEAD has an article in this week's New Yorker magazine about Jennifer Weiner and her campaign against the marginalization of female authors by the literary media. From the middle of the article:

. . . Weiner has waged a campaign against the literary media for being biased against female writers, and against books written for women. (She has never been reviewed in the Times.) In 2010, when Jonathan Franzen’s “Freedom” was published, Weiner and Jodi Picoult, another best-selling novelist, objected to the attention garnered by Franzen and his work, which Weiner termed “Franzenfreude.” (Weiner started but didn’t finish “Freedom.” “I got about halfway through the Patty’s diary section, and then I realized that a female author would get crucified for attempting to write in a male voice that sounded so utterly inauthentic,” she says. “That, plus my typical Franzen issue—the endless contempt he seems to have for all his characters—made me put it down.”) On her blog, Weiner criticized Jeffrey Eugenides for dismissing Picoult’s complaints as “belly-aching”; earlier Weiner had created an ad for one of her own books which spoofed the promotional campaign for Eugenides’s novel “The Marriage Plot.” It showed Weiner in a dashing vest of the sort that Eugenides has been seen to wear, and read, “Jeffrey Eugenides doesn’t have a book out this summer, but Jennifer Weiner has: ‘The Next Best Thing.’ ”

 

Weiner’s novels have sold millions of copies, but lately, through her blog and her Twitter account, she has stoked a public discussion about the reception of fiction written by women. Photograph by Pari Dukovic.

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Fro more information on the topic see Vida.org's website: http://www.vidaweb.org/