Feminist Fiction Friday--odds and ends

Janet Evanovich has signed a deal to write several more Stephanie Plum novels, but more excitingly, she's teaming up with crime writer Lee Goldberg (co-creator of the Dead Man series, amongst other thing) to write a new series. starring a female FBI agent and a dashing male fugitive. Will lovejinks ensue as well as crime? You can read the details here.

The Library of Congress has released a list of 88 Books that Shaped America.  (Why not 100 or 50?  Eighty-eight seems like a really odd number.)  They are listed in the order they were published and the first woman author appears at #9--Amelia Simmons' American Cookery (1796).  Billed as "the first American cookbook," an exact reproduction of the book is available on Amazon. Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin is number 18, with Louisa May Alcott's Little Women coming in at a few notches lower.  (Seriously--it's like a rule you have to read this book if you are a girl.  It should have been #1 no matter when it was published.) Toni Morrison's 1987 novel Beloved is the last book written by a woman on the list, at #86.

In the oldies department, I just ran across an anthology called This is Not Chick Lit, published in 2006.  Subtitled "Original Stories by America's Best Women Writers," it's crazily affordable.  Amazon -affiliate sellers offer it for a penny plus $3.98 shipping.  (And btw, I don't have an Amazon affiliate account--they were discontinued in California awhile ago, so I'm not making any money by shilling books and videos for them.)  Of the women listed, I only know the work of two of them, so I am looking forward to my introduction to Dika Lam, Judy Budnitz, Samantha Hurt, and the rest of the ladies.

Feminist Fiction Friday--Quotable Women

I’ve been thinking of women writers and of Virginia Woolf in particular. She of course is the author who famously wrote that women need money and “a room of one’s own” in order to write. And anyone who struggles to balance the demands of a day job against a need to write will say “amen” to that.
But I started wondering what other writers had to say about sexism and found some real gems.  (Who knew Robert Louis Stevenson was a feminist?)
The following quotes are from the Quote Garden, an absolutely fantastic resource for the perfect quote on just about any subject compiled by quotation anthologist Terri Guillemets.
“For it would seem ... that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.” --Virginia Woolf, Orlando:  a Biography 
"I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman." --Anaïs Nin
“Why is it that only girls stand on the sides of their feet?  As if they're afraid to plant themselves?”--Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams, 1990
“The little rift between the sexes is astonishingly widened by simply teaching one set of catchwords to the girls and another to the boys.”--Robert Louis Stevenson
“If there’s a book you really want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it!”—Toni Morrison