Evidence Against Her Book

The fact that this book isn't a best-seller tells you what's wrong with contemporary literary fiction. Used to be a book like Dew's or like Anne Tyler's, would win the National Book Award or the Pulitzer. A book about family. About, gasp, women. Now we're completely obsessed with a certain kind of prose and we dismiss all books like these -- all family dramas -- as worthless. We dismiss them as "women's fiction." As "Oprah books." As if Ursula Hegi's book Stones From the River , for example, an Oprah book, wasn't magnificent. It's just sexism, pure and simple.