I know Flavorwire means well with this list of ten women writers they love—supposedly, it was inspired by the whole Jezebel/Daily Show fracas, and I guess any large-scale conversation About Women gets people thinking about where women are and are not in every area of art and life. But the fact remains that this is a list of mostly excellent writers (Kendra Wilkinson’s on it, wink-wink) that lumps together short story authors, novelists, journalists, essayists, a beloved 94-year-old YA author, a vacuous reality star, a young debut novelist and established authors with several books to their name–all on the basis on their gender. That the list isn’t meant to be definitive or prove anything (unlike several of the more controversial lists of late that have “coincidentally” excluded women, or the the lists made specifically to rebut them which tend  to limit themselves to specific publications years or genres) actually makes it more baseless. Really, what is the point here?

Meanwhile at Salon, Laura Miller has an awesome takedown of critics like Lee Siegel and Malcolm Jones, who turn up their noses at Shirley Jackson (the hook being her recently issued Library of America collection of novels and stories, with an introduction by Joyce Carol Oates) while mythologizing the supposed heyday of fiction by “Bellow, Updike, Mailer, Roth, Cheever, Malamud” (that was Siegel specifically, arguing in the wake of The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40″ that “[f]iction has become culturally irrelevant”). Miller offers a pointed, badly needed corrective to their lazy view of the past:

Mid-20th-century Americans believed that novels by the jostling alpha males on Siegel’s list were important and “central to their lives” largely because a chorus of cultural authority figures united to tell them so. That’s not to say that those novelists weren’t fine writers, or that the depiction of an upwardly striving middle-class descended from relatively recent immigrants (many of them Jewish) didn’t provide lively new subject matter. But it certainly wasn’t everyone’s story (as it was often made out to be), or a literature that everyone found interesting or that everyone would have consumed with “existential urgency and intensity” in absence of those endorsements.

She also handily debunks the idea that there’s any such thing as objective “greatness.” The piece goes a long ways towards relieving the perma-headache I’ve developed from reading so much  redundant interweb squabbling about all sorts of literary lists (the New Yorker one just the most recent among them), along with the aforementioned Jezebel/Daily Show thing. Clearly the lesson is that I should turn off the computer and go read some Shirley Jackson.