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Book Review of Our mutual room: Modern literary portraits of the opposite sex

Our mutual room: Modern literary portraits of the opposite sex


Copyright 1987, 384 pages. From the Introduction:

Mean and women working in an atmosphere of common respect and productivity, their work not limited by the boundaries of their gender but, rather, strengthened and broadened because of their ability to transcend gender--that is the theme this volume is most concerned with. When writers, male or female, broaden the scope of their work by crossing the gender barrier and imagining the interior life of characters of the opposite sex, how does that imaginative act enrich the experienced of fiction? The surest answer to that important question is to be found in the best examples of such writing, labeled cross-gender writing by Reynolds Price, and the seventeen selections assembled in this anthology are just that--examples of the best cross-gender writing in American Fiction of the seventies and eighties.

The included selections are from:
Ann Beattie, Falling in Place
Raymond Carver, The Bridle
Robb Forman Dew, Dale Loves Sophie to Death
Michael Dorris, A Yellow Raft in Blue Water
Clyde Edgerton, Raney
Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine
Perry Glasser, Mexico
Gail Godwin, Glass People
Judith Guest, Ordinary People
Josephine Humphreys, Dreams of Sleep
John Irving, The World According to Garp
David Leavitt, Aliens
Alison Lurie, The War Between the Tates
Gloria Naylor, Linden Hills
Reynolds Price, Kate Vaiden
Anne Tyler, Celestial Navigation
John Updike, Marry Me