The Best Book You’ve Never Read

When Richard Yates’s The Easter Parade came out in 1976, it was a Book of the Month Club selection, alongside Judith Guest’s Ordinary People. Yates—who’d achieved career-making acclaim with his first novel, Revolutionary Road, but less success with subsequent ones—was excited about his expanded readership. But he also called up his editor Sam Lawrence to express his worry that Delacorte planned to market the novel, which follows two sisters from the 1930s to the 1970s, as a “woman’s book.”

Yates was not the first or last male novelist () to worry that his work would be diminished by its association with women. Even today, remains a category in publishing—my own books are sometimes labeled that way—and I often wonder what it means. Is it a book that features