'Women write about death, men about sex'

There's nothing like an outspoken literary prize judge to get people talking - this time it's Daisy Goodwin, chair of the Orange Prize judges, who as Jojo Moyes writes in The Telegraph, said that:

...this year’s entries have been suffused with human misery. Judging the award, she said, “there were times when I felt like a social worker”.

Moyes adds:

I think Goodwin’s entrants have simply realised the truth: that there are no literary credentials to be gained from writing upbeat prose. Current wisdom suggests you cannot be taken seriously if you include a happy ending, wit – or even in some notable cases – a plot.

Goodwin's comments are also considered in The Guardian and The Times. Elsewhere in The Telegraph, Celia Walden is pondering what seems to be on male novelists' minds: sex.

I find it both exasperating and affecting that men never grow out of sex. I don't mean the act itself – which would be sad – but talking about it, intellectualising it and constantly endowing it with supernatural, universe-defining powers. Nowhere is this tendency more apparent than in Martin Amis's new book, The Pregnant Widow; every page of it is saturated with nubile breasts, oversized buttocks – and the philosophical relationship between nubile breasts and oversized buttocks.