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When I was gifted a Kindle for my birthday this year, I did something that I admit, shamefully, I've never done in a bookstore: I perused titles in the "lesbian" category. After sifting through pages of poorly titled erotica, I stumbled across a terrible/AWESOME genre: lesbian romance. More »
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Jennifer Egan just won the Pulitzer Prize for her novel, A Visit From the Goon Squad. She is a woman. In an interview, she said some things about other women. Which can only mean one thing: catfight! More »
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With the long-awaited sequel about to drop, it's time to ask, who, exactly, is Francine Pascal? More »
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A kerfuffle over Jonathan Franzen's new book has exposed a controversy in the literary world: to hear some writers tell it, women may get the money, but men get all the praise. Except when men get both. More »
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"Women are willing to buy books by male writers, but men seem much more reluctant to buy books by women," notes a (male) Atlantic writer. His solution: To read one female writer's novel for every one by a man. More »
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That's the title of the interview with Elizabeth Gilbert in this week's Entertainment Weekly, and it's my exact perception of how Hollywood feels about women. More »
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There's a debate raging in The Guardian. Yesterday, DJ Connell threw down the gauntlet by suggesting that "the 'chick-lit' label does nothing for humorous female writers already suffering exclusion from an old boys' club." Today, a chick-lit author responds: More »
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The name "Marian Keyes" will be familiar to even the most casual chick-lit reader. Her stories of love, loss and friendship are phenomenally successful. Which is why her battle with depression has come as a shock to fans. More »
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Ranging from trashy to tragic to triumphant, the biographies and memoirs in this compilation not only tell the stories of the women who've helped define "celebrity" in the past 100 years, but also provide some pretty entertaining bathroom reads. More »
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Sydney Zamora is a brash, calculating and unrepentant heroine who is quick to drop a suitor and curse him out as she extracts herself from the date. Is she the new prototype for chick lit characters? More »
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The interwebs are abuzz this week with news of a shift in chick lit from Shopaholic-style conspicuous consumption to more recession-appropriate storylines. But is this "new chick lit" just more of the same, dressed up in slightly cheaper clothes? More »
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Middle-aged woman like to read about sex. There. Are you happy? Insert chocolate joke. [Telegraph] More »
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A new book by critic Elaine Showalter begs the question, are women writers now just writers? More »
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There's something particularly distasteful about the tone of yesterday's Sunday Styles piece on book clubs. This woman joins a book group hoping to "network" with women in "upper echelon" positions, only to find they want to read Oprah's picks and Dan Brown. “'It was bad enough that they wanted to read "Da Vinci Code" in the first place,' Ms. Bowie said, 'but then they wanted to talk about it.'” Oh, the trials of being smarter than everyone else! More »
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"There are 8,000 nerve endings in the clitoris and this son of a bitch couldn't find one of them." Intrigued, right? Right? Well, you better be, because that's the sales pitch publicists are using to promote this new beach read, Tan Lines, by J.J. Salem. And if you didn't find it wildly "sexy" and "naughty" and "provocative" the first time around, well, maybe 12th is the charm. Basically, the publishers have made a video of some hapless assistant in Madison Square Park making various strangers read the line aloud. Hilarity ensues. Or maybe it does; we got too bored to make it past the tenth snickering guy. [AdRants] More »
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It has been suggested that females prefer pink because of an evolutionary preference for reddish things like ripe fruits and healthy faces. We also prefer pink books. Or at least the publishing industry is so convinced of this that to cover their asses they're wantonly packaging any book written by a woman with a chick-litish cover in the desperate hopes that we'll buy it. Says The Guardian's Diane Shipley, "Having cottoned on to the fact that chick lit books sell like cupcakes, publishers are now adding chick lit-style covers to any book written by a woman whether it fits the genre definition or not." More »
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Remember when we counted the number of luxury brand name mentions per page in the hateful YA series The Clique (1.8 brand mentions per page, for those of you keeping score)? Well in today's New York Times style section, Cathy Horyn takes a page out of our playbook and notes the number of products placed in the brand-loving grown person novels hitting shelves this summer. Horyn examined the Choo-addled pages of James Patterson's Sunday at Tiffany's, and found "When I got done turning down the corners of the pages of Mr. Patterson’s novel that mentioned a brand name or a stylish place (he, too, transports his characters to Nantucket), my copy looked severely riddled." More »
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Janelle Brown’s debut novel, All We Ever Wanted Was Everything, in addition to including a Bauhaus reference in its title, is essentially about the relationship between Janice Miller and her two daughters, Margaret, 28, and Lizzie, 14. AWEWWE depicts a shining Silicon Valley suburb replete with country club appearances and pool boys. In the grand tradition of the suburban novel, though, beneath the surface of all that material excess lurks despair, accidental pregnancy and general malaise. It's sort of like a modern day, West Coast version of the Ice Storm, but instead of key parties there's…meth. We talked with Janelle, a former staffer at Wired and Salon about her darkly funny book, Maxi, the feminist ‘zine she used to run in the 90s, and the uneasy intersection between art and commerce. More »
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She slouched on her dirt brown Levitz couch and read Janet Maslin's compendium of summer "chick lit" novels from the New York Times. She hesitated, her gnawed-on, calloused fingers perched warily atop her PowerBook, and wondered why these quite diverse reads had been lumped together so carelessly. "What does a non-fiction book about luxury goods like Bringing Home Birkin really have to do with a pitch black novel about a woman whose husband leaves her immediately after making bank in Silicon Valley, a la All We Ever Wanted Was Everything?" she wondered, tugging at the strap of her Forever 21 sundress. And then she realized: these books don't really have anything in common, other than the fact that they're marketed towards women and have the pale pink and baby blue covers to prove it. More »
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This morning, Jessica wrote about the New York Times coverage of the German novel Feuchtgebiete (known in English as Wetlands), though it won't be available in translation until next year. I'll bet you thought you'd have to wait until then to read some German smut! Well, luckily for you, I majored in German lit and Moe's brother had a copy of the book about which the Times said "It is difficult to overstate the raunchiness of the novel, and hard to describe in a family newspaper." Hooray! Check my semi-literary translation after the jump, as I get you through the first few paragraphs. More »
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"We are mired in a repetitious pattern of hate, jealousy and resentment toward those who are plucked by media powers and come to stand — however inefficiently — for the rest of us in the cultural imagination, securing the top spots, the best exposure, the prime media real estate in exchange for opening veins of feminine vulnerability." That's Salon's Rebecca Traister, weighing in on the publishing world's ghettoization and fetishization of the female experience by women writers both real (Emily Gould) and imagined (Carrie Bradshaw). Traister, in a little over 1,400 words, perfectly sums up this writer's inner conflicts over Sex and the City, the nasty, knee-jerk reaction to Emily's NY Times magazine piece, and the aesthetically prejudiced, commercially-limited and critically loathed space occupied by many contemporary female writers. Here's more: More »
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Guardian writer rails against critics who call JK Rowling and other women fantasy writers "simple". • Palestinian and Israeli women mingle in a special diet group to lose pounds and gain mutual understanding. • The ASPCA and other animal rights groups have filed a lawsuit against Ringling Bros. for chaining elephants for up to 100 hours. • Woman pops out baby in car, without the help of doctors or spouse. • A roving group of women are stealing flowers from graves to make crafts. • Girls in bikinis serving coffee? Awfully original. • The EEOC is launching a study into why Hispanics are so underrepresented in government jobs. • Fasting for up to 16 hours may help fend off jet lag. • Irregular periods in teens may be a sign of bulimia. • Has anyone else noticed that roller derby is really popular with rockabilly and punk girls? • Women are more concerned with losing weight than avoiding cancer, heart disease, or diabetes. • Perhaps that's because their weight could cost them their jobs! More »
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Kerry Cohen is the author of two autobiographical books, Loose Girl: A Memoir of Promiscuity and Easy, but not being big readers on subjects we feel are more ideally suited to learning by "doing", we hadn't heard of her before a May Marie Claire interview, "Confessions of a Sex Addict." What, wonders the magazine, possessed Kerry to subject herself to such a "harrowing litany" of casual sex encounters? "The same reason heroin addicts go back for a high," offers the knowing Kerry. Um, to ward off a prolonged period of uncontrollable throwing up and crapping yourself punctuated by severe cold flashes potentially resultable in death? Not really. "It was default behavior, and to not resist it would have taken a lot more effort," she goes on, although I have a sense she actually said the opposite. "You don't even have to be that attractive to get male attention...I also thought I was different from [most sluts] because I was trying to have a relationship...I felt unloved.'" So, wait a sec. Is this really sex addiction? Or more like the "human condition"? How many dudes did Kerry even fuck? Ooooh, it's in the first line! More »
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"In terms of 'is this book chick lit,' I'm not sure I'm the best one to answer that, or that I can say for sure that the book is anything other than a Jennifer Weiner book. I never try to intentionally make my books more or less anything...what books get called or how they get reviewed or classified or sold in bookstores is entirely out of the author's hands and has more to do with the cover, the publicity pitch, the marketing team and the booksellers...I just try to write the best books I can. Sometimes they'll be about single girls looking for love, sometimes they'll be about married mothers looking for a good night's sleep, and maybe someday I'll attempt a book from a guy's perspective." — Certain Girls author Jennifer Weiner on whether or not her new novel is "chick lit" [Trashionista via Galleycat] More »
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The inimitable Jane Smiley reviewed chick-lit doyenne Jennifer Weiner's new novel, Some Girls for the Philadelphia Inquirer over the weekend, and she wonders why the cover is so goddamn pink. "The pinkness of the novel implies to me that Weiner herself has given up seeking a wider audience, and so given up developing her fictional premises from lots of different perspectives," writes Smiley. Smiley believes that "American fiction has split again, into the boys' team and the girls' team. Certain Girls demonstrates that this works to impoverish both sides." (USA Today notes that the male characters in Certain Girls, "lack substance and exist only as foils for the women.") More »
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Gals. I gotta tell you about something. It's this new internet algorithm thingy, and it's taking over my life. You know how we're interested in the ways men and women write differently? Well this thing called the Gender Guesser, is supposed to guess the gender of someone based on a passage he/she has written. It's not 100% accurate — "men should not be offended if it says you write like a girl," they're quick to state — but I'll tell ya, it's 100% maddening. I've been plugging every fucking piece of writing I can think of. But it's like: no matter what we write, it comes back freaking male. That Charlotte Allen essay on how women are stupid: 64.77% MALE. Katha Pollitt's rebuttal: 64.06% MALE. A Modern Love column penned a few years ago by Jezebel editor Jessica Grose about crying on the subway: 57.96% MALE. The girliest thing I could fucking find was the first page of motherfucking Ulysses, which was 56.51% male. Motherfucking Ulysses?! What girl likes that book? Doesn't anyone write like a girl anymore? More »
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Today's Women's Wear Daily features an impressively-long article about Celebutantes, the story of "26-year-old Lola Santisi, daughter of an Oscar-winning director and a former model, who's working as a brand ambassador for an up-and-coming designer vying to dress a celebrity for the Oscars." Written by Daughters-of-Hollywood Amanda Goldberg and Ruthanna Hopper and based, no doubt, on the lives of the ladies they know and lunch with, the book is being sold as the ultimate insider's guide to Tinseltown's foibles (Hopper is daughter to Dennis; Goldberg is daughter to Charlie's Angels producer Leonard). The two are also featured prominently in a 3-page "Personal Style" spread in the new issue of Harper's Bazaar, in which they recommend $2,200 Hayward Dowel purses and $3,795 Missoni dresses (ugh). More »
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Girls of Riyadh, a novel by writer Rajaa Alsanea about four posh girlfriends whose romantic foibles are posted to a Yahoo group, is causing a major stir in Alsanea's native Saudi Arabia. According to Forbes, the "chick-lit" novel was initially banned when it debuted in 2005 because of the relatively salacious (in Saudi terms) behavior of the book's heroines. (They receive text messages from suitors, they conduct covert operations through online dating profiles, and consider relationships with men from Muslim sects different from their own.) Although the ban on Girls of Riyadh has since been lifted, the most appalling thing about the book is not that it was banned in the first place (though the suppression of free speech is certainly disturbing) — it's the heroines' Western-like obsession with luxury goods. More »
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Before the Food Network was all about curvaceous Nigella, perky Rachael, and overly annunciating Giada, Clarissa Dickson Wright, who rode in the sidecar (remember!?!?) alongside her cohort Jennifer Patterson, cooked meat pies on a little show called The Two Fat Ladies. The culinary program was definitely less about the food (not being British, kidneys and, you know, blood pudding isn't our thing) and more about the jolly fun and hilarious rapport between the two, yes, FAT, woman behind the counter. Wright's autobiography, Spilling the Beans, just hit the shelves but it's not going to be quite as jolly a tale as the Britishisms she drolled on Fat Ladies. Rather, Wright survived a brutal childhood in which her father named her after a pig, beat her, and made her eat carrots covered in slime. She pursued food as a way of defying his desire for her to be a doctor like him and though we still can't get the image of her massaging ground meat with long-taloned fingers out of out head, we're glad to hear this fat lady came out on top. [Daily Mail] More »
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What's the secret to chick lit? Read on, and prepare to count your riches! In a review of Jill Davis' Ask Again Later, Washington Post writer Carolyn See announced she's "unlocked" the genre's chief appeal — the diligent avoidance and/or removal of any and all character development! More »
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Meet author Katherine Taylor. (Her narrator is called "Kath," too!) She never thought she was pretty, always thought she looked like a boy. (What is up with these pretty girls — ahem, ScarJo — saying they think they look like boys? Anyway, Kath thinks she writes as well as any boy, which is why she is the latest entrant in the massive debate a-raging, mostly among authors and publishers and whoever mills paper dye in the color "Pepto", over the definition of chick lit, namely whether said definition should read something like "total mindless crap, denoted by a pink hue and/or font on book jacket that is NOTHING like what I do" or "a genre that encompasses both total mindless Bergdorf Blonds crap and real richly drawn narrative that underscores truths of the Human Condition like what the pink book writing broads I know write." Writing about this debate has become almost a journalistic genre itself, and today the New York Observer serves up a pretty engaging profile of highly connected bartender-turned-writer KT's personal struggle with the color pink (which she hates, and is very sure would have been the color of Benjamin Kunkel's Indecision had it been written by a girl.) But wait, she doesn't want to dis the color pink — because her book, it turns out, will be pink. More »
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Okay, it's serious-time, kids. More »
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What do you get if you cross Bridget Jones with the baby Jesus? More »
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