

The Fun/Smart Divide: Why Books Are Candy-Coated

Brand-Obsessed Chick Lit Makes Us Lose Our Breakfast (At Tiffany's)
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…
This Is Not Chick Lit: A Q&A With Writer Janelle Brown
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…
Blogging Towards Bethlehem
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…
Somebody's Getting Their Lands Wet
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…
Salon Offers A Last, Well-Put Word On A Week Of Women Writers
"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…
Female Fantasy Writers Accused Of Being "Simple" • Women Care More About Weight Loss Than Cancer
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…
Is "Sex Addict" Memoirist Kerry Cohen Even Actually A Slut?
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,…
"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…
Jane Smiley Wonders: Has Writer Jennifer Weiner Thrown In The Towel?
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…
Doesn't Anyone Write Like A Fucking Chick Anymore?
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…
Fashionistas Flog Book About Being Fabulous In Hollywood
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…
Girls of Riyadh Is Saudi Arabia's Gossip Girl
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…
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 Chick Lit Cat Fight Chronicles.... Might Be A Witty Title For A Pink Book, No?
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…