Jezebel: jennifer weiner

New York Times Hard-Pressed To Name Funniest Female Novelists

Jessica — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 15:30:00 EDT

New York Times book critic David Kelly asked his fellow Times' writers to name the funniest novel ever, and he noted that not a single female author was nominated. "Where are the female nominees?" Kelly wonders. "Someone here mentioned Jane Austen, but only halfheartedly and only after I pointed out that not a single novel by a woman had been proposed. What gives?" Mediabistro says that Times commenters mention Paula Fox, Eudora Welty, and Stella Gibbons as some of the funniest female novelists, and best-selling writer Jennifer Weiner says that Helen Fielding, Gail Parent and Nora Ephron make her chortle.

I agree with the Ephron choice (Heartburn is a must read), and would like to add 1984 Pulitzer Prize winner Foreign Affairs by Alison Lurie, and many things by Anne Lamott, who has been tenderly funny although slightly less so ever since she found Jesus. What fiction-writing females would you nominate for funniest novel ever?

What's The Funniest Novel Ever? [NY Times]
Hitchens Take Heart: NYTBR Also Finds Women Unfunny [Mediabistro]
Monday, September 15, 2008 [Moment Of Jen]

"In terms of 'is this book chick lit,' I'm...

Jessica — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 13:20:00 EDT

"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]

Jane Smiley Wonders: Has Writer Jennifer Weiner Thrown In The Towel?

Jessica — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 17:00:00 EDT

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.")

While any novel is better when it considers the perspectives of both men and women, how many examples of classic literature have the reverse problem — that the female characters lack substance and exist only as foils for the men? Any Hemingway novel suffers from this malady; Philip Roth's female characters are a joke and even the more modern Romeos of literary wunderkinds like Ben Kunkel have trouble creating fictional women with any staying power. And yet these novels still manage to get to the pinnacle of the literary pantheon, while any female writer who writes mostly about women and their issues is relegated to the pink ghetto with a fuschia cover and a pair of heels.

And anyway, it's a widely accepted fact that men don't buy books in the first place. Are women more likely to buy something because it's pink? I want to believe that this is untrue, but then again Confessions of a Shopaholic, that carnation-hued mess, was purchased by millions so what do I know?

Weiner Is Talented Enough To Aim Higher [Philadelphia Inquirer via Galley Cat]
'Certain Girls': It's Not A Sure Thing [USA Today]