Customer Reviews

This Is Not Chick Lit: Original Stories by America's Best Women Writers

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This short story collection is worth the cover price for editor Elizabeth Merrick opening essay alone. Merrick does not hate chick lit (she freely admits to enjoying and respecting several titles), nor does she want it to die a painful death. Merrick, after smartly summing up your basic chick lit heroine, metropolitan setting, token gay friend, wicked boss, diet rules, and relationship drama, grants chick lit its place in the world of genre fiction. With this collection, Merrick simply wants to shine the light on modern literary talent. She wants to share these stories with the world--stories about pushing emotional limits, experiencing new cultures, setting personal challenges (a steak-eating contest, anyone?), and musing about social status and careers. This is a book to read with a stack of sticky flag-notes in hand, to mark stories which inspire the reader to pursue further study or exploration of specific topics.

The opening piece describes the experience of a Nigerian immigrant in pursuit of the American dream. Her remarks about this upside-down country still resonate with me--America is a place in which rich people look starved and poor people are fat, where rich people dress in shabby clothing, and in which not everyone owns the gigantic house and car that represent the American dream. In another contribution, Francine Prose manages to masquerade a contemplative essay as a fictional story, and the gimmick succeeds wildly. Aimee Bender's short story reads pretty much like a piece in any of her other collections, making her one of the weakest (but still excellent) links in the book.

The authors represent a veritable who's who of modern literary talent. Most of them have recent full-length releases (Jennifer Egan's The Keep is not to be missed). My one (small) complaint about the collection is that the short author bios are relegated to an appendix, rather than appearing immediately after each author's story entry. When I am consumed by a narrative, I want to explore more about the author immediately. Also, with the plot fresh in the reader's mind, connections between the author's life and her writing will leap off the page.

The genius of this collection is that there is no overarching theme or message; these stories are unified by their numerous distinctions. The title clearly attracts media (and blogger) attention, but I hope that readers of both genders pick this one up. The writers may be female, but their written words prove that they are talented writers, pure and simple.

Disclaimer: I'm a man. Presumably because of this, I got an odd look from the bookstore cashier buying this book with "chick lit" in large hot pink letters on the cover. If you're concerned about this happening to you, you can of course buy this book from this very website and it will arrive in a discrete brown package.

If, instead, you stumble across this volume in a bookstore or library, but inadvertently skip the word "not" on the cover, you may be surprised by a curious absence of handbags inside.

What you will find instead will include, among other things, a steak-eating contest, a disgraced publicist's unusual efforts to rehabilitate a dictator, and an explosives-filled FBI sex robot's philosophial debates with the Unabomber.

Whatever your gender, I don't think it's an exaggeration to say there's not a dull story in the bunch, and I'd be surprised if you don't put down the book wanting to read more by at least one, if not several, of the authors included in this excellent collection.

Subtitled: Original Stories by America's Best Women Writers

In her introduction, Elizabeth Merrick writes, "Chick lit as a genre presents one very narrow representation of women's lives." While not disparaging Chick Lit as a genre (she mentions writers she likes, including Jennifer Weiner, for example), Merrick proposes that there are a lot of great women writers today that do not fit exactly into that genre, that present varying and strong alternative representations of the varying and strong experiences women face in their lives.

The stories in this book range from funny to deadly serious to touching. A publicist that decides to represent a despotic general tries to make him likeable by putting him in a knitted hat. A woman contemplates her wedding night--and runs. Another woman volunteers at a shelter for women and children, and through the experience reflects upon her own loneliness and neuroses. A couple experiences their last moments together before terrorists crash their plane into one of the Twin Towers.

This book contains everything you'd expect from Chick Lit: first dates, reflections on high school crushes, and relationships gone bad. But it is more inclusive and expansive than what is expected from the Chick Lit genre, with the thought-provoking, the touching and the downright quirky, driving the stories to places as deep and painful the lives of real women living in their thoughtful, touching and quirky real lives.

Armchair Interviews says: Fantastic read!

These stories are by turns insightful, poignant, fanciful, hilarious and heartbreaking. A fabulous collection that belongs on the shelf of every short story aficionado.

I really enjoyed this collection of stories. The stories really varied in theme and tone, which I liked. Some of the stories I especially liked were "Selling the General" by Jennifer Egan, which blended great humour about PR in the modern world with some poignant thoughts about loss of self esteem when your career goes awry, "Embrace" by Roxana Robinson which was a really moving story about one couple's life together told with a Rashomon-like changing of view points between the man and the woman, and "Gabriella, My Heart" by Cristina Henriquez, a beautiful story about a young gay man, and the one woman he loved before he realized he was gay.

In case you hadn't heard: this anthology has upset a lot of apple carts. There is a smackdown in progress in some literary blogs about the merits of Chick Lit. Elizabeth Merrick's eloquent introduction dishes up some no-punches-pulled definitions: "White girl in the big city searches for Prince Charming, all the while shopping" and an "exaltation of glamour and goods." No one could mistake that for praise -- and in a small part of the reading world, this blunt judgment of the genre has people in a frenzy.

But the fact that the controversy hasn't yet crept onto Amazon's review pages suggests that there are many readers out there like me: fans of short fiction whose attention to what Chick Lit is, or isn't, has been wandering at best. Of interest to us is Merrick's contrapuntal theme: that "women writers of literary fiction are having a golden moment, right now." See if Curtis Sittenfeld's contribution to this volume, or Jennifer Egan's, persuades you of that. Or Merrick's own writing, which is sharp and sincere. There are weaker parts to the collection, to be sure, but the whole is a great read, and not just for fans and foes of Chick Lit.

I enjoy chick lit and am proud of it! But I agree with Elizabeth Merrick that a lot of the chick lit novels out these days all seem the same. I picked up this book after reading about it in USA Today. The stories are funny and unusual. If you are looking for something different, pick up this book!

This book is a great way to sample American female authors. And I love the whole theme of it. It's a great little collection.

This was not any kind of lit. Just a bunch of junk compiled to make enough pages to print a book. Who edited this stuff. I'll give it to the used book store, and hope it hit's the 50 cent table. And I hope no one else tries to suffer through it like I tried, and suffer I did!

Some of the stories in here were excellent while some simply fell flat for me. The opening story was fantastic. However, ending the book with Tillman and Witt's stories surely left a worse taste in my mouth!