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

by Elizabeth Merrick

Book Overview

Chick lit: A genre of fiction that often recycles the following plot: Girl in big city desperately searches for Mr. Right in between dieting and shopping for shoes. Girl gets dumped (sometimes... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0812975677
• ISBN13: 9780812975673
• Release Date: August 2006
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.3" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

This IS a shining spotlight on modern short literary fiction

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.

Read the title with care

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.

Worth the hype and then some

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

Great variety of stories

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.

Great anthology

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.