A provocative critique of chick lit’s glossy narratives and their complex relationship with postfeminist ideals.
Chick-Lit: Postfeminist Fiction is the fourth volume in “On the Edge: New Women’s Fiction,” FC2’s ongoing effort to discover new and innovative voices in women’s fiction. Determined to contradict the myth that “women don't write experimental fiction,” Chick-Lit discovers women writers with a fresh and irreverent wit and honesty, but no less powerful in their rendering of human experience.
Chick-Lit collects the original fiction of newly discovered writers, but also the award winning work of notable writers like Carole Maso, Jonis Agee, Stacy Levinne and Carolyn Banks. Marked by innovations in form and point-of-view, the writers in this collection are not satisfied with the terrain commonly referred to as “women’s writing.” Insane asylum sex, board games that control people’s lives, a masochistic pedophile humiliated by his victim, an obese woman paying nickels and quarters for attention from teenage girls, a deranged hair stylist and her disloyal dog, a men's impotence therapy group, a surreal landscape constantly producing the body of a woman's mother: this is writing that shouts, yes, there is such a thing as postfeminist fiction.
Cris Mazza is the author of a dozen novels and collections of fiction. Her most recent books are the novels Disability and Homeland, and a memoir titled Indigenous / Growing Up Californian. Among her other notable titles are Dog People, Your Name Here: ___, plus the critically acclaimed Is It Sexual Harassment Yet? She was also co-editor of Chick-Lit 2 (No Chick Vics), anthologies of women's fiction, and was a recipient of an NEA fellowship. Mazza's first novel, How to Leave a Country, while still in manuscript won the PEN / Nelson Algren Award for book-length fiction. The judges included Studs Terkel and Grace Paley. Since then, Mazza's fiction has been reviewed numerous times in The New York Times Book Review, The Wall Street Journal, MS Magazine, Chicago Tribune Books, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, The Voice Literary Supplement, The San Francisco Review of Books, Time Out: London, and many other book review publications. In spring 1996, Mazza was the cover feature in Poets & Writers Magazine, and in December 2004 Poets & Writers published her essay Chick-Lit and the Perversion of a Genre. The October 2005 Contemporary Literary Criticism as well as Routledge Press's Chick Lit: The New Woman's Fiction (October 2005) feature Mazza's essay on Chick-Lit. A native of Southern California, Cris Mazza grew into early adulthood in San Diego County. She now lives 50 miles west of Chicago and is a professor in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago
Jeffrey DeShell, novelist, professor, and literary critic, is the author of six novels:
Expectation,
S & M,
Arthouse,
The Trouble With Being Born,
In Heaven Everything is Fine (FC2), and
Peter: An (A)Historical Romance (Starcherone), as well as a critical book,
The Peculiarity of Literature: An Allegorical Approach to Poe's Fiction. He has co-edited two collections of fiction by American women,
Chick-Lit I: Postfeminist Fiction and Chick-Lit II: No Chick Vics (FC2), and was a Fulbright Teaching Fellow in Budapest, Hungary, 1999-2000. Currently, DeShell is a Professor of English, where he has served as the Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
