Name: Tess
Home: St. Louis
Ghettoization?
As I am rushing crazily around to get ready for the Missouri Writer's Guild Conference, I give you a link to an article by Susan Sontag in Publishers Weekly (via the One Story blog). Sontag calls on today's female writers to resist their "ghettoization" in the genre section of the book store.
It's an interesting topic, and I'd like to hear what my readers have to say about it. Personally, I think there's nothing wrong with genre fiction, but I find the category of "chick lit" insidious; it relegates novels about and by 20- and 30-something women to a pastel corner of the book store. It made me especially mad when the recent Little Children, by Tom Perrotta, was treated by critics as serious literary satire; I'm convinced that, had the same book been written by a woman, it would have been given a cutsey title and a pink cover.
It's an interesting topic, and I'd like to hear what my readers have to say about it. Personally, I think there's nothing wrong with genre fiction, but I find the category of "chick lit" insidious; it relegates novels about and by 20- and 30-something women to a pastel corner of the book store. It made me especially mad when the recent Little Children, by Tom Perrotta, was treated by critics as serious literary satire; I'm convinced that, had the same book been written by a woman, it would have been given a cutsey title and a pink cover.
posted by Tess | 11:53 AM
1 Comments:
Oh...sing it to me sister. Right with you on this. That's why I'm waiting until after 40 to publish my novel... ;-)
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