Chick Lit 2: No Chick Vics
Edited by Cris Mazza, Jeffrey DeShell, and Elisabeth Sheffield
1996
Quality Paper
ISBN 978-1-57366-020-4
This book is the follow-up volume to Mazza and DeShell’s hugely popular Chick-Lit: Postfeminist Fiction, published by FC2 in 1995. Chick-Lit 2: No Chick Vics features new work by Rikki Ducornet, Eurydice, Elizabeth Graver, Ursule Molinaro, and fourteen other witty and deadly serious writers.
Chick-Lit 2 discovers new and alternative voices in women’s fiction whose stories do not involve trauma that comes from the outside. As Mazza writes in her introduction, “Sexual assaults and harassments and injurious poor body images do exist and have waged a war on women (the American Medical Association says so). But for this book, I was interested in seeing what action(s) women characters can incite on their own, whether bad or good, hopeful or dead-end, progressive or destructive.”
These writers are plying sharp eyes and ears, peeking through keyholes, tearing up pages, throwing carefully thumbed books out the window, and generally making a name for themselves. You will want to see this collection for yourself. This book is its own blessed event and second coming all rolled up into one.
Now we are ready to consider the skuzzier side of women … One generation of women wrote “shit happens.” The next writes, “Yeah, it still does, but I’ve stuck my fingers in it.”
Editors
Cris Mazza is the author of a dozen novels and collections of fiction. A native of Southern California, she 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. Her FC2 books include Disability, Girl Beside Him, Former Virgin, Revelation Countdown, Is It Sexual Harassment Yet?, and Animal Acts.
Jeffrey DeShell, novelist, professor, and literary critic, is a Professor of English at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and the editor of two collections of fiction by American women, Chick-Lit I: Postfeminist Fiction and Chick-Lit II: No Chick Vics. His FC2 books include Expectation, Arthouse, The Trouble With being Born, S & M, and In Heaven Everything Is Fine.
Elisabeth Sheffield has won an NEA Fellowship and two Fulbrights, and she is the Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Her FC2 books include Helen Keller Really Lived, Fort Da: A Report, and Gone.
Chick-Lit is the rare anthology of women’s writing that is virile, sensual, irreverent, funny, unexpected, unsentimental, close to unspeakable.… A must-read for girls who have considered selling out.
Chick Lit: Postfeminist Fiction
Edited by Cris Mazza and Jeffrey DeShell
2000
Quality Paper
ISBN 978-1-57366-090-7
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 Levine, and Carolyn Banks. Exploring 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.
Chick-Lit is the rare anthology of women’s writing that is virile, sensual, irreverent, funny, unexpected, unsentimental, close to unspeakable. There is still prose that ecstatically and resolutely resists the anemic contemporary conservatism of both left and right. A must-read for girls who have considered selling out. This book hails the dawn of an inclusive, fun, sexy, silly, literary feminism.
Under its brisk, diminutive heading, Chick-Lit unites strong full-bodied stories, ominous undercurrents of daily reality. Reading these stories is the Non-Victim’s defense.
… I know these stories fulfill one of the commandments of good fiction: They throw you off guard and into someone else’s mind.
These stories contain violence, sex, madness, and perversion. They are not all pleasant, but they are fresh, creative, powerful, and challenging. Recommended for literary collections.
Editors
Cris Mazza is the author of a dozen novels and collections of fiction. A native of Southern California, she 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. Her FC2 books include Disability, Girl Beside Him, Former Virgin, Revelation Countdown, Is It Sexual Harassment Yet?, and Animal Acts.
Jeffrey DeShell, novelist, professor, and literary critic, is a Professor of English at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and the editor of two collections of fiction by American women, Chick-Lit I: Postfeminist Fiction and Chick-Lit II: No Chick Vics. His FC2 books include Expectation, Arthouse, The Trouble With being Born, S & M, and In Heaven Everything Is Fine.