The latest weighty stuff ala book industry opinion pieces have much to say. For starters, the Baltimore City Paper focuses chick lit, today’s trash reading for young professional women. (Danielle Steele? That’s your mother’s stuff!) Now, I don’t have any problem with trash fiction. I read as much of it as anyone else, just in genres other than chick lit. Why? Because chick lit doesn’t speak to me. I’m way beyond their protagonists’ average age, I’m not into boys, booze, and body image. (Well, at least not the body image that comes with youth. Have a two kids, age fifteen years, and start having hot flashes, honey, then come see me about body image.) But there’s another reason I don’t like chick lit and Hanne Blank nails it exactly. It’s heterosexism. That’s probably why I’ve never read Danielle Steele or Judith Krantz, my age group’s chick lit.
To make a long story short, let’s just say that I read GLBT book journals as often as I read the NY Times book section. But I’ll also be the first to concede that even GLBT fiction is going the chick lit route, so maybe it’s little more than a generation gap.
BTW, here’s the latest on GLBT autumn releases.
OK, I’ve tried avoiding the whole California recall thing but with such a lack of discipline that I figure what’s one more link? It’s kind of irrestible when author Steve Almond, in declaring himself an unofficial candidate, invokes the Love and Leather ticket. (Actually, it’s in the Love in Leather ticket, I quibble briefly.) Besides, his lobbyist/teacher salary swap is a fine idea, as is his (ahem) intention to bring Mary Carey on board. Let’s see, I’ve got fifty cents to spare, a Hersey’s miniature… now I’ve just gotta dig out some porn for the guy.
Remember my rant about sex and literary fiction this past June? (Which seems to have vaporized somewhere in the data base, damn it, so don’t look for it until I find out what the hell happened.) It was based on an LA Times piece, which I think you have to pay for at this late date. (Another damn it, huh?) Well, the argument has crossed the pond with Sam Leith discussing literary sex.
I appreciate the distinctly British slant the article brings to the article, but it lacks a few things. First, not all British lit focus on clumsy emotions and sex. Michel Houellebecq’s Platform is downright sex positive, where healthy, mutual sexual expression is a balm against cynicism and misogyny. I’m not going to go off too loudly about this article — I’m simply glad the dialogue continues — but I would recommend looking beyond British literary fiction to their genre erotica because, there, the Brits succeed where Americans fail. Imprints like Black Lace, Nexus, XLibris, and Chimera show exactly what can be accomplished in genre erotica. I bet the Brits publish almost as many erotic novels as they do in other genres. I could be wrong, certainly, but the six shelves worth that my local Borders exhibits fuel my observation.
Enough already.
IMPORTANT META: If you emailed me in the last month and didn’t hear from me, please email me again. I had a disasterous email crash and lost all my mail. Although I was able to back up the files after the fact, they may be too corrupted to access, so resends are very, very necessary. Please, please, please!
