In Praise of Chick Lit: The Genre’s All-Stars Talk to Vanity Fair
“As The Devil Wears Prada 2 dominates, it’s time to give these best-selling, much-maligned books about single women in the big city their due—with help from Plum Sykes and Jennifer Weiner.”
I don’t like the term chick lit; nonetheless, I’ll have to live with it because it’s widely used in literary discussions—or, as this article puts it, “chick lit, one of the most commercially successful (and critically derided) genres of the late ’90s and early aughts.” But the article is quick to distinguish between chick lit and other kinds of books written by and for women:
Confessions of a Shopaholic, Something Borrowed, Jemima J, I Don’t Know How She Does It, The Nanny Diaries, Maneater, The Devil Wears Prada—those books are chick lit. And like the proverbial Heather, they and their brethren have two mothers: Carrie Bradshaw and Bridget Jones.
Hillary Busis discusses the history and significance of the term and what it represents.
The Secret of Elizabeth Strout’s Appeal
“How she writes best sellers that are also critical darlings”
Elizabeth Strout writes books that engage readers in the inner lives of her characters. In this article in The Atlantic, Adam Begley examines how she does it, with particular emphasis on Strout’s latest novel, The Things We Never Say.
Lord of the Flies Has Been Misunderstood for Too Long
“The new Netflix adaptation from Adolescence creator Jack Thorne proves that the cautionary tale about lost boys is more meaningful than ever. As Thorne tells Esquire, ‘How difficult it is to be a boy is something that will always fascinate me.’”
In Esquire, Anthony Breznican discusses Netflix’s recent adaptation of Lord of the Flies by screenwriter Jack Thorne with reference to Thorne’s “groundbreaking and devastating series Adolescence” of last year. Thorne tells Breznican that William Golding’s novel “is not about who we are when we’re at our essence . . . It’s about a group of kids that come with a culture and a socialization that they then reenact on the island. They are products of their parents.”
The Simpsons Present Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” and Teachers Now Use It to Teach Kids the Joys of Literature
In another instance of focusing on television’s literary adaptations, this recently reprinted article explains how “on the first ever “Treehouse of Horror” from 1990—the Simpsons’ recurring Halloween episode—they adapted Poe’s ‘The Raven’ more faithfully than any bit of lit found in any other episode.”
Where Have All the Book Reviews Gone?
“What the rise of A.I. and the gutting of books coverage across U.S. media will mean for literature.”
Dwight Garner, a long-time book critic for The New York Times, laments that “Only yesterday, it seems, nearly every American newspaper, dozens and dozens of them, even in midsize cities, ran book reviews by local critics. . . . Time, Newsweek and other weeklies had serious critics who mattered to the conversation and knocked their heads together like bighorn rams. So much of this is gone.”
This situation “marks an inflection point in America’s literature, which can’t thrive without serious, fervent and quick-witted criticism: public talk, back and forth, between competing voices, in something like real time.”
And the final nail in the coffin of American literary criticism is, of course, AI, with its “flat, consistent tone, the pert little summary bits, the repetitions, the impersonal and fluorescent-lit mood.”
We Need More Geriatric Heroines: Seven Books About Actually-Old Women
As a geriatric mystery reader, I, too, have been looking for more novels about “actually-old women.” (See my review of Jenny Cooper Has a Secret by Joy Fielding. Both the author and the protagonist of this novel are over age 75.)
In the article linked here, novelist Laurie Frankel explains that, while novels about middle-aged women are common, novels featuring “actually-old female characters” are much more scarce. She recommends some of her favorites.
A robust vocabulary of curse words signals strong verbal fluency
I used to think that people who habitually used curse words did so because they didn’t have a large enough vocabulary to express ideas more specifically. According to this article, I was wrong: “in 2015, researchers discovered that a robust knowledge of taboo language actually correlates with higher overall verbal ability, suggesting that a rich repertoire of curse words accompanies a well-stocked mental dictionary. The research was published in Language Sciences.”
© 2026 by Mary Daniels Brown
