Home > The Magazine > Cartoons

Saturday 11 October 2008

Dare to dream and make your ultimate trip a reality

The latest culture as recommended by our staff

Michael Henderson

Michael Henderson suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value events

Click here for exclusive articles, offers, tasting notes and discussion

No such thing as chick lit with a brain

Celia Walden

Wednesday, 27th September 2006

Celia Walden finds the Los Angeles chattering classes obsessed by a book which tries to give a much-mocked genre a cerebral makeover. Too bad it fails utterly

If, like me, you are allergic to chick lit, the chances are that the problem has as much to do with the fatuousness of the heroines’ interests as with the quality of the prose. Jimmy Choo? Lovely shoes, but I have no inclination to discuss them over a bottle of wine. Men? Love them too, but I don’t want to talk about them as a category either. So what if someone were to write chick lit that’s intellectual — for birds with brains? Is the very notion an oxymoron that could alienate two opposing armies of female readers at a blow? Or could it be the start of a whole new literary genre?

1 | 2 | 3 Next page

More articles from: Celia Walden | this section

Print this article | Email to a friend | Permalink | Comment

Post this entry to: del.icio.us | Digg | Newsvine | NowPublic | Reddit

Real Life

Melissa Kite

Travel sickness

Low Life

Jeremy Clarke

Chaste thoughts

Credit where it’s due

Charles Spencer

Charles Spencer battles the credit crunch

An evening with the Muslim Facebook crew

Sarfraz Manzoor

Sarfraz Manzoor celebrates an iftar meal with homeless people and his fellow Muslims, a web-generated ‘flashmob’ observing an Islamic tradition of generosity to the needy

Strictly Come Dancing is not the BBC’s core broadcasting

Rod Liddle

Rod Liddle — a former editor of the Today programme — says that the Corporation must stop pretending to be democratic if it is to keep the licence fee. Unashamed elitism is the only chance that the Beeb has in the new media world

A cliché too far

Deborah Ross

Taken
15, Nationwide

A pilgrim’s progress for the 21st century

Mary Wakefield

Mary Wakefield talks to the author William P. Young, whose self-published religious novel has astounded the publishing world and sold nearly two million copies

Shared Opinion

Hugo Rifkind

It didn’t occur to Cameron that White Van Man might be trying to pat him on the back

Critical condition

Lloyd Evans

Lloyd Evans on the perils of being both playwright and critic

Welcome to the United States of Amnesia

Mary Wakefield

Gore Vidal tells Mary Wakefield that America has forgotten its constitutional roots, and explains why Bobby Kennedy was ‘the biggest son of a bitch in politics’