Chick Lit 2: No Chick Vics

by Cris Mazza (Editor), Jeffrey DeShell (Editor), Elisabeth Sheffield (Editor)

2nd FC2 anthology of 'postfeminist fiction'

225 pages, Paperback

First published October 25, 1996

About the author

Cris Mazza is the author of a dozen books of fiction, mostly recently Waterbaby (Soft Skull Press 2007). Her other titles include the critically acclaimed Is It Sexual Harassment Yet?, and the PEN Nelson Algren Award winning How to Leave a Country. She also has a collection of personal essays, Indigenous: Growing Up Californian. Mazza has been the recipient of an NEA Fellowship and three Illinois Arts Council literary awards. A native of Southern California, Mazza grew up in San Diego County. Currently she lives 50 miles west of Chicago. She is a professor in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago "

Reviews

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 2 out of 5]

In fairness: I am not the ideal audience for this collection (not being an ultra-cool American female in her mid-to-late twenties, prob with an MFA or similar)—in a used book shop, Rikki’s cover art and the FC2 logo made me curious, and GR regular Jessica Treat appears (whose piece from Not a Chance is one of the best), so I made the £2 plunge. The anti-theme of the collection “no chick vics” (no stories about victims) is an excuse for a smattering of tales with bizarre, confrontational, quirked-to-the-max, or lyrical-beyond-tolerable-level female narrators, making use of various innovative styles, varying in their success and interestingness—as I limped towards the climax, the voices tended to blend into one blabbering opaque first-person narrator candid about sex saying nothing terribly interesting about her bourgeois American existence (and concluding on a tedious pornographic tale). I liked the stories by Eurydice, Sandy Huss (who uses striking graphics and plagiarisms), and Joshilyn Jackson (Rikki D also appears here, with a piece from The Word “Desire”).