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A provocative critique of chick lit’s glossy narratives and their complex relationship with postfeminist ideals.

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 Levinne and Carolyn Banks. Marked by 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.
 

Ibtihal Salem's writing provides an excellent forum for studying both everyday life in Egypt and current literary experimentation in the Middle East. Her poignant pieces hover between the structure of story-telling, the visuality of vignettes, and the compression of poetry. They both record and evoke a literary ferment going on in Egypt today.

Salem's writing of the last thirty years is lauded for its social messages also. Finding the expression of sexuality necessary to explicate problems of Egyptian identity, Salem often links poverty to gender marginality. Her heroines, however, celebrate the heritages that have shaped them, even as they resist certain aspects of them. Like many writers in Egypt, Salem honors traditional folktales, even as she deals with contemporary problems from class and economic perspectives.

Marilyn Booth, one of the best translators of Arabic fiction working today, has dealt in her introduction to this collection with the unusual experimental form by examining Salem's craft as well as the contextual history surrounding the stories. Since Salem is writing "across genres," Booth helps the reader also by opening each piece with an explanatory comment, often quoting the author, and thus further illuminating Salem's portrayals of lives bounded by Egypt's waters—the Canal, the Nile, and the Mediterranean.

When Edward Tamlin disappears while writing his memoir, Jane Tamlin (his wife and the mother of his young children) begins to write a secret, corrective “counter-memoir” of her own. Calling the book Choke Box, she reveals intimate, often irreverent, details about her family and marriage, rejecting—and occasionally celebrating—her suspected role in her husband's disappearance.

Choke Box isn't Jane's first book. From her room in the Buffalo Psychiatric Institute, she slowly reveals a hidden history of the ghost authorship that has sabotaged her family and driven her to madness. Her latest work, finally written under her own name, is designed to reclaim her dark and troubled story. Yet even as Jane portrays her life as a wife, mother, and slighted artist with sardonic candor, her every word is underscored by one belief above all others: the complete truth is always a secret. But the stories we tell may help us survive—if they don't kill us first.

WINNER OF THE 1996 FC2 NATIONAL FICTION COMPETITION

New York. 1 BC. A mythic metropolis. Dangerous, seductive, and strange.

A Queens schoolchild rises to become a powerful superhero. A scavenger fashions love from the city’s castoffs. A weary detective keeps vigil as the city shifts. A serial prankster spells secrets across the skyline.

Through seven transformative tales, fate-struck characters undertake urgent journeys for belonging and survival in the city that tests, nurtures, and remakes them. Alex Shakar’s debut collection metamorphoses the familiar into the marvelous—sharp, luminous, and wondrously alive.

Closed for Repairs is a series of eleven vignettes that depict Cuban ingenuity in the face of urban problems. Each solution is framed with humor and irony and gives a glimpse of life on the island today.

In a clever fashion, Nancy Alonso shows us the spirit of resolve on the part of Cubans when faced with such issues as transportation problems, lack of water, and the shortage of consumer goods and construction materials caused by the embargo.

Illuminating the endurance and resilience of the Cuban people, these stories will make you chuckle. Alonso's sly wit is compelling as she satirizes the bureaucracy—an element of her work that will resonate universally.

Can liberation be found in the unexpected corners of a Renaissance faire?

In a near-future United States, the government has just stripped away the protections of birthright citizenship, and eighteen-year-old Raven is facing deportation. Her best hope: finding her long-gone father, an off-the-grid Renaissance faire entrepreneur called Tom the Hunter. If Raven can convince Tom to affirm his paternity, she will be able to remain in the only country she has ever known.

But Tom is no easy man locate, let alone tell what to do. The charismatic leader of an underground resistance movement based at a Ren faire in Bristol, Wisconsin, he has spent his life agitating against the ever-increasing reach of corporate and government surveillance while avoiding its gaze. In a society overrun by drones, self-driving cars, and wearable devices that track mood and behavior, he sends messages by pigeon and trains hawks to attack invaders. The only thing from the “regular world” allowed to enter his self-contained realm has been Gwen, his new lover. Facing economic and emotional headwinds after losing her job, Gwen has fled her family and a home dangerously in need of remediation, and she dives headfirst into an affair with the passionate yet conniving Tom. But when Tom’s machinations threaten those around him, Gwen begins to question her choice to leave her children behind for a world that may not be as empowering as it seems.

As Raven and Gwen become enmeshed in the vibrant and insurgent community of Bristol’s Ren faire and Tom’s antics reach unsettling new heights, each must make a choice on where they stand—and with whom.

As the old adage goes, "if you can't say it in a few pages, you won't in a hundred." The selections in Cold Flashes—very short prose and black-and-white photographs—embody perfectly this transparency, thrift, and restraint. Found here are highly polished micro-narratives, both fiction and nonfiction, and a series of eloquent and artistic halftones that capture their sizeable subjects in a nutshell. By minimizing the exposition, the selections stimulate the imagination to reflect on the rich diversity of people and places that make up Alaska. To be savored piecemeal at coffee shops, on the bus, or while waiting in line, the images and text in Cold Flashes will resonate with both the reader and each other, fusing into something profound yet elusive.

Gathered here in their entirety are the seven previous volumes of Robert Francis poetry—Stand with Me Here, Valhalla and Other Poems, The Sound I Listened For, The Face against the Glass, The Orb Weaver, Come Out into the Sun, and Like Ghosts of Eagles—together with a group of recent poems, many not previously published but “saved” to end this volume on a note of newness.

Because the original seven volumes are kept in chronological order, the reader can follow the author's journey from his quiet early work to poetry of greater color, warmth, vitality, vivacity, and sportiveness; and can note just when and where Francis' style becomes more and more diversified, with word-count, fragmented surface, and the celebration of words themselves.

The book is graced with eight wood engravings by Wang Hui-Ming.

Parker returned to action after 23 years away, and he did so with a bang in this classic entry in the long-running hard-boiled crime series

Richard Stark's Parker novels are the hardest of hard-boiled, classic crime novels where the heists are huge, the body counts are high, and the bad guys usually win. 

The Parker novels have been a huge influence on countless writers and filmmakers, including Quentin Tarantino, Stephen King, George Pelecanos, Colson Whitehead, Lucy Sante, John Banville, and many more. Their stripped-down language and hard-as-nails amorality create an unforgettable world where the next score could be the big one, but your next mistake could also be your last. There's nothing else like them.

After the bloodbath of Butcher’s Moon, the action-filled blowout Parker adventure, Donald Westlake said, "Richard Stark proved to me that he had a life of his own by simply disappearing. He was gone." And for nearly twenty-five years, he stayed away, while readers waited.
 
But nothing bad is truly gone forever, and Parker’s as bad as they come. According to Westlake, one day in 1997, “suddenly, he came back from the dead, with a chalky prison pallor”—and the resulting novel, Comeback, showed that neither Stark nor Parker had lost a single step. Knocking over a highly lucrative religious revival show, Parker reminds us that not all criminals don ski masks—some prefer to hide behind the wings of fallen angels.