The release of This is Not Chick Lit: Original Stories by America’s Best Women Writers, an anthology edited by Elizabeth Merrick, has stirred up a great brouhaha in the writing and publishing industries. The ruckus is not entirely illogical, as Merrick recieved inspiration through her dismay with the state of the writing and publishing industries. The book, she explains, is the fruit of “years of being appalled, as a young writer, at how little promotion serious women writers get:”

You need review space, and review space is still very biased toward men and bylines at our literary publications. Look at Harper’s or The New Yorker. It’s a very good week if there are 25 percent or 30 percent female bylines.

As that was happening, serious books by women were edged further off the front display tables by these knockoffs of Bridget Jones’s Diary, and then it just got harder and harder to find literary works by women. I wanted to make a way for the audience of readers who want more literary work to be able to find it. And so that’s how this anthology was born.

The anthology, which contains stories by writers such as Aimee Bender, Jennifer Egan, Mary Gorden, Binnie Kirshenbaum, Francine Prose and Curtis Sittenfeld, is anything but anti-feminist, contrary the conclusions some might draw from the title. Instead, its aim is to focus on the issues that preoccupy those women who are trying to make serious contributions to the face of literature, whether they are “female” issues, “feminist” issues, or neither. Merrick advocates the ability for women to write about the female psyche without limiting it to the topics of finding Mr. Right and the right handbag to go with him.

“We don’t have just one story, we have many stories, and they’re not getting heard,” Merrick laments. “It’s essential that they be heard, because if we don’t hear them and we just hear that it’s all about marriage and designer shoes, then that diminishes us. It diminishes our imagination.” She’s tired of men cornering the market on ‘genius’ books, a problem she encountered when trying to find a publisher for her novel Girly, an epic exploring female sexuality and spirituality through seven different voices. She finally had to publish the book herself.

But there are a number of disagreements that have sprung up around the book’s publication. The first is, naturally, from authors and proponents of the chick lit genre itself, who feel that the anthology is persecuting one half of the female authorship body, creating factions precisely when it should be rallying the troops. Jennifer Weiner, author of Good in Bed and In Her Shoes, fumed, “We’ve got the country’s (self-proclaimed) best women writers turning up their noses at their fellow women authors’ more commercial efforts. The best chick-lit books deal with race and class, gender wars and workplace dynamics, not just shoes and shopping.”

And one could certainly argue that the publishing industry is kept alive through commercial best-sellers that entertain readers even if they don’t innovate literature. In retaliation, Lauren Baratz-Logsted is publishing an anthology titled This is Chick Lit. “The reason chick lit sells in such great abundance is that it provides readers with a reliable form of entertainment,” she said. “Is there something wrong with this?”

But from Merrick’s point of view, chick lit is taking up publishing resources and bookstore space that might otherwise be available to serious female writers. And it seems to me that a continued proliferation of chick lit, sometimes without regard to quality, combined with a male domination in the genre of serious literature, can intimidate aspiring female writers, conciously or unconsciously. In his article, Jeff Simon points out that “only a few of the stories in her declaration of commercial independence are formally challenging. Is that because she - the anthologist - is out of sympathy with that kind of story, or the best current female writers are?”

Merrick reveals that the bias is not her own: she is desperate to discover female authors tackling issues and style in controversial ways. “I would argue that those books are being written - and very possibly not published,” she states. “We all know what we do with the difficult Boy Books. These books win our awards. These are the books that generations of men are trying to (emulate) with their next generation of Boy Books. I think there are women writing these books but it’s happening as there is increasing pressue on women to write in a more realist mode.”

Visit a discussion of This is Not Chick Lit on Conversational Reading.