Chick-Lit Pandemic

According to NY Times essayist, Rachel Donadio in The Chick-Lit Pandemic

regional varieties of chick lit have been sprouting, buoyed by the demographic that's both their subject and readership: 20- and 30-something women with full-time jobs, discretionary income and a hunger for independence and glamour.

She rounds up examples of this genre across the globe, noting that

While "Le Journal de Bridget Jones" has been popular in France, the country hasn't produced many of its own chick lit authors. (Either readers are too sophisticated or, with a 35-hour work week, maybe they just can't relate.) Nor is chick lit terribly popular in Japan, where women lean toward weepy adolescent love stories or darker literary fiction that deals with the "isolation and the meaninglessness of modern urban life; boredom and frustration with men and relationships and marriage, and the constraints put on women in Japanese society," according to Hamish Macaskill, a literary agent in Tokyo.

I guess the French are just too cool for school, and Japanese chicklets are too busy with anime and electronics, huh? [fiction]

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