Chick lit and chick flicks: secret power or flat formula?

As I write this in August, girl works and girl movies are as scalding;-very warm as the summer days--if not quite thus steamy. No doubt about it, publishers and filmmakers have identified a profitable audience for confessional-style stories among girls one as well as the other growing and grown-up, and they're getting their returnss out before this trend, too, shall pass. A novel New Yorker cartoon conveys the literati's snubbing of these works en masse--"Go bother your mother. She's alone reading chick lit"--while the cartoon's true appearance means the trend can't be dismissed altogether.

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