Whether or not you think the economy is improving, the turmoil of late has spawned a new genre in women's literature.
All over the fiction world, women in publishing are losing jobs.
To read the latest crop of novels, you'd have to think that the industry is being gutted. So many novels lately turn on the premise of a high-placed female executive getting the boot because sales are down or a new manager is taking over.
Fanny Blake's upcoming What Women Want is the latest in this new genre. No surprise that Ms. Blake is writing about the work world she knows well. She was an editor herself, before sitting down to write her own piece of fiction.
Her debut novel (is it really a debut when someone's got industry connections?) has been featured this week by St. Martin's Press Read-It-First program.
Within the first twenty-four pages, the readers are right in the middle of the changing of the guard at a fictional publishing house in England. Move that location to Boston and anyone working for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt would relate to the trauma of lay-offs.
But they'd find commonality in The Jane Austen Marriage Manual as well. Kim Izzo's novel is all about---a woman in publishing, in this case magazines, losing her job.
Oh, yes, and Ms. Izzo used to work at a fashion magazine, just like her protagonist.
Why the eruption of a new genre?
Can't you just picture all those editors in New York City, watching sales drop as corporate suits prowl the halls, looking for fresh meat to toss to the accountants? A book about someone like them being shown the door? Instantly relate-able.
So there's two authors who've cracked the paper ceiling by writing about a subject they know. Makes you wish you could get a more exciting job and get fired from it.
Strictly for research, of course.
Real life isn't like the fiction that's written about the unemployed. It isn't always a happy ending.
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