Susan Steinberg is the author of story collections The End of Free Love (FC2) and Hydroplane (FC2). She teaches at the University of San Francisco. Cate Marvin's most recent book of poems is Fragment of the Head of a Queen (Sarabande, 2007). She teaches creative writing at the College Staten Island, City University of New York.
The recent chick lit writers versus Franzen conversation, while not without its own tedium, has brought to light some serious concerns about the utterly transparent gender disparity in the literary…