Rachel Kramer Bussel today speaks with Julia Cheiffetz, 26-year-old Associate Editor at Random House:

Mediabistro: You recently signed Elizabeth Merrick's anthology This Is Not Chick Lit: A Collection of Original Stories by America's Best Women Writers, which will include work by Francine Prose, Myla Goldberg, Vendela Vida, Aimee Bender, Curtis Sittenfeld, Jennifer Egan, Samantha Hunt, and others. The book has caused a lot of controversy among book bloggers, chick lit writers, and other authors for its slant against chick lit. Can you tell me more about the anthology and why you chose to work on it?

Cheiffetz: One day when I was out for a jog, I started to think about all of the big literary novels that have been championed in the past few years: Middlesex, Motherless Brooklyn, The Corrections, Everything is Illuminated-all great books. But it dawned on me that, more or less, these were all guy books. I started to wonder why there hasn't been a huge breakout literary novel written by a youngish woman (that didn't have an ethnic twist). When this came up in conversation with an editor here, he said, "what about The Lovely Bones?" Well, that's not quite what I meant. And it's true that this year Random House was lucky enough to publish Prep. But still I think it's an issue.

Fabulous women writers of literary fiction do exist but, sadly, they don’t always get the kind the kind of exposure they deserve. I wanted to publish This Is Not Chick Lit to gather these writers in one place.