12 Frogs asked a while back where all the good female authors are. I'm not really a contemporary fiction person, and was going to write a post saying "Beats me, but here's some dead people." (Like JS, I don't read hardly anything that the major publishing houses seem to think an adult American female should read.) But then I reviewed my bookshelves, and it turns out there are quite a few contemporary women writers that I like. Here goes:

There's Anne Lamott, who JS mentioned, but I've only ever read her essays. They pretty much rock. I even liked Operating Instructions, and I'm the most notorious anti-child person around these parts. Her Salon essays are also wonderful, if you haven't already read them - a lot of them became Traveling Mercies. And Isabel Allende, Edwidge Danticat and Amy Tan (particularly The Kitchen God's Wife.) And the absolutely inimitable Dorothy Allison. And there's Alice Walker, whom I adored for about 10 years and then finally fell out of love with after she released The Way Forward Is With A Broken Heart. (Although The Color Purple is an undeniable classic.)

Plus, there are the aforementioned Great Dead Women: Eudora Welty. Jane Austen. Edith Wharton. Betty Smith (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.) Zora Neale Hurston, especially. And I've always meant to read Carson McCullers and never have, but I am told she also rocks. The rest of them I've read, and am therefore certain of their fabulousness. All of them fall in the non-drivel category.