Once thought to be a blight on the North American literary landscape only, chick-lit has in recent times made inroads on other continents, according to a recent article in The New York Times. The piece discusses regional variations on the chick-lit formula — including Poland’s suicide- and kidnapping-infused version of the genre — as well as the popularity of both translated and homegrown chick-lit in an odd smattering of countries that includes India, Hungary, and Sweden.

Cynics should take heart, however: chick-lit is largely a bust in countries like France — “Either readers are too sophisticated or, with a 35-hour work week, maybe they just can’t relate,” writes the Times‘s Rachel Donadio — and also in Japan, “where women lean toward weepy adolescent love stories or darker literary fiction that deals with the ‘isolation and the meaninglessness of modern urban life.'” And while some young Indonesian women writers have created a whole other kind of genre fiction relating to the “frank … treatment of sex and politics,” Africa, as one would expect, has been largely untouched by the craze. And, thankfully or not, “Neither Bridget Jones’s Diary nor any of [Helen] Fielding’s other books have been translated into Arabic,” according to Donadio.

Related links:
Click here for Rachel Donadio’s story in The New York Times