Melissa Bank is an American author. She has published one collection of short stories, The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing and one novel The Wonder Spot. She was the winner of the 1993 Nelson Algren Award for short fiction.
The Girls' Guide to Hunting And Fishing was a bestseller in both the United States and the United Kingdom, garnering mostly positive reviews. "[1] Said the Los Angeles Times: "Bank writes like John Cheever, but funnier." Newsweek raved: "Bank draws exquisite portraits of loneliness, and she can do it in a sentence." Others placed Ms. Bank in the school of restraint exemplified by Hemingway and Raymond Carver.
Melissa Bank along with English author, Helen Fielding, are credited with giving rise to the Chick Lit genre. Once Chick Lit moved away from being intelligent, humorous women's fiction to less well-written romantic comedy, many of the original authors distanced themselves from the movement.
A movie adaptation based on two short stories from The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing was filmed starring Sarah Michelle Gellar and Alec Baldwin, titled Suburban Girl.