Monday, May 07, 2007

Yeah, I Grew Up Feral, Too

And I'm afraid I stayed that way.

Bookseller Chick had a good guest post yesterday by Marta Acosta on the divide between genre and literary fiction. She says, "Because I grew up feral in the wilds of the public library, I never learned the rules about books. No human explained that literary fiction was superior and distinct from genre fiction; no one cautioned me against the acute boredom of a thick literary tome."

And so she innocently read everything.

Sometime in the last couple of months I read a suggestion that literary fiction is, itself, genre fiction. It's a "type" of fiction, a classification, and thus a genre. Sorry I can't remember where so I can attribute it properly.

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