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.
Labels: genre fiction, literary fiction