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Literary Fiction

4 years ago

OK, who decides what is Literary Fiction? I just entered Fannie Flagg's Welcome to the world, Baby Girl into the August game. It is listed as Literary Fiction in a book site that I frequent. Not long ago, I read a list of those in this hallowed group, and was quite appalled at some of the books and authors.

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Comments (5)

carolyn_ky
4 years ago
This from Google: Literary fiction is a term that has come into common usage in the early 1960s. The term is principally used to distinguish "serious fiction" which is a work that claims to hold literary merit, in comparison from genre fiction and popular fiction.

I surely don't know who decides what is what, and neither do I know who would say "in comparison FROM."
yoyobon_gw
4 years ago
Apparently a Google Genius.
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You might want to check out Gerald Durrell's books, especially the memoirs/travel/animal collecting books. They are light nonfiction and most of them have a strong evocation of place. I especially recommend: My Family and Other Animals (about his childhood in Corfu, Greece) The Whispering Land (animal collecting in Argentina) Three Singles to Adventure (animal collecting in British Guiana) Beasts in My Belfry (working in a zoo in England) The Drunken Forest (animal collecting in Argentina and Paraguay) The Bafut Beagles and A Zoo in My Luggage (animal collecting in British Cameroon) Durrell wrote wonderfully (and often humorously) about places, people and animals. Other books that come to mind are Arnaldur Indridason's mysteries that take place in Iceland. At least three have been translated into English (Jar City won the Golden Dagger award). His descriptions of the people, land, weather and society are very true-to-life (although rather bleak, as the policeman protagonist sees a lot of the dark side of life).
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Kath
4 years ago
Which is why at the bookshop I work in we don't try to separate it out. We have sections for crime, sci-fi and fantasy, romance and classics (which we determine as books written by people dead for more than 100 years) and the rest is fiction. Even deciding what should go in the crime section is difficult. Some thrillers end up there and some are in fiction.
vee_new
4 years ago
I had always assumed that literary fiction was high-quality writing possibly bordering on the pretentious! The sort of book an author spent months working on before his/her publisher spent big bucks at various literary festivals and putting ads in the broad sheet papers promoting it.

. . . and they would never end a sentence with it.
annpanagain
4 years ago
Literary fiction to me is the high-brow type of book that gets into the Booker list and is discussed on TV book shows. Rarely does a murder mystery get included unless written by P D James! Not my kind of reading at all.

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