Genres are a problem, and
never more so than when books are presented as pages of glossy icons, rather
than stacks of paper on shelves. Genres also shift all the time: it's a
perennial joy to watch the high-street bookstores attempting to group recent
trends into saleable blocks. "Gothic Teen Fiction", "Supernatural
Romance" and "New Adult" (for the steamier side of things) have all been spotted
in the wild, attempting to summarise the avalanche of vampire-witchy-werewolf
Young Adult Fantasy titles now available, while "True Family Tales", "Difficult
Lives" and "Survival Stories" have all been tried for the genre more unkindly
dubbed Misery Memoir. Electronically, the gaps are easier to spot; Amazon's Kindle store currently
lists a number of Karl Marx ebooks in the "Folklore &
Mythology" category.
Launching the New York
Review of Books ebook series, NYRB Lit, last year,
the editor Sue Halpern made a call for literary fiction to take a stand as a
genre of its own. Historically, the distinctions between "literary" and
"mainstream" fiction have been very blurred: authors and publishers want to be
considered literary, but they also want the financial rewards of a book making
it into mainstream reviews and sales, even as the traditional proponents of
literary fiction – broadsheet reviews, independent booksellers and libraries –
are squeezed. As genres are ever more refined and micromanaged, taking a stand
for literary fiction makes sense.
Halpern's definition of
literary fiction seems like a winning one too: it stands out for its "allegiance
to language". And so NYRB Lit's growing catalogue makes a virtue of language and
literacy; recent titles include translations of Kiran Nagarkar's Ravan and
Eddie, a Marathi tale of two boys growing up in Bombay; Markus Werner's On
the Edge, which sold 40,000 copies in Germany alone; and Yoram Kaniuk's
1948, a prize-winning Hebrew memoir of Israel's war of
independence.
As Halpern notes, such books have often been too thinly spread across genres
to make an impact: the selection of ebooks, shuffled into categories and
marketed across different media, makes a strong case for literary fiction to be
regarded as a genre in itself, and championed as such.
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