In Defense of Paul Auster on “Boy’s Literature”

By Michelle Dean on Jan 30, 2014 - Flavorwire

The novelist Paul Auster caught some notice the other day by remarking, in a talk at the Morgan Library, that he liked to think about a class of books he called “boy’s literature.” In this category he includes the disparate work of Poe, Pynchon, and Borges. He is able to do this because he defines the quality of “boy”-ness, as such, pretty abstractly:

[S]omeone who is so excited, takes such a sense of glee and delight in being clever, in puzzles, in games, in… and you can feel these boys cackling in their rooms when they write a good sentence, just enjoying the whole adventure of it. And the boy writers are the ones you read, and you understand why you love literature so much.

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