Tonaya Thompson, Assistant Editor for the wonderful magazine Tin House, answers on the magazine’s newly christened blog:
“Many fine writers have straddled that line, Kurt Vonnegut being an obvious example, and Denis Johnson, one of the greatest literary voices of our time, in my humble opinion, just came out with a detective novel. Are Cormac McCarthy’s books Westerns? I think you know genre fiction when you read it. My personal definition goes something like this: fiction that almost purposefully avoids the literary, in hopes of keeping the reader (or the writer, for that matter) from having to “work” too hard. It also tends to employ some stock tricks, like ending very short chapters with cliffhangers, often hopping predictably from one POV to another. Characters tend to be one-dimensional, with the kind of awkward and false-sounding dialog you’d expect.”
read the rest of the post here.
also, click here to check out issue 40, their anniversary issue, with new fiction by Aimee Bender! Jim Shephard! Stuart Dybek! Amy Hempel! Joshua Ferris! oh my..
Filed under: badass, books, questions, writing, cormac mccarthy, denis johnson, genre fiction, kurt vonnegut, tin house
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