Literary Fiction

It's an odd animal: women's literary fiction -- NOT erotica -- with a brazen, sensual and deeply flawed main character. Carmen is perpetually concerned with, touching and baring her body. Yet the sex never becomes the story; it isn't that sort of book.

Gender distinctions in literature are arbitrary and often ass-backwards. Can women, for example, write "men's fiction"? Why not?

In Bring Up the Bodies, the sequel to the Booker Prize-winning Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel weaves a richly textured world that is at once deeply foreign and entirely relevant.

By avoiding the easy cliché of the cold arranged marriage, Markovits intensifies the emotional heft of the story -- and forces the reader to be moved by the characters' fates.

I've read great books, good books, mediocre books, and books so awful they damaged my eyes, and it wasn't genre that determined their ranking. Which formative reading hours would I have lost if the book police determined my choices?

In Miss Fuller, April Bernard takes a speculative scalpel to the life of Margaret Fuller, offering a narrative of her experiences that shines a harsh and unbecoming light on the male transcendentalists.

Everyone has their own way of honoring our fallen, lost to AIDS. There is no one correct way of doing so. For me, I chose to write.

Roxane Gay recently pointed out in Salon that all our discussions about whether women writers like best selling Jennifer Weiner don't get enough press...

Genre labels can kill books, and oversimplify narratives. If we aren't to group books into categories with such prejudiced or dismissible undertones, then how else can we label literature? Here are a few suggestions.

Beyond the raw details of her daughter's death, beyond her grasp to understand its aftermath and its applied metaphor, Blue Nights deals with the physical "dismantling" of Didion herself.

The Marriage Plot is entertaining but I was hoping for more substance in a novel that is being hailed as a literary classic in the making.

Novels and memoirs about the damages of childhood beg to become tear-jerking orgies. What kept me reading was Torres' dry-eyed control over his material. Edited with obsessive care, he hasn't allowed that to happen.

The appropriation of a piece of literature to a certain genre is a process descriptive of the political moment in which the text finds itself; it's indicative of what's permitted to be described as fact in a particular cultural atmosphere, whether it's intended to be or not.

If any point can be taken from this book aside from the kinkiness of it all, it is perhaps that in 2011, nothing should really surprise us anymore.

Over the thirty years of my publishing career, I've learned that book snobs come in all shapes and sizes. And their snobbery often seems more about them than the genre they've picked for their disdain.

In America today, to mix art and politics in any literal sense is considered either passé or taboo, but in the 1930s it was a vein of practice mined by many writers and artists.

It may sound silly or difficult to understand to someone who hasn't gone through a life-threatening illness, but I made my way through my healing, and through my cancer treatment, by treating it as if it were a sacred act.

In the world of The Help nothing is what it seems, but there is a kind of innocence to its mysteries. There is just enough suspense to keep the pages turning, and tragedy throughout.

This is the latest in our series on the short story--its unique aesthetic, how it's different from the writing of a novel, who are some of the form's major practitioners, and what it takes to craft a successful short story.

As men wearing suits analyze the death of Borders, it's become clear that none of them grew up kissing books. They blame book readers, digital books, Amazon, and the recession for the demise of the chain when they should be blaming the executives.

Despite popularity and a passionate readership, genre fiction gets a bad rap. The guilty-pleasure, low-culture stigma of Harlequin romances and Dungeo...