: Re: What is Literary Fiction? I keep hearing about literary fiction, and how it is so much better than genre fiction. What exactly is literary fiction?

@Vandalay250

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I would say that it is fiction written in an elevated style. Note, by "elevated" I do not mean necessarily superiour. Heinlein was mentioned above, and he falls into a second category: books that transcend their time period. If you write crappy genre fiction, and people are still reading it 200 years later, it magically becomes literature (just ask Alexandre Dumas).

The particular subject doesn't really matter very much. Most people would place obvious sci-fi like Farenheit 451 and 1984 in the category of literature. Likewise more modern and geeky literary fiction like The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay or Johnathan Strange and Mr. Norrell are classed as literature solely because of style, not subject. A good number of postmodernists write novels that would fit into scifi or fantasy (like David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest or Thomas Pynchon with Gravities Rainbow or Mason and Dixon(1)) but you won't ever find them there because the style doesn't fit.

Like it or not, most genre fiction, be it romance, or thrillers, or scifi, or fantasy...It's written plainly, without a lot of embellishment. There are exceptions, of course, like when Steven Brust got stuck in French Romance mode for 10 years, but other than that...

1) Psychics and talking dogs respectively, are fantasy. Even if the dogs speak poetry.

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