My Year Abroad is a book about appetite, about wanting more (and more and more, and infinitely more). It’s a story about how our appetites can make us and unmake us. It’s… very weird, if that’s your thing. Being a small-c catholic reader who came from fantasy means that I have a great appetite (appetite! a theme!) for weird literary fiction, where weird can mean anything from “xenophobic haunted house” (White Is for Witching, by Helen Oyeyemi) to “eating turtles to be immortal” (The People in the Trees, Hanya Yanigahara) to “inventing a fictional blues song whose made-up singer then…
Leave a CommentTag: literary fiction
Some time ago, when my Twitter TL was having many conversations about genre fiction and fanfiction and literary fiction, and I was chatting to my brilliant friend Maureen about how to solve genre wars, I got the notion of writing some posts with litfic recommendations for lovers of fanfiction. Then, as tends to happen, I got distracted by life events and the world being on fire and I didn’t do anything about it. BUT. Then I read this extremely litficcy book, America Is Not the Heart, by Elaine Castillo, and when I say extremely litficcy you should understand that I…
Leave a CommentSo, over on Twitter dot com recently, Hannah Moskowitz wrote a very smart thread about how publishing should oughta take some lessons from fanfic. And then Max Gladstone wrote an also very smart thread in response to say that mainstream publishing maybe already does take those lessons. And then a bunch more people said a bunch more things about fanfiction and genre fiction and literary fiction; and my friend Maureen (she blogs at By Singing Light and is the best!) and I decided to sit down and thrash it all out. (The title is a joke. We don’t really crack…
2 CommentsHave you ever had the experience of reading a book and being sure throughout most of the book that you know what’s going on, and then you get to the end and you realize that you actually have no idea if you really know what the author is talking about? That was my experience with The End of Everything. As the denouement unfolded, I stopped saying “Yup, yup, yup, yup,” to imaginary Megan Abbott in my head and instead said, “Wait, what were you talking about?” The End of Everything is about a thirteen-year-old girl called Lizzie whose best friend…
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