Once upon a time, novels were just, well, novels.
Pride and Prejudice was once just a novel, as were The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and The Woman in White. If first published this year, however, each would be slotted into one of the genre ghettos constructed by the literary snobs. Beginning with Pride and Prejudice, you would find those novels in the following aisles at your bookstore: Romance, Young Adult, Science Fiction, and Mystery.
Of course, they were all published well before the modern era of genre ghettos, and thus have long been deemed “Literature.” They can be safely read at even the most pretentious of coffeehouses without fear of derisive smirks.
I happen to toil within the Mystery ghetto. Thus it was fun, in my latest Poisoned Pen Press post, to begin a dialogue on Mysteries for Literary Snobs. I will continue that dialogue here for the next few weeks as I discuss several mysteries for literary snobs.
Enjoy! And please share your thoughts.
Do yourself an SEO favor – list all the books/with links to their individual posts here, then place a link to this post in the Michael’s Links section! I think my book club might attack your list, it’s on the “series possibility list”!
Good idea, Alanna. I’ll see if I can figure out how to do that for your book club and others.