![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eve_primeI’m an outsider to the literary world – obviously I read stuff, and I follow various writers online, and I did once work for a remainder book company for two years, but there are things I wonder. And one of them is this:
Today I was in a bookstore looking for the sequels to Wicked. I went to the SF/F section and looked a couple of shelves above Martin, but no Maguire, which seemed odd. Wicked was a very popular book. A million copies in print, or some such. So I went over to the regular literature section, the “Modern Classics,” and there were two shelves of his books. “Ah,” I thought, “he’s one of those authors.” For whatever reason, some authors write what’s clearly fantasy, and yet it’s considered mainstream? I’d also bought Lev Grossman’s The Magicians from that part of that bookstore, and although I haven’t read it yet, I thought it was fantasy too.
Is there a thing where some authors, maybe those with East Coast publishing establishment connections, write books that are considered non-genre even though an ignorant reader would say they are? And does that make their work “literary” and increase their sales among people who don’t think of themselves as SF/F readers? And do these books still have the same appeal to those who do?
I’m not talking about children’s books, or fairy tales, or literary books with fantastical elements for the sake of allegory. I’m talking about books for adult readers set in full–fledged fantastical worlds, or with elaborate systems of functioning magic. Fantasy novels.
(Another example might be Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, British rather than East Coast, but I think it’s in the “regular” section of bookstores too.)
Today I was in a bookstore looking for the sequels to Wicked. I went to the SF/F section and looked a couple of shelves above Martin, but no Maguire, which seemed odd. Wicked was a very popular book. A million copies in print, or some such. So I went over to the regular literature section, the “Modern Classics,” and there were two shelves of his books. “Ah,” I thought, “he’s one of those authors.” For whatever reason, some authors write what’s clearly fantasy, and yet it’s considered mainstream? I’d also bought Lev Grossman’s The Magicians from that part of that bookstore, and although I haven’t read it yet, I thought it was fantasy too.
Is there a thing where some authors, maybe those with East Coast publishing establishment connections, write books that are considered non-genre even though an ignorant reader would say they are? And does that make their work “literary” and increase their sales among people who don’t think of themselves as SF/F readers? And do these books still have the same appeal to those who do?
I’m not talking about children’s books, or fairy tales, or literary books with fantastical elements for the sake of allegory. I’m talking about books for adult readers set in full–fledged fantastical worlds, or with elaborate systems of functioning magic. Fantasy novels.
(Another example might be Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, British rather than East Coast, but I think it’s in the “regular” section of bookstores too.)