Literary fiction

I would

consider it literary fiction.

Yeah.

Yeah, and it's just so

So I was very happy about that.

I like literary fiction, sci-fi, fantasy, magical realism and auto fiction.

I mean, I like other things, but you know, I just had to narrow it down.

Right.

But anyway.

She has found that state so bad this time around that I barely read during my pregnancy.

I read a lot of literary fiction and literature and translation before.

Could you please recommend some literary fiction for me as I try to ease myself back into reading regularly? The last book I tried to read was The Hypocrite by Joe Hamya in English, but I found the characters too irritating.

Welcome back to Live, Laugh, Literary Fiction.

We haven't thought about a song.

Let's talk about it now.

How to up your stakes with relationships and character arcs.

Commercial versus literary fiction.

And making sure that your flashbacks actually tie into the plot.

Can we talk about the opening a little? Yes, please.

And I was enthralled.

I was shocked.

taken away there were a lot of like line level stuff that on sunday people were complaining it's like he stated it and then he stated it again and it's like well what function does that serve in literary fiction that would probably be excised but in popular fiction it's like why not pile on and as one

person at the group mentioned in a lot of commercial fiction you know people will be you know watching tv these days while scrolling their phone let alone listening to an audiobook while doing multiple other things or you know only like skim reading like i heard this crazy thing on tiktok where like people read books by just

But in my better moments, I kind of think, yeah, well, this is probably a little bit what it was like for early modern people [chuckles], you know, like living in the 1790s.

It's also really interesting that university presses, as Ito said, they're now starting to pick up not just academic books, but also fiction, mainly literary fiction.

And what's interesting about that is that the narrative that is circulating in the larger publishing world, and, I mean, it's not just a narrative, there's some truth to it, is that literary fiction doesn't sell.

It needs to be subsidized by genre fiction and celebrity memoirs and whatnot.

Even memoir now, people are talking about it as if it doesn't sell.

And the fact that university presses are actually turning to those books and seeing, can we make some revenue out of these books and maybe subsidize the academic market, I think is a testament to the fact that it doesn't have to be that way.

The fact that we have this narrative about literary fiction not selling, it's not an inevitability that's baked in somehow to the structure of reality.

It's something that authors and reading publics and publishers can do something to shift if there's dedication and if there's will.

And if anyone knows me, that gets me excited.

But yeah, it was kind of like, it felt like it walked a line between being a beach read that was flirting with literary fiction, but didn't quite achieve it.

Joe, I share your opinion about, there was just a lot of like explanation of characters, psychological makeup that, that, was just kind of weird and out of place that I think could have very easily just been done through the action in the book.

It largely was, but there was this extra explanation for every character's psychology in certain moments, which is kind of weird.

Maybe it's prophetic of a privilege the ultra-rich will have in 10 years.

Perhaps.

So since we tend to focus on what we loosely call literary fiction, I found myself wondering as I read Burnham Wood, what exactly are we looking at here? Literary fiction or something closer to popular fiction? I mean, the novel is very topical.

The prose is relatively straightforward and stylistically, Catton doesn't seem particularly interested in calling attention to the writing itself.