Well, I mean listen… I think it’s no accident that we’re celebrating genre writing by literary writers and not genre writing by genre writers. I think that one of the elements, one of the dimensions that is left out of this discussion endlessly, and to my great frustration, is the word privilege. No one would be reading these books at the level they’re reading them now, if they didn’t have the credentials, the imprimatur, of literary fiction. Which is to say if a genre-writing-Joe had produced both of those books they would be stuck in their genre moment. And I think that this is what’s incredibly important about this discussion … is that there is privilege, and that this privilege grants a serious reading to literary writers writing genre versus genre writers writing genre. I don’t think we’re giving them a serious reading, I don’t think they’re going to be reviewed in the New York Times, and there is a deep unfairness there. Somebody like Justin [Cronin] and somebody like Colson [Whitehead], they have an American passport and they can come back and forth from the third world of genre writing and no one asks them any questions, but the genre writers are stuck with a Dominican passport, and they can never get out.
Source: hustonthetodd
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