I've been thinking that something like this would happen, given the popularity of YA among adult readers.
It seems like, whenever there's a conversation about genre and "literary" fiction, somebody starts yelling about how literary fiction is all bleak and dour, and it's all about middle-aged novelists and university professors having affairs, and -- truthfully, I think that's not just a genre thing; I think that generation might be a component to that as well. I would never have discovered a fantastic book like "Someday This Pain Will Be Useful To You" if it hadn't been in the YA section -- it's not really surprising that publishers would want to highlight similar books that are a few years too old for YA, but does it really need a separate genre category? It seems like Hip Young Literary-Lite Fiction gets enough attention as it is...
Good point on how it often seems to be focused on a specifically white, able-bodied, middle-to-upper-class experience. ("Someday This Pain" too, about a rich boy in New York, though he is gay...)
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Date: 2009-11-12 10:28 pm (UTC)It seems like, whenever there's a conversation about genre and "literary" fiction, somebody starts yelling about how literary fiction is all bleak and dour, and it's all about middle-aged novelists and university professors having affairs, and -- truthfully, I think that's not just a genre thing; I think that generation might be a component to that as well. I would never have discovered a fantastic book like "Someday This Pain Will Be Useful To You" if it hadn't been in the YA section -- it's not really surprising that publishers would want to highlight similar books that are a few years too old for YA, but does it really need a separate genre category? It seems like Hip Young Literary-Lite Fiction gets enough attention as it is...
Good point on how it often seems to be focused on a specifically white, able-bodied, middle-to-upper-class experience. ("Someday This Pain" too, about a rich boy in New York, though he is gay...)