Saving Chic Lit Through Experimental Fiction

I have recently been reading "All the Single Ladies," a non-fiction work by Rebecca Traister that, among many other things, celebrates cities as the best place for an apparently growing number of unmarried women to live.

"Cities allow us to extract some of the transactional services that were assumed to be an integral gendered aspect of traditional marriage and enjoy them as actual  transactional services, for which we pay. This dynamic also permits women to function in the world in a way that was once impossible, with the city serving as spouse, and, sometimes, true love," Traister says.

"High-Minded Sex:" The Erotic Eight to the Fornicating Four?

Today, Literary Hub announced the outcome of the second round of it's single-elimination competition for best depiction of sex in literature.  The starting point was what the service identified as the "erotic eight," which I assume means the outcome will be identified as something along the lines of "the fornicating four" -- as opposed to the more conventional "final four."

Today being April Fool's day, it is hard to know whether the decisions of the distinguished judges should be taken seriously, but having written up the first elimination round, I'll play along with the game. As was the case yesterday, the actual passages of "literary sex writing" will not be reproduced on this blog. But links will be supplied for the convenience of readers who can't resist seeing what the fuss is all about.

"High-Minded Sex:" First Round Victors

In yesterday's post, I wrote about a March Madness-style tournament on "literary sex writing" -- you know, the presumably high-minded method of addressing this evergreen topic. In other words, we're talking about art as opposed to pornography. But as the years pass, that distinction appears to get increasingly blurry.

As advertised, winners from the initial round-of-sixteen were announced today with the following results (this being a family-friendly blog possibly read by scores of children, the actual passages will not be reproduced here, but links will be provided):

"High-Minded Sex," and the Winner Is ...

If one is an author in the current reading environment, one is told that to label something "literature" is to bestow upon it a kiss of death.

So if the word "sex" is associated with the word "literary," will that turn off otherwise interested readers in droves?

Literary Hub, an on-line aggregator of news and features about writing, could be about to find out. The service has just announced a single-elimination style tournament for "literary sex writing."  Such prose evidently stands in sharp contrast to ordinary old sex writing and as such, may be considered a high-minded, as opposed to prurient, activity.

A Familiar Device and a Trope: "For the Best?" You Decide

Ann Beattie's story "For the Best" in the March 14, 2016 New Yorker opens with a familiar device: there will be a meeting of possible consequence later in the story and, of course, we are immediately curious as to what's going to happen even though we know little more about anything at this point. It's a part of human nature that writers regularly prey upon and most of the time, we're hooked.

Gerald, a well-off elderly Manhattanite is, as usual, invited to a friend's annual Christmas party, but this time a "heads-up" email sent just before the invite arrives tells him his former wife, who he hasn't seen in 31 years, has been invited as well. Just to make sure readers understand the portent of this development, we are told the email contains not just one but two exclamation points.

Fiction and Non-fiction Indistinct in Some Cultures

Think about a two lane road. In the U.S., if there is a dotted line down the middle, cars coming in either direction can cross over the line to pass a slower vehicle, assuming the coast is clear.

Now think about the same road on more difficult terrain.  There are two lines in the middle, one solid and the other dotted. If the solid lane is on your side, you can't cross it. But if you are driving on the side with the dotted line, you can.

Connecting the Dots ... and James Patterson's BookShots

With this post I am going to tie together some earlier topics and point out how they apply to James Patterson's new venture, called BookShots.

In a couple of  earlier posts, which interested readers can find here  and here, I discussed the phenomenon of declining attention spans in the digital and social media age. And then, in a more recent post that can be found here, I reported on a recent study that found, among other things, that a surprising number of people never finish the novels they purchase and, in many cases, don't read much of them.