genres

Considering Starbucks was founded in 1971 and only officially began to take over the world 20 years ago, there are a remarkable number of books about the company – enough for its own mini-genre of business-inspired literature, Starbooks, if you will.

“Meet the growing clique of "hic lit" authors who have forsaken the demon drink and are saving themselves fortunes in therapists' fees by writing about their travails. Publishers are falling over themselves in the hunt for the next big title in the "painful lives" genre.” It’s surely a very popular genre; in the past couple of years it’s seen annual sales of more than £24m.

Diary of a Bad Year is apparently being classified as “radical literary theory”, and theory is not fiction; therefore, Coetzee’s novel failed to make the Booker longlist. This highlights the question of border-blur in the classification of books. Where is the line drawn on radical, and how fine is the distinction between the theorist and novelist prose style?

A new author rebels against being labeled a gay writer. Then he waxes eloquent, rejecting his own rejection of the ‘genre’ and questioning the need to inflict genres on literature at all. Then finally, he decides he’s in, because being a gay writer will get him attention and more money. Jeeze guy, get it together. Is you is, or is you ain’t?