My Literary Fiction Is More Literary Than Yours
Attempting to sort out what "literary fiction" is and why we keep arguing about it
Recently, over an overpriced lunch, a writer acquaintance-of-a-friend explained to me that their writing isn’t getting published because it’s “too literary.”
I always look a little askance at writers who explain why their work isn’t getting picked up, because in all their hypothesizing, they often seem to leave out the one really common reason work doesn’t get published: because it’s not good enough.
But anyway, let’s assume that this particular writer’s work is good enough. And let’s take their claim seriously: literary journals and publishers are rejecting their work because it’s simply too literary.
In this context, what is “literary” supposed to mean?
If we’re using “literary” to refer to a genre—as in, science fiction, romance, thriller, literary fiction, historical fiction—then this claim makes about as much sense as saying historical fiction is “too historical.” The book either hits the benchmarks of the genre, or it doesn’t. A romance novel can’t have too much romance in it; a thriller can’t be too thrilling. And publishers of literary fiction—which means 99% of literary journals, plus independent presses, plus many of the Big 5 imprints—are not afraid of fiction that is “too literary.” In fact, they’re all in an arms race to deconstruct the novel more explosively and permanently than the next guy.
So this writer was using the term “literary” in another sense entirely—not as a genre, but as a grab bag of associated qualities. The writer was trying to tell me that their work was too intelligent, too zany, too inventive, too unconventional, and/or too demanding to get published.
This is all possible—publishers certainly do turn books down for those reasons. But in that situation, it’s much more useful to name the reason than to file all possible virtues and flaws under the designation of “literary.”
If your reverse-chronological-novel-in-iambic-trimeter structure is too out there, that’s something you as the writer can change, if you’re willing. But you could hardly be expected to make your masterpiece “less literary.” Who would want to? “Literary,” in this context, is sneakily synonymous with “good.”
I want to try to untangle what we mean when we talk about literary fiction, because wow is it a mess out there. Literary fiction has dropped in quality. Literary fiction signals membership to a club, not specific qualities of the work itself. Literary fiction is a misapplied term that unfairly leaves out certain high-quality writers.
I think all of these takes have a lot of truth to them, and the reason they can all be true at once is that “literary” means different things to different people in different contexts.
I’ve seen “literary fiction” used to mean the following:
A category distinct from “genre fiction”: writing that resists formula and prioritizes beautiful language
A marketing category that tells readers to expect beauty rather than plot
Writing with “depth, style, and character texture and development”
Slow, boring, plotless fiction
Anything that was published 50+ years ago
Writing with at least some imagery in it1
And we could break down those bullet points into sub–bullet points that tease out what readers mean by literary, what writers mean by literary, and what publishers mean by literary.
Well—let’s do that quickly, just to be thorough:
What readers mean by literary: “Some of these sentences were beautiful”
What writers mean by literary: “I am smart”
What publishers mean by literary: “If this is going to sell, it’s going to be on perceived prestige, not on a big hooky plot”
All this confusion results in some pretty pointless debates about what is truly literary and what is merely pretending to be. It also results in people getting slotted into categories that don’t make much sense.
So let me first do a breakdown of what literary fiction means in the publishing industry, and then I’ll see if I can provide an absolutely bulletproof definition of literary fiction that resolves the debate once and for all, and that helps writers figure out where to sort themselves when pitching their work.
Literary fiction is one end of a spectrum. The spectrum goes like this:
commercial → upmarket → literary
This spectrum is meant to indicate something about the writing of the book, whereas genre is meant to indicate something about the content. So by this system, every book has both a genre (e.g. thriller) and a location on the spectrum (e.g. upmarket). One does not determine the other2; they are two separate methods of evaluating and labeling a book for the marketplace.
On the far end of commercial fiction, you’ve got writers like James Patterson, pumping out monthly books with a team of minions. You’ve got books that show up in airports and grocery stores. You’ve got books that go down easy, books that aim primarily to entertain.
A lot of thriller, romance, and science fiction falls into this category, but that doesn’t mean that books in these genres are automatically commercial. You can have a literary thriller, as writers like Helen Phillips and Rumaan Alam have proven. You can even have literary romance, though no one ever labels it that way. I haven’t read Lily King in a while, but she seems to enjoy writing mildly steamy literary love triangles—one could probably argue that she’s writing literary romance.
Upmarket is the midpoint between commercial and literary, sometimes literally called “sweet spot” fiction. The simplified equation for upmarket fiction = good writing + plot. Novels like Fredrik Backman’s Anxious People and Taylor Jenkins Reid’s The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo are pretty clear examples of upmarket.
These books are often chosen for national book clubs—Oprah, Read with Jenna, Book of the Month, etc. A lot of rom-com3 books fall into this category. Women-geared thrillers are increasingly falling into this category—Ruth Ware, Gillian Flynn. Anything narrated by a dog is upmarket fiction.
And then you’ve got literary fiction, which wins prestigious prizes like the Booker Prize and the Nobel. Big-name writers of literary fiction often have a lot of overlap in byline: New Yorker, LRB, Paris Review. Zadie Smith writes literary fiction, whether she’s writing historical novels (The Fraud) or contemporary realism (NW).
So if you are a writer trying to position your work in the marketplace, you have to make two decisions:
Where do you fall on the commercial → upmarket → literary spectrum?
What is your genre?
A savvy query letter introduces a novel with both of these characteristics. “I’m submitting an upmarket thriller / a literary horror novel / a commercial mystery novel.”
Note that, because the publishing industry loathes transparency, these terms are often changed out for labels that mean the same thing:
literary scifi/fantasy → speculative fiction
literary realism → literary fiction
upmarket realism → women’s fiction4
upmarket love story → romcom
commercial fantasy + love story → romantasy
It’s okay if you don’t use the most in-vogue, up-to-date term (e.g. I just learned the term “bubblegum thrillers,” which is going to last approximately 2 weeks). The important thing to know is the distinction between The Genre and The Spectrum, so that you don’t find yourself pitching a “literary upmarket novel.”
The two systems of cataloguing books—by genre, and by spectrum—are actually quite useful, when used correctly. But the lines get blurred easily, because no one can agree on what makes a book definitively literary versus upmarket versus commercial. Or rather: what makes a book definitively literary is usually its packaging, not any innate quality that the book holds.
For example: All Fours by Miranda July. This novel is literary, because Riverhead published it and they’re a literary imprint, and because Miranda styles herself a literary writer, and poses like one in her author photo. Is the novel actually literary? It’s written in a mostly conversational first person; there’s not a lot of linger-and-awe language page by page. I think one could make a fair argument that All Fours is actually upmarket, but because it hasn’t been published as an upmarket novel, that argument is kind of moot out of the gate.
At the publishing house where I work, we recently had a conversation about whether the cover of a forthcoming novel should be glossy or gritty. (If these terms are foreign to you, go into any bookstore and touch some covers—the pebbled ones are gritty, the shiny smooth ones are glossy.) Gritty tends to communicate “literary,” glossy tends to communicate “upmarket.” The novel was already fully copyedited when we had this discussion—it wasn’t going to change suddenly from an upmarket to a literary book and back again. Except it kind of was, based on how we decided to market it.
So the categories are slippery. When agents go on submission with a novel that falls somewhere between upmarket and literary, they’ll submit to both upmarket and literary imprints, and whoever buys the book shapes how it will be marketed and perceived. The acquiring editor might even nudge the book more or less literary, in keeping with the imprint’s style and preferences.
We can imagine the spectrum from commercial to literary as a river, where everything is anchored down but still able to drift a fair amount with the current. Where the anchor drops might have something to do with the book’s innate qualities, but beyond that, it’s a matter of perception, and it’s always in flux.
That said, wouldn’t it be nice if we could come up with a fixed definition of commercial, and upmarket, and literary—and if we could try to sort of stick to that definition in pitching and packaging books?
Here’s my take, which has already generated some controversy so don’t worry about getting your own hackles up:
Literary fiction aims to draw attention to the language choices the writer is making. Commercial fiction aims to draw as little attention as possible to the language choices the writer is making.
What I like about this definition is it separates “literariness” from quality. A literary writer might draw a lot of attention to the intricate constructions of their sentences, while also writing horrible sentences. This is “purple prose,” a phenomenon that everyone recognizes but that gets really hard to explain if you associate “literary” with “high-quality.”
On the other hand, a commercial writer might write incredibly clean, clear, lean, intelligent prose that invites the reader to swallow it whole, without lingering on every chosen adjective and punctuation mark. This would be good commercial writing.
Literary writers, good and bad, want you to notice their sentences. We can argue about how much fun it is to read Henry James’s neverending sentences full of nested clauses, but we will agree regardless that we are called upon to notice the sentences. There’s nothing under-the-radar about Henry James, or David Foster Wallace, or Anna Burns.
And commercial writers, good and bad, want you to stay focused on the story, without getting distracted by the sentences. There can be really good sentences in commercial fiction, but they’re not the kind that you’re meant to puzzle over and read out loud to your friends.
Upmarket, therefore, is a blend: the reader’s focus is shared, to varying degrees, between the sentences as sentences and the sentences as story material. Elena Ferrante is, I think, on the literary end of upmarket: she makes unusual and noteworthy choices in many of her sentences, but when I read the Neapolitan Novels, I can’t remember ever lingering for long on a particular sentence construction.
The question to ask yourself as a writer, then, is: how much attention do I want my reader to pay to the role I’m playing? Do I want the reader to forget entirely that a book is a constructed thing made up of words, or do I want them to marvel at the ways I string words together?
Of course, literary fiction can subsume us in the immersive world of a story just as upmarket and commercial fiction can. But I would argue that even in that immersive state, with highly literary fiction, we are paying attention to the constructed shape of the sentences.
I also want to mention that “brutally spare” and minimalist writing can be literary, by this definition. Stuffing your sentences with extra words is just one way to get people to pay attention to your sentences—another way is to be mercilessly economical.
The reason I’m willing to die on the hill of this definition of literary fiction is that all other definitions I’ve seen are flawed. It’s just really hard to strip away implications of quality from definitions that focus on “style” or “depth” or “amount of care the writer has taken with their work.” The only reason we get away with saying these things about literary fiction is that we don’t say them to the faces of commercial writers, who would be well within their rights to respond that in fact, they do put care into every word they write, and if their writing is so utterly without style, how come readers keep showing up to buy their books year after year, with their name in huge letters on the cover?
This conflation of category and quality gets especially dubious when you think about young adult fiction, which is quite hard to write well, and also tends to the more commercial—teen readers are less liable to be hooked by glorious sentence structure than by clean writing and a good story. Young adult writers are spending at least as much time choosing their words carefully as literary writers who decide that “bitter black acid” is a good way to refer to a pot of coffee.
Okay: I’m sure you have quibbles and caveats. But I’m going to get the jump on you by pushing back on some pushback.
How do we account for people like Dashiell Hammett? I mean, he was a writer of deceptively simple and astoundingly beautiful sentences!
I think this comes back to the idea that “literary” isn’t really about quality at all. If you’re tempted to pause and reflect on a Dashiell Hammett sentence, that suggests to me that he’s more literary—and if it’s only upon flipping back through the book that you notice the sentences as sentences, that suggests to me that he’s less literary. So not a judgment on beauty or quality or value, but a judgment on, like, visibility of effort.
Lots of great literary fiction goes down easy.
Well, sure, but it’s not a question of how hard you personally find it to read—if it was, that would be more a judgment of your intelligence than of the book itself. Again, I think it’s not a question of how “difficult” or “formidable” the prose is so much as what it asks us to pay attention to.
I think one thing that differentiates literary fiction is a focus on novelty, avoidance of formulas.
It’s true that a lot of genre fiction relies on common tropes and patterns. But then, how many literary fiction submissions have I received in the last month about a young woman getting too involved in the fraught marriage of an older couple? Also, upmarket fiction specializes in the high-concept premise, which is all about novelty.
I just think we get into dangerous territory if we claim that novelty and invention are the exclusive property of literary writers, and reliance on cliche is what distinguishes commercial writers. Not the dangerous territory of offending people—the dangerous territory of overlooking sharply written commercial fiction and poorly written literary fiction in order to fit everything into prescribed boxes with prescribed quality judgments.
Maybe one reason I’m so dead-set against conflating “literary” with “good” is that, as an editor, I read so much literary fiction that is so not good. If someone tells me they write “literary fiction,” are they telling me something objectively true about their book, or are they trying to brag? If it’s the latter, it’s a misplaced brag—there’s nothing inherently impressive about opting to write literary fiction versus some other kind of fiction. I’m only impressed if you can write it well.
So let’s say you’re a writer, and you’re trying to decide if the project you’re working on is literary or upmarket or commercial.
First step: finish the project. Write it the way it wants to be written. No point worrying if it’s too commercial or too literary before it’s even done.
Second step: come to your own private assessment of where your writing falls on the spectrum. Do you want people to slow down and marvel at your sentences, or do you want them to enthusiastically chug forward through the story, or some mix of the two? Whatever kind of fiction you think you’re writing, flip through a few books of that category. Are these writers making choices about language that are similar to your choices?
Third step: share your project with friends and see what they say about the writing. Was it smooth? Complicated? “Brutally spare”?5 Did it catch their attention? Did they notice weird things you were doing with syntax? Did they perceive a lot of “voice”? If your friends are enmeshed enough in the literary world to weigh in on whether your book is commercial/upmarket/literary, ask them to weigh in.
Fourth step: when in doubt, move one peg toward commercial. Everyone overestimates their own literariness. This is because we falsely associate “literary” with “good.” Unshackle yourself from this meaningless association and remember that the less literary a book is, the more copies it’s likely to sell.
All right, that’s as hot as this take is going to get. Please feel free to weigh in via the comments below. Keep in mind that if you criticize my definition, you have to come up with a better one.
Thanks for reading!
This is only kind of a joke. As an agent, I noticed that absolutely everyone pitched their work as literary, even when they were clearly writing straight-up genre fiction. It was as if they crossed a certain threshold of adjectives and thought: only a literary writer would put this much thought into their sentences!
Except that we’ve ruined the cleanliness of this system by making “literary fiction” both a section of the spectrum (beautiful writing etc.) and a genre (sad people having affairs and thinking about life). The term is used to communicate both writing style and content. In this essay I’ll mostly be talking about literary fiction in the former sense, as I think the content aspect of literary fiction (sad people having affairs) is pretty easily relabeled “realism.”
I know that’s a movie term, not a book term, but we keep changing the book term: women’s fiction, chick lit, latte lit, each term a little yikes in its own way.
I have no idea what we call upmarket realism for men. Publishing is really struggling on the men front. Possibly because we employ so few of them.
Sorry to keep harping on this phrase… as an editor, I see it a lot. Here’s a handy breakdown:
minimalist literary writing: “brutally spare, taut, sharp”
maximalist literary writing: “lush, lyrical, expansive”
I find it very funny when novels are pitched as “both lush and spare.” Perhaps the writer is alternating every sentence?
As someone who works in editorial at a big 5, I can absolutely confirm the above is all pretty spot on. The one thing I might add is that, as editors think about sales (we're always thinking about sales), the "literary" book is one you're aiming directly at awards and accolades to build the status of the imprint and yourself as an editor. Commercial is, as the title suggests, aimed at selling large amounts of copies. Upmarket (I'm speaking very broadly here but I think this is more and more true) is published with the aim of snagging book club attention. While I agree you should write the book you want to write and think about positioning later, it can be helpful to keep the above in mind as you think about your audience!
I think another huge issue with this categorization is that readers often look to awards to see which books they should be reading, which means they pick up very literary books and get a quarter of the way through and are bored out of their minds. Not sure what to do about this, but i do think that it harms the publishing industry if we associate literary with good because it has the potential to sway the common reader into believing that reading isn’t for them, when really they’re reading the wrong type of book.