I'm confused by whether his point is "award winning authors in their genre" (...I don't actually think HC or DM are very GOOD) or just "popular authors in their genre"

That's what I was wondering, because he's only written two novels so far, and one of them just came out last year. The awards are great, but they don't make him quite a household name at this point.

There are people who know those names, and other people who don't know those names, is his point, I think. I didn't actually get very far into the article before I lost interest, though.

The only one I hadn't heard of his Mary Gaitskill, and googling indicates it's the kind of thing I never read.

I imagine one reason Simenon is so high on that list (and he is huge in Europe) is that he was extraordinarily prolific. He wrote over 200 novels, many of them based around his dectective Maigret character. His novels are often turned into TV films, sort of like all the BBC and Agatha Christies telefilms.

Monsieur Hire with Sandrine Bonnaire is probably the best known feature film adapted from his work (and it's a remake of Panique, which is from the 40s).

Oddly enough, I was looking up Jules Verne novels this weekend and came across a list of the most translated authors, where I had never heard of #5, a children's author (a few of her series were familiar but the name meant nothing).

Disney Productions
Agatha Christie
Jules Verne
William Shakespeare
Enid Blyton
Vladimir Lenin
Barbara Cartland
Danielle Steel
Hans Christian Andersen
Stephen King

Huh, you'd never heard of Enid Blyton? It's not often I get the drop on any of you guys.

I love the BBC Poirot and Marple adaptations because they're like CSI or Law and Order, where actors you know constantly turn up.

Oh, god, Enid Blyton wrote everything. EVERYTHING. I don't think there was a more prolific kids and YA author that I was into as a kid. Every fucking series of hers, except the Noddy ones, because they were too young. But The Faraway Tree? Famous Five? Secret Seven? Her boarding school series? Stuff of my childhood.

I have heard of Maigret, but I didn't know who the author was.

I didn't hear of Blyton until a few years ago, but I'm not sure her books were in print here when I was a kid. The older books I was reading then were usually my mom's -- Cherry Ames mysteries, the Beany Malone books, The Five Little Peppers.

I'd heard of Maigret, too, but not the author.

Huh, you'd never heard of Enid Blyton? It's not often I get the drop on any of you guys.

Well, it's not like my mother had any familiarity with British or American children's literature so my exposure to it is pretty random. Of course, that instead meant early exposure to Tintin, Astérix, and Le Petit Nicolas and I think I'm fine with that. Also, lots of Babar.

Simenon is one of those mystery writers who gets literary respect and treatment. He's had a fair number of his books reissued by the New York Review of Books imprint. He wrote the Maigret novels, but also works of "hard" street crime which are well regarded.

It was from reading a post by Herself at her LJ that made me realize the dividing line for the distinction of literary fiction and genre fiction and why there's a bit of a disconnect.

It's that literary fiction is (ostensibly) much more concerned with writing at the level of the sentence. Language is paramount over story or character. This is something of a legacy from Modernism. Which is why Balanchine is a Modernist choreographer -he's about the formal elements of ballet (the shapes that bodies make), not the story. Abstract expressionism is concerned with paint-on-canvas rather than representation. It's all about pure forms and discarding the 19th century legacy of kludgy ornamentation.

I've been boggled at times when people dismiss out of hand this emphasis on language in writing: "I only care about the story! I don't care if there are a couple cliches dropped in to move that forward" because its so contrary to what I was taught. Some people tend to think of that well-wrought language to be the curlicues on the structure, or the frosting. Whereas from an academic POV that's the main thing.

But that's how most people read. For the story and the characters. To be immersed in narrative. But that's not what's studied in schools.

I knew it was IO9 and I went there anyway, so it's my own fault, but someone should tell Literary Fiction Guy that there's also a basic grammatical error in the first fucking sentence. And that's far from the only one, but I got distracted by the fact that he seems to have a serious problem ending his sentences.

Last week I was ranting about how if I'm supposed to take web publications seriously, it would really help if the editors proofread the articles they posted and, y'know, EDITED. Even good writers make mistakes. But he is not a good writer, and he seems to assume anecdotes are universal truths, and those things combined make it difficult for me to follow his argument. Now I'm going to mark up a copy of that for my own satisfaction because, jesus.