One of my biggest literary pet peeves is the mindset that genre and literary fiction are completely separate entities. What bugs me about this division most is that there's an implied hierarchy, where literary fiction is a higher form of art and all genre fiction is inherently worse—which simply isn't true. There are tons of sci-fi, fantasy, horror, and mystery stories that pay the same attention to craft and language as the works in the literary canon. On the other side, I'd also say that I've read my fair share of poorly written realistic stories.
The reality is that writing quality and plot-driven narratives are not mutually exclusive, and how literary something is has nothing to do with whether the story it tells is realistic or not. I think part of the problem here is that “literary” has become a kind of catch-all term, often used to refer to any realistic fiction that doesn't fit neatly into another category. A story isn't automatically literary just because it's a realistic story with low action, any more than a story is automatically not literary just because it has supernatural elements.
Read this if you like: Karen Russell, Carmen Maria Machado, quirky short fiction
tl;dr summary: Collection of (mostly) literary stories in which characters hope, for better or worse (mostly worse).
Like I imagine is the case for many people right now, the Olympics has become my default “on in the background” content since it started. Not because I’m particularly passionate about any of the sports involved—more the opposite, in fact. There’s something very intriguing and entertaining about watching sports I normally don’t think about, or seeing things I’m only familiar with from family picnics being played at an exceptionally high level.
Something else the Olympics makes very clear: sports are omnipresent in just about every culture of the world. This has likely been true for thousands of years. From the original Olympics held in ancient Greece to the ball game of the Aztec and Maya, just about every culture we know about had some kind of sport.
Despite this, I think it’s safe to say that sports are among the most neglected aspects of society in creative writing. You can definitely find examples of sports in fiction and poetry, but not nearly to the same degree as other cultural touchstones like food, music, religion, or fashion.
