Stephanie Vanderslice

Author, Professor, Blogger, and Huffington Post writer

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Today’s Fiction. . .

April 20, 2009 by Stephanie Vanderslice Filed Under: Uncategorized

Heather Sellers posted a dinner party what to read list on her blog, Word After Word, recently. Can’t help but notice that so much of the list is nonfiction–which I find myself drawn to more and more these days because. . .dare I say, I find it’s better written, manages to combine interesting subject matter with elegant prose more than much of the fiction that seems to find its way to bookstore shelves today.

I read an agent quote from a Poet’s and Writers interview suggesting that there was a lot of “beautifully written” fiction out there but it didn’t “grab” the agent.

Surely, there must be submissions that do both. . .I’m reading The Lace Reader for a book club right now and while the plot is decent enough, I can barely get through the writing, first person present tense, pretentious and self conscious. Is it possible that these editors/agents are revealing a bias against good writing in fiction, believing, when they see it, that they just have a “beautiful little nonstory” on their hands.

Interestingly, one of the other people interviewed described watching teenage girls in a bookstore talking about great books that they’d read and then observed, that, come to think of it, “there are a lot of good books in the YA market these days.” Well written books, too, I’d like to add. I’m rarely disappointed in the writing in a YA book, and the burden of a strong plot is on those books just as much, perhaps more, as their adult counterparts.

Food for thought. What do you think?

Comments

  1. Monda says

    April 21, 2009 at 12:08 am

    I think I’d rather spend an evening with fiction, really. It takes a scathingly good story to rope me into nonfiction.

    And I think there are several links out there I need to pass along, mostly because I meant to do it this morning and didn’t.

    The Ponzi Workshop
    US vs. UK

    …and my favorite…Papers of a Great Writer

  2. Monda says

    April 21, 2009 at 12:10 am

    Let me try that first one again…

    The Ponzi Workshop

    (I’m learning how to put links in comments. harder than it looks.)

  3. Cindi says

    April 21, 2009 at 4:57 am

    I used to be very interested in non-fiction and then I felt burned out on them! Now, I read a mixture of non-fiction and fiction. I really agree that YA books are very good. I purchase them for my nieces and sometimes, myself.
    Thanks, Cindi

  4. mundanejane says

    May 3, 2009 at 2:52 am

    Wasn’t “The Lace Reader” originally self-published? I may be remembering it all wrong, by now. But I do remember hearing about it on NPR and looking for it. I’m glad I didn’t follow through.

    I’m almost always disappointed in the books that get all the raves–the few exceptions being those I read BEFORE hearing all the hype. Thinking about it now, I can see that this seems to suggest more about me than the books themselves.

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STEPHANIE VANDERSLICE

Author, Professor, Blogger, and Huffington Post writer. Stephanie Vanderslice aims to write what she likes to read: fiction and nonfiction that spins a web to lure the reader in. Read More…

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