I’ve touched on “genre” and the murky definition of “literary fiction” before. Here’s how Andre Dubus III, author of the novel Gone So Long, attempts to explain both: “This whole notion of ‘genre’ is more of a marketing category for publishers than anything else; a well written book is a well-written book…I tend to gravitate toward what we call literary fiction, which may simply mean character-driven stories, ones where we sense the writer has worked really hard on his or her sentences, and, of course, it has to be the kind of work that seems to be trying to illuminate truth in some way, no matter how ugly it is.” Nicely said.