What’s Behind the Label ‘Domestic Fiction’?
Soledad Fox Maura, professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at Williams College and soon-to-debut novelist, wonders why World Cat “(the biggest library search engine on the planet)” has classified her upcoming novel, Madrid Again, as domestic fiction:
Why would my novel, about an itinerant bilingual mother and daughter who do not have a permanent home and zigzag across the Atlantic at a frenetic pace, the long and complicated legacy of the Spanish Civil War overshadowing their every move, be in such a category?
After a quick look at the definition of domestic fiction, she suggests that we find some new terms for fictional genres if we, in fact, need such genres at all. “What I question is a genre that is so clearly gendered, with connotations that are so outdated.”
‘My Wine Bills Have Gone Down.’ How Joan Didion Is Weathering the Pandemic
Lucy Feldman writes, “Didion will forever be a certain type of person’s idea of a deity—the literary, the cool.” Here Feldman talks with Didion, now 86, on how she’s enduring the COVID-19 pandemic at her home in New York.
Didion’s latest essay collection, Let Me Tell You What I Mean, was published on January 26th.
What Stories of Transition and Divorce Have in Common
As part of its feature Outward, coverage of “LGBTQ life, thought, and culture,” Slate offers this partial transcript of a podcast with author Torrey Peters about her new novel, Detransition, Baby. The book features the characters “Reese, a trans woman in her 30s who desperately wants to be a mother, and Ames, Reese’s former lover and a former trans woman who now has detransitioned and lives as a man.”
Page refresh: how the internet is transforming the novel
“Doom scrolling, oversharing, constantly updating social media feeds – the internet shapes how we see the world, and now it’s changing the stories we tell, writes author Olivia Sudjic.”
Sudjic writes that, since viewing social media is now such a big part of our lives, we are surprised when fictional characters don’t check their screens:
We are hungry for writers who can parse our present, whether in essay form, in works such as Jia Tolentino’s collection Trick Mirror (2019) and Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (2020) or the fiction about to hit our shelves (or Kindle screens) that put social media front and centre.
As Political Divide Widens, Will Big Houses Rethink Conservative Publishing?
Publishers Weekly takes a look at the significance of Simon & Schuster’s cancellation of Josh Hawley’s book after his actions on January 6th as an unruly mob broke into the U.S. Capitol. The article asks several members of the publishing industry “whether, and where, big houses will draw the line with conservative authors.”
(Also see this article from last week’s Literary Links.)
25 Great Writers and Thinkers Weigh In on Books That Matter
In honor of the 125th anniversary of its Book Review, the New York Times “[dips] into the archives to revisit our most thrilling, memorable and thought-provoking coverage.” Writers featured include Toni Morrison, Joan Didion, Patricia Highsmith, and Kurt Vonnegut.
Tracking the Vocabulary of Sci-Fi, from Aerocar to Zero-Gravity
“The new online Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction probes the speculative corners of the lexicographic universe.”
Check here for the backstory of terms such as warp speed, transporter, and deep space.
Take a peek inside the world of longtime Seattle-area book clubs
I met most of my best friends at book group. Here Moira Macdonald, arts critic for the Seattle Times, features the stories of some local book groups that have been discussing books for more than 30 years.
© 2021 by Mary Daniels Brown
I’ve never heard of “domestic fiction” as a genre or a category!
I have and, like this writer, I’ve always found it offensive, since it’s usually used pejoratively. There’s a new subgenre of thrillers called domestic noir, which centers around threats to the homes that characters (almost exclusively women) have built up to protect the ones they love. I find this term slightly less pejorative but still problematic because men are just as likely to harbor secrets that could destroy their families. But everything always comes back around to women as the caretakers of home and family. It is what it is, I guess.
You’re right. The term is offensive, and, I would wager, not particuarly useful for gaining meaningful insights into a particular work of fiction.