It's pretty simple, actually. Literary fiction makes for "real books," genre fiction does not. The terminology is unnecessarily loaded, IMO. Both styles have th

It's pretty simple, actually. Literary fiction makes for "real books," genre fiction does not. The terminology is unnecessarily loaded, IMO. Both styles have their followings, both can be highly enjoyable, and both have established and respected awards. I think the distinction between the two has to do with the primary driver of the book. Genre fiction tends to be about telling a story about people and events. Plot and character both get strong billing, but plot dominates. In literary fiction, though, plot tends to be unimportant and character analysis dominates. A whole book can take place inside the mind of one person over the course of, say, one uneventful day. This isn't an iron-clad rule, of course. By my definition, A Wizard of Earthsea is basically literary fiction; not coincidentally, English teachers sometimes assign it. Occasionally, a writer sprinkles fantastic or pulpy elements in a work of literary fiction and earns high praise; Gabriel García Márquez and Salman Rushdie do this routinely. It was kind of amazing that Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go — very much a dystopian science fiction novel — made the Booker shortlist in 2005.