It's A Terrible Thing For A Book,

I'm Now Much More Excited About Genre Distinctions. What I Still See Breaking Down Are More The Hierarchical Arrangements Of Genres. That Is, "there Is Literary Fiction, And Then There Are Lesser Genres." I'm Much More Clear On The Idea That Literary Fiction Is Itself A Genre. It Is Not Above Other Genres. It Is Down There In The Muck With All The Other Genres, And It's Doing The Wonderful Things That It Does, But To Give It A Y-axis, To Make It High And Low, Just Seems Absurd. I Stand By That.

I've Stayed In Houses That Were In The Country, And In England, But I'm Still Not Sure That I've Stayed In An English Country House.

I've Only Read Three Books By Stephen King. When I Was 10 I Read 'the Long Walk,' One Of His Pseudonymous Bachman Books. In My Early 20s, While Trapped On A Family Vacation, I Read 'the Dark Half,' Which Taught Me A Word I Have Never Forgotten: Psychopomp. Now I Have Read '11/22/63.'

It's A Terrible Thing For A Book, When You Feel Like You're Supposed To Like It.

You Don't Want To Move Toward Some Utopian Literary Situation Where Everybody's Free Of All Conventions. That's Ridiculous! Conventions Are What You Need. You Have Nothing To Break Down If You Don't Have Conventions.