Wednesday, December 14, 2011

12 Days of Bookmas -- Day 10 #bookmas

Play to win free books! Go here for an explanation of the contest and for a list of the many blogs where clues can be found.

Clue for Day 10 (Posted December 14, 2011) Lauren

I’ve always loved literary fiction. There’s something exquisite in an author’s ability to inspire new waves of thought in narration. I love being introduced to new worlds I’ve never seen before, new situations of beauty or horror or sorrow that I know, the minute they enter my mind, I’ll never forget as long as I live.

But it takes work, literary fiction. You can’t just relax and passively read through Chopin or Chandler or Vonnegut. For literary fiction to really do its job, you have to pay close attention and really lend your whole self to the text for a while. This can be an astonishing and mind-altering experience, if you let it. However, literary fiction exists on a spectrum, with the low end being upmarket commercial fiction and the high end being (cue earsplitting, hysterical scream) modernist literature.

There is one particular author of modernist literature whose work I simply can’t get through. Ever since I ignorantly took a college intensive on this author in my senior year of college, thereby allowing him or her to effectively hijack my life, I have disliked the work of this very highly-acclaimed author of modernist literature. I will be haunted by it as long as I work in publishing, since modern authors quote him or her all the time.

Who is this author?

My clue: Guillermo del Toro

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