Are you a fiction or a nonfiction person? What’s your favorite literary genre? Any guilty pleasures?
What engages me is the mysterious, indefinable music of a writer’s voice. I first read Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden” when I was 15 years old, and if I’d been told that it was a young man’s autobiographical novel, I would not have been surprised. Proust’s great novel might well be memoir, like virtually all of the first-person fiction of my friend Edmund White, who blurs the line, as it’s said, between “fiction” and “nonfiction.” The sparely, scrupulously crafted early short stories of Ernest Hemingway about the young Nick Adams might well be “nonfiction” — of surpassing beauty. If the reader wants information primarily, of course nonfiction is preferred. But what is executed by way of “information” makes literature, whether fiction, nonfiction or poetry.
– Joyce Carol Oates
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/09/books/review/joyce-carol-oates-by-the-book.html
