What makes fiction literary?

What does the term “literary fiction” mean? What makes a story or essay or novel literary instead of … something else?

That’s a question I’ve been pondering for some time now. Lately, a series of pieces appearing online have attempted to get at an answer.

NPR’s Book of the Day host Andrew Limbong attempts to define the term in a recent newsletter. He thinks the term “feels snobby” and “lacks any usefulness as a descriptor.” I feel the same way about it. “Literary” sounds so pretentious and smacks of elitism. But given the sad state of recreational reading these days–and the fact that most readers are in general more highly educated than non-readers–maybe all literature is elitist these days.

Taking aim at the high-falutin perception of litfic (as we insiders *cough* like to call it), at least in the title, is a piece by writer Devon Halliday titled “My Literary Fiction Is More Literary Than Yours,” which Limbong links to from his essay. Halliday has actual experience in the publishing business, and shares some insider info on what people in the publishing world mean when they talk about litfic as opposed to commercial or upmarket fiction. These terms have more to do with the content than with genres. So, in theory, a fantasy, romance, romantasy, or science fiction novel could be literary.

‘Literariness’ does not equal quality

“Literary fiction,” Halliday writes, “aims to draw attention to the language choices the writer is making,” as opposed to commercial fiction, which “aims to draw as little attention as possible to the language choices the writer is making.”

This perspective jibes with the idea that litfic is more character-driven than plot-driven (the thumbnail definition provided by Wikipedia). But Halliday leaves some wiggle room in his definition. It is not an either-or proposition, a notion that a plot-driven piece cannot be literary.

What I like about this definition is it separates “literariness” from quality. A literary writer might draw a lot of attention to the intricate constructions of their sentences, while also writing horrible sentences. This is “purple prose,” a phenomenon that everyone recognizes but that gets really hard to explain if you associate “literary” with “high-quality.”

Halliday adds that literary writers ultimately “want you to notice their sentences.” (True.) “We can argue about how much fun it is to read Henry James’s neverending sentences full of nested clauses, but we will agree regardless that we are called upon to notice the sentences. There’s nothing under-the-radar about Henry James, or David Foster Wallace, or Anna Burns.”

Does ‘Best of…’ equal quality?

Another writer on Substack, Jacob R. Weber, tries to get at the question by examining the “Best of…” anthologies and the literary magazines that feed them. In so doing, he homes in on the idea of “quality” in literary fiction–or at least quality in the eyes of certain gatekeepers.

In “On Defining ‘Literary Fiction’ and ‘Literary Greatness’,” a piece published Lit Mag News, Weber argues that two “Best of…” anthologies–Best American Short Stories and The Best Short Stories (a.k.a. The O. Henry Prize Winners)–set the bar for defining what is considered the “best” literature, at least in the realm of the short story.

If you equated “stories in the ‘Best of’ collections” with “litfic,” I don’t think you’d be far off, at least as far as short fiction goes. This wouldn’t be a complete definition of litfic, but it would give us an objective criterion to identify it in the same way that “often centered in Los Angeles” gives us one to understand what yacht rock is. 

But as Weber points out, the problem with basing literary quality solely on the stories selected for those anthologies is that they are selected from an exclusive club of literary magazines.

“The stories in the ‘Best of’ collections tend to be from the same lit journals listed on Erika Krouse’s page, for the most part the ones near the top of the list,” he writes. (Erika Krouse’s page ranks 500 litmags using criteria including placement of stories in the “Best of…” collections as well as circulation, whether they pay writers, and “coolness.”)

This excludes a lot of excellent writing, including pieces written in a literary style. But they come from what I would call the Ivy League literary magazines–those well-established guardians of taste like The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Ploughshares–as well as some second-tier litmags. I guess they would be like the “Public Ivies,” in higher ed parlance.

One thing you’ll notice, if you pay close attention to content, is that while a science fiction story or two might get into one of these anthologies, it’s never one of the stories from Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, or any of the other major sci-fi journals. It can have magical realism like Kelly Link or Karen Russell, but not “fantasy,” or at least not fantasy if it was originally published in a “fantasy” magazine. It can even have horror, so long as the horror was originally published in The Bennington Review.

“A true ‘America’s Best Short Stories’ anthology,” he writes, “should include at least some genre work, and not from the Beyonces of litfic crashing the Country Western party of genre, but by the Country Western stars of genre doing it so well they deserve crossover recognition.”

Unmentioned in Meyer’s post is another gatekeeper anthology, The Pushcart Prize series, which seems more democratic in its selections, as well as a more recent anthology of exceptional writing called Coolest American Stories. In Coolest, you will find pieces from litmags not included among the usual suspects, as well as stories previously unpublished.

Of themes and symbols

In his post, Meyer references a February 2025 article by Andrew Blackman, titled “What Is Literary Fiction, Anyway?” Here, Blackman sees litfic not as a genre, like romance or mystery; “literary fiction can fit into a genre, and genre fiction can be literary.”

What differentiates litfic, in Blackman’s mind, is its tendency “to be more interested in themes and symbols than in simply telling us what happened.”

Many of the components of literary fiction I’m talking about here are not black and white: it’s not that all literary novels have them and all non-literary novels don’t. I think of it more as a continuum of some kind. Literary fiction tends to place more emphasis on exploring themes.

Tolstoy’s War and Peace, for example, most obviously explores themes of war and peace, but it also has a lot to say about class divides, tradition vs. modernity, the power of social conventions to shape our lives, etc. Through the many different characters in the book, Tolstoy shows us different approaches to life, with varying results. He’s not telling us what to think but presenting us with different models, and the conclusions we reach may be different depending on what we bring to our reading of the book. 

Do we know litfic when we see it?

Wading through these and other writings about litfic, I’m drawn to the definition offered by The Lascaux Review on its submission page:

Writing of literary quality venerates the language and speaks to the human condition. We make no effort to define these terms—we know it when we see it. Accessible literature is poetry and prose that can be understood and appreciated without annotation.

“We know it when we see it.” That’s the same litmus test former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart used to define hard-core pornography in a 1964 obscenity case that came before the court.

Maybe writers and editors should adopt a similar litmus test for defining literary fiction.

Or maybe we should focus instead on writing the best damn stuff we can–plot-driven or character-driven, symbolic or literal–and leave it at that.

I still wouldn’t mind getting published in The New Yorker or The Paris Review, though.