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Saints of the Middlebrow | Los Angeles Review of Books

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Genre Bending: The Plasticity of Form in Contemporary Literary Fiction by Jeremy Rosen. Stanford University Press, 2025. 346 pages. As a nonprofit publication, we depend on readers like you to keep us paywall-free. Through December 31, all donations will be matched up to $100,000. DONATE TODAY! IT’S 2025, and the turn to genre is old news. Since at least the 1980s, writers of “literary fiction” have been adopting the forms and techniques of popular “genre fiction”—a huge category that includes detective novels, sci-fi, spy thrillers, fantasy, horror, Westerns, and all varieties of romance. By 2012, China Miéville could tell the Edinburgh World Writers’ Conference that it had already become “a cliché to point out that generic tropes are infecting the mainstream.” As ever, it seems that the academics are the last to know. Thirteen years after Miéville’s much-cited remark, Jeremy Rosen’s Genre Bending: The Plasticity of Form in Contemporary Literary Fiction can still advertise itself as “

Saints of the Middlebrow Jon Repetti considers Jeremy Rosen’s “Genre Bending: The Plasticity of Form in Contemporary Literary Fiction.” By Jon Repetti December 9, 2025 Literary Criticism Genre Bending: The Plasticity of Form in Contemporary Literary Fiction by Jeremy Rosen . Stanford University Press , 2025. 346 pages. Buy on Bookshop.org Did you know LARB is a reader-supported nonprofit? LARB publishes daily without a paywall as part of our mission to make rigorous, incisive, and engaging writing on every aspect of literature, culture, and the arts freely accessible to the public. Help us con

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