The Delights of the Genre

As great as good literature is, there is nothing more delightful to me that reading great genre fiction. Tales of adventure, romance, war, the American West, or mystery and detection are one of the great joys of reading. I already have a separate blog for horror fiction, but I wanted another place to write about the multitude of great stories that don’t fit into that category. Likewise, I already have a blog for classic literature and essays, but that doesn’t seem the appropriate place for the likes of hardboiled detectives or swashbuckling pirates either. While this blog may seem like something of a catch-all, and it is, I actually think a kind of uniformity of purpose can be seen in all of these disparate stories, and that having a place for all of them together, much like my film blog, is far more entertaining to the reader of these kinds of stories than the rigidly segregated spheres that most consign them to. With the sudden proliferation of public domain fiction that has become available on e-readers, my emphasis here will be on stories that were either written seventy-five years ago or earlier, or that are set in those earlier times. Please feel free to comment or make suggestions if you know of other great stories.