Much of the way books get classified has to do with marketing decisions. I think it's more useful to think of literary books and sci-fi/fantasy books as existing on a continuum. To oppose them, to suggest that one category excludes the other, always feels bogus to me. The great Leonard Michaels line is "I wanted proximity to darkness, strangeness"? That's what I'd say I want from a book, regardless of where it falls on the fantastical spectrum - that suspense connected to a particular human character, rather than just some mechanized plot.
Karen RussellI didnโt realize that one tragedy can beget another, and another โ bright-eyed disasters flooding out of a death hole like bats out of a cave.
Karen RussellBut if you kept thinking about a fight youโd lost, Mom said, you were programming yourself to lose again.
Karen RussellNo, I donโt have to tell a soul about this, I promised myself. When you are a kid, you donโt know yet that a secret, like an animal, can evolve. Like an animal, a secret can develop a self-preserving intelligence. Shaglike, mute and thick, a knowledge with a fur: your secret.
Karen Russell