Christopher Higgs’ post from the other day, “Tin House & Genre Fiction,” has broken 100 comments. One of those comments is from Tonaya Thompson, the author of the Tin House blog post, “To Genre or Not to Genre,” that Higgs was posting about. Thompson has also written a followup post on the Tin House blog, “Genre Redux.”

Anyone who read my original post as saying that we will discount any piece of writing out of hand is willfully misreading it. And I think that’s because my attack on “lazy” writing put a lot of people on the defensive, especially since I equated that with genre writing.

It’s a good piece, and if you’ve been following the thread, you should definitely read this new post. She seems rather generous to me, in terms of treating her detractors with credulity. She’s certainly more conciliatory than I’d ever dream of being, if similarly treated. (Ironically enough I have an obligation to disclose that I am published in the current issue of Tin House: an essay celebrating Needful Things by Stephen King, the very existence of which would seem to put the lie to a whole raft of commenter claims about TH’s–and my–genre-related biases.)

Anyway, for ease of access, after the jump find a copy of Thompson’s comment in the Higgs thread. It’s worth reading the comment before proceeding to the followup post, and you’ll notice that she asks for recommendations of genre writing to read, so feel free to leave those on her blog or on ours. You–or she–could also do much worse, I’d just like to mention, than by reading the Michael Moorcock book pictured above.

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