Just thought you all would like to know that this is currently a
subject of hot discussion among American public librarians. It
seems to re-surface every decade or so (well-known previous
examples: Forrest Carter's THE EDUCATION OF LITTLE TREE and Beverly
Sparks's GO ASK ALICE) and never seems to get resolved. Personally,
whenever I do a library tour for students, I ask them to tell me
the difference between "fiction" and "non-fiction". Some bright
spark always eventually offers that "non-fiction is true; fiction
isn't." I then offer counter-examples (e.g., political opinions,
mythology in NF, barely retouched historical biographies in
Fiction). I then point to the poetry and essays and
foreign-language literature in the NF section. I add the fact that
every book in the "Fiction section" does in fact have a "Dewey
number (mostly 813.54)." When they are all stumped and give up, I
conclude: "Fiction, for the purposes of the public library,
consists of those books the librarians think people are looking for
when they ask us: 'Where's the fiction section?'"
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