My local library shelves its fiction by genre (Crime, Historical, F&SF, ‘Relationships’), a practice I loathe, but I’m morbidly curious to learn if anyone else’s library (a) does this, but (b) has also coined some bizarre, completely nonstandard name for those few books they’ve decided can’t be squeezed into any genre at all.
My local library has chosen “Allsorts”. Gaaah.
[I suppose they decided that “Literary Fiction” sounded too snobbish, and on that I suppose I agree with them, but this weird, infantile neologism goes to the opposite extreme. Just shelve everything alphabetically by author, put colour-coded genre indicators on the spine if you must, but let people slip serendipitously out of their silos by browsing the whole damn gamut.]
Greg Egan
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2026-05-10 07:41:10 UTC
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2026-05-10 07:41:10 UTCEvent JSON
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