Map, Not Container

Michael Chabon's new novel, The Yiddish Policeman's Union, has been receiving rapturous reviews. Here he is on writing, genres and identity: "I don't see...genres as tightly sealed containers from which one must not allow the contents to be [mixed]. Literature is much more like a map and the genres are territories on that map and they border each other, they overlap. I wrote the novel in one of these border kingdoms. To me it's literature. What we typically would call literary fiction is a very imprecise term and what is most clearly most identifiably literary fiction is itself a genre."