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Your Definitive Guide to Categorizing Genres

Deepali Agarwal Feb 4, 2019

Deepali Agarwal

Staff Writer

Deepali Agarwal has a Master’s in literary linguistics, which means that every person she’s ever known has, at some point, asked her to ‘edit a thing’ for them-- ‘just see if it reads okay?’ She doesn’t mind, because she believes that the world can be fixed one oxford comma at a time. Deepali lives in Delhi, the capital of India, where cows are sacred, but authors and poets exist and write brilliant things. She works as an editor with OUP India’s School ELT division, where she moves apostrophes, looks up pictures of cats, and talks about children’s books for eight hours. The rest of her day is spent reading, thinking about Parks and Recreation, and wondering if there exist jobs for English majors that pay more than peanuts. Twitter: @DeepaliAgarwal_

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Whenever we try to talk about sub-genres, whether old or emerging, Real Readers™ crawl out of the woodwork to tell us we’re very wrong, and don’t understand the Nuances of Literature. This is an especially strong tendency when it comes to the sub-genres of fantasy and science fiction (Hmm. Why, I wonder*). So while you debate the differences between low and high fantasy, or magic realism and urban fantasy, we’ll be here with some rock-solid, foolproof guidelines.