When someone asks me what kind of books we publish at ScrollWorks, I usually say “literary fiction” and then immediately regret it. Not because it’s inaccurate, but because the term is so loaded, so fought over, and so frequently misunderstood that saying it out loud often creates more confusion than clarity. It’s like telling someone you’re a “moderate” in politics; both sides assume you belong to the other.

I’ve been in meetings where the phrase “literary fiction” was used to mean four completely different things by four different people, and nobody noticed the disconnect until an argument broke out. I’ve watched authors bristle at having their work called literary, as though it were an accusation of difficulty rather than a compliment. I’ve seen booksellers shelve the same novel in literary fiction and in thriller, depending on which store you walked into. The category is, to put it charitably, a mess. But it’s our mess, and since we publish books under this banner, I figure we owe it to our readers to explain what we actually mean by it.

Let me start with what literary fiction is not, at least as we think about it.

It is not fiction that is deliberately obscure. There’s a persistent idea, particularly among people who don’t read much of it, that literary fiction exists to make readers feel stupid. That it’s full of long sentences, pretentious references, and plots that don’t go anywhere, all designed to signal the author’s intellectual superiority. This idea isn’t entirely without basis. There are books that fit this description, and some of them get praised by critics who mistake difficulty for depth. But equating literary fiction with obscurity is like equating fine dining with tiny portions. It’s a stereotype that contains a grain of truth and a mountain of distortion.

Literary fiction is also not fiction without plot. This is another misconception that drives me a little crazy. The criticism goes: “Literary fiction is all style and no substance. Nothing happens. It’s just someone thinking about their feelings for 300 pages.” I’ve read literary novels that fit this description, and I didn’t enjoy them either. But the best literary fiction, the kind we publish and the kind that keeps me reading, is deeply plotted. Things happen. Characters make decisions that have consequences. The difference is that the plot in literary fiction tends to be driven by character psychology rather than by external events. The story moves forward because of who these people are, not because of what happens to them.

Consider a book like The Last Archive. It has a clear narrative arc, with tension, complication, and resolution. A reader who needs to know what happens next will keep turning pages. But the engine driving that narrative is internal: a character wrestling with memory, responsibility, and the gap between who they thought they were and who they’ve turned out to be. The external events of the plot matter because of what they reveal about the character’s interior life, not the other way around. In genre fiction, typically, the arrow points in the other direction. The character’s interior life matters because of how it affects their ability to navigate external events.

Neither approach is inherently better. I want to be really clear about that. I read and enjoy genre fiction regularly. I have a shelf full of crime novels and science fiction that I return to with genuine pleasure. The distinction between literary and genre fiction is not a quality ranking. It’s a description of where the center of gravity sits in the storytelling.

So what do we actually mean when we call something literary fiction? Here’s my working definition, the one that guides our editorial decisions at ScrollWorks.

Literary fiction is fiction in which the quality of the prose is not merely a vehicle for delivering the story but is itself a significant part of the reading experience. The way the sentences are constructed, the precision of the word choices, the rhythm and music of the language, these things matter in literary fiction in a way that they typically don’t in genre fiction, where the prose is expected to be transparent, to get out of the way and let the reader focus on the plot.

I want to be careful about how I phrase that, because it can easily be misread as a claim that literary fiction has “better” prose than genre fiction. That’s not what I’m saying. Transparent prose is its own skill, and doing it well is extraordinarily difficult. What I’m saying is that in literary fiction, the reader is expected to notice the prose, to be affected by it, to find pleasure or discomfort or surprise in the specific way something is expressed. The prose is doing double duty: delivering information and creating an aesthetic experience.

Think about the difference between a window and a stained glass window. A regular window’s job is to let you see what’s on the other side. A stained glass window does that too, but it also asks you to look at the window itself, to appreciate the colors and patterns and the way light moves through them. Genre fiction is generally a regular window, literary fiction a stained glass one. Both are windows. Both serve the basic function. But the experience of looking through them is fundamentally different.

The second element of our working definition involves ambiguity, specifically a tolerance for it. Literary fiction tends to leave certain questions unanswered. Characters’ motivations may be complex and contradictory. The ending may not provide neat resolution. The reader is often left to draw their own conclusions about what a story means, and reasonable readers might disagree. This isn’t carelessness or evasion on the author’s part. It’s a reflection of the literary fiction writer’s commitment to representing human experience honestly, and honest representation of human experience includes a lot of uncertainty.

Genre fiction, by contrast, typically resolves. The mystery is solved. The lovers get together. The hero defeats the villain. The world is saved or at least stabilized. This resolution is part of the genre contract with the reader, and violating it feels like a betrayal. Literary fiction operates under a different contract. The reader agrees to accept ambiguity in exchange for a deeper, more textured engagement with the characters and their world.

The third element is thematic seriousness, by which I don’t mean that literary fiction is always somber or heavy. Some of the best literary fiction is very funny. But there’s generally an engagement with ideas, with questions that don’t have easy answers, with the complexities of being alive in a specific time and place. Literary fiction wants to understand something about the human condition, and it’s willing to sit with difficulty and discomfort in pursuit of that understanding.

Now, I know that all of this sounds very abstract. Let me make it concrete by talking about the specific books we’ve published and what makes them “literary” in our estimation.

Still Waters is, on its surface, a quiet book about a family in a small town. If you described the plot in a sentence, it might sound like any number of domestic novels. But what makes it literary, in our sense of the word, is the specificity and beauty of the prose, the way the author uses the landscape as an extension of the characters’ emotional states, and the book’s willingness to sit with silence, with the things that people in families don’t say to each other but that shape every interaction. A genre novel with the same plot would likely provide more explanations, more overt conflict, more resolution. This book trusts the reader to hear what’s being said in the spaces between the words.

Echoes of Iron has more conventional narrative momentum, a plot that pulls you forward in a way that’s almost thriller-like in its pacing. But the prose is doing things that a typical thriller wouldn’t attempt, using sentence structure and imagery to create dissonance and unease that mirrors the protagonist’s psychological state. And the ending, without spoiling it, asks questions that it deliberately doesn’t answer. A reader who needs closure might find that frustrating. A reader who accepts the book on its own terms will find it haunting.

I think the most honest thing I can say about literary fiction is that it’s fiction that asks more of its readers. Not more intelligence, not more education, not more cultural capital. More attention. More willingness to slow down, to re-read a sentence, to sit with confusion, to trust that the author is taking them somewhere even when the destination isn’t visible. In exchange for that attention, literary fiction offers something that I find irreplaceable: the experience of inhabiting another consciousness so fully that you come out of the book slightly changed, seeing the world in a way you didn’t before.

This exchange, attention for transformation, is what we’re publishing for. It’s what gets me out of bed in the morning and what keeps me reading manuscripts at night. It’s what I mean when I say literary fiction, even though I know the term is imperfect and contested and probably always will be.

There’s a practical dimension to this that I should mention, because the “literary fiction” label has real market consequences. Bookstores shelve literary fiction separately from genre fiction, and the two sections attract different browsing behaviors. Readers who go to the literary fiction section are typically looking to discover rather than to satisfy a specific appetite. They’re open to surprise in a way that genre browsers often aren’t, because genre readers usually know what they want (a mystery, a romance, a fantasy) and are looking for the best version of that specific thing. Literary fiction readers are more likely to pick up a book based on the first paragraph than on the back cover description. This is why voice matters so much in our category: the first paragraph is the audition, and the voice is what determines whether the reader keeps going.

The market for literary fiction is also, I should note, smaller than the market for most genre categories. Romance alone outsells literary fiction by a factor of roughly four to one. Mystery and thriller combined outsell it by an even larger margin. This means that publishing literary fiction is, by definition, a decision to pursue quality of readership over quantity. Our readers may be fewer in number, but they tend to be intensely engaged, deeply loyal, and unusually likely to recommend books to other people. They’re the readers who write letters to authors, who come to readings, who follow a publisher’s list the way music fans follow a record label. That kind of readership is precious and, I’d argue, worth the trade-off in volume.

I want to address one more thing, which is the increasingly blurry boundary between literary and genre fiction. This is a trend I’m enthusiastic about. Some of the most interesting writing happening right now exists in the overlap: literary novels that borrow the structures of genre fiction, genre novels that bring literary ambition to their prose. Kazuo Ishiguro writes a novel about clones and wins the Nobel Prize. Susanna Clarke writes a fantasy novel that’s also a profound meditation on loneliness and art. Colson Whitehead writes an alternate-history adventure about the Underground Railroad that’s both a page-turner and a work of serious literary art.

At ScrollWorks, we’re interested in this boundary-crossing work. We don’t require our books to fit neatly into the literary fiction box. We require them to care about prose, to respect their readers’ intelligence, and to aim for something deeper than entertainment alone. If a book does those things while also telling a gripping mystery or a love story or a speculative what-if, so much the better. The category labels are a convenience for bookstores and marketers. The actual experience of reading doesn’t care about categories.

So the next time someone asks me what we publish, maybe I should skip “literary fiction” altogether and just say: we publish books that you read slowly, that you think about for days afterward, and that you press into the hands of someone you love with the words, “You need to read this.” That’s clunky as a marketing tagline, but it’s closer to the truth than any genre label will ever be.