In American fiction, perhaps the groundbreaking instance of this genre is Philip K. Dick's 1962 novel "The Man in the High Castle," which imagines that the Axis had won World War II.
Take metal, for instance, a genre I had previously assumed was invented for the sole purpose of giving me a headache.
Here we have an obvious instance of genre confusion.
As an example of the content, the genre workshop consisted of a discussion about genres, a short film parodying different genres, an exercise where the students wrote "consequences" type stories, each taking it in turn to write five minute segments of a "genre" story about each of their characters, and a homework genre exercise based on a conflict to do with eating lunch in a busy café.
Andrew Smith's Grasshopper Jungle, for instance, a genre-melting account of perpetual adolescent horniness against a backdrop of mutated, man-eating human locusts, pulls no punches in its frank examination of teen lust, expressed throughout in pungent and profane language.
Mr. Teachout offers noble instances of the genre, but omits perhaps the noblest of all: Sophocles' "Oedipus at Colonus".
The many books written in the last 20 years about the German philosopher Martin Heidegger's complicity with Nazism represent further instances of the genre.
2) Even the better instances of that sub-genre are still not very satisfying over time to the author.
