Ruth Franklin’s review of Michael Chabon’s “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union” starts off with a statement calculated to raise the ire of speculative fiction readers:

Michael Chabon has spent considerable energy trying to drag the decaying corpse of genre fiction out of the shallow grave where writers of serious literature abandoned it.

Ursula K. LeGuin wrote a delightful response that begins:

Something woke her in the night. Was it steps she heard, coming up the stairs — somebody in wet training shoes, climbing the stairs very slowly… but who?

The illustration accompanying this entry is cropped from the original drawn by bellatrys inspired by the LeGuin piece. There’s already a chapbook (pdf link).

Overall, Franklin’s review is not as dismissive as the opening sentence implies, but instead reflects what I think of as a profound ignorance of thoughtful, entertaining work being done in genre fiction. Her ignorance is captured best in the inverse of a complement she pays to Chabon’s book, calling it “a ‘what if?’ story for adults.” For adults — as if anything published in genre fiction is written for children. Why do you think the literary establishment is so ignorant of genre? [mefi]