Fiction or not fiction? Or, to put it in plain French, fiction or non-fiction? This is the question which, year after year, becomes more and more pressing. Indeed, hesitations multiply when it is necessary to divide the works between the novels and essays/documents rankings. The same goes for booksellers who must dispatch their deliveries to the appropriate shelves. Thus Sylvain Tesson, whose book, With the fairiesis classified as a novel, just like his previous opus was, The Snow Panther. A slightly subjective classification for these stories which are certainly literary but do not meet strictly romantic codes. Also take the testimony on Neige Sinno’s incest, sad tiger (POL), labeled novel just like Its smell after the rain (Stock) by Cédric Sapin-Defour, chronicle of his love story with his dog.
One last example? A French childhood (Albin Michel) by actress Farida Khelfa, reflections on her origins stamped novel on her publisher’s website. Fun fact, published in the same “Itinerary” collection, Thinking against yourself, by Nathan Devers is recognized on the Albin Michel website as a “literary essay”. Distributions, we see, are not really intuitive, while the Proust, family novel (Robert Laffont) by Laure Murat, A meditation on the emancipatory power of literature is classified as an essay – which, that said, did not prevent the Goncourt and Medici juries from selecting it last fall.
But, actually, who decides on distribution? The publishers themselves, as the company Tite-Livre, supplier of our rankings, tells us, or for the large publishing houses, their distributor, whose decisions are sometimes corrected by the publisher (at Grasset, There is no Ajar by Delphine Horvilleur and The consent by Vanessa Springora have thus moved from the novel category to that of essays). Let’s now look at the respective advantages of these rankings. It is obvious that in times of literary prizes, the “novel” label constitutes an asset. Furthermore, readers are, as we know, much more fond of fiction than of essays. Finally, fictional labeling can avoid some legal problems… On the other hand, it is much easier to include the list of essays/documents than that of fiction. Thus, during the week of January 15 to 21, Sarah Rivens was in pole position in the novels charts with some 30,000 copies sold Lakestonevolume I while Emmanuel Todd, 1st in the list of essays, sold “only” 7,000 copies of The Defeat of the West. And the 20th best-selling novel, Anah Huang (Twisted Love 1), had 2,500 copies on the counter versus 1,250 for his alter-ego of the tests, Eric Larchevêque (Undertake to be free. My story and my advice for taking action).
A word of advice, read The Third Continent. The literature of reality (Threshold) by Ivan Jablonka, a fascinating essay devoted to this fluidity of genres and the emergence of a new literature, a literature of truth (reports, investigations, diaries) which dynamites borders. A literature of reality to which many publishers are already very sensitive, starting with Adrien Bosc who launched, in 2011, the editions of Sous-Sol, with his collection “ Feuilleton Non-fiction ” of narrative non-fiction rich in nuggets such The Wager Shipwrecks by David Grann or Barbarian days by William Finnegan and authors like Maggie Nelson, Gay Talese and Deborah Levy…