A Stranger in Foreign Lands

This is my second book of short stories, which I place in the genre of literary fiction. I published a book in 2005 entitled 12, then reworked the stories, polished and honed them into a book that is more of a novel than disconnected stories. I titled that book Sketches Of A Young Man's Life - A Novel In 12 Parts. It is a novel because of its interwoven themes, metaphors, and symbols, which appear, sometimes ghostly, in every story. It was a novel, not in the sense that it told one long story, but that it was all viewed from the standpoint of one young man's life. It is an experimental work of fiction.
This second book of short stories shares many of the characteristics of the first book. However, I will not refer to this one as a novel as I did with my first book, though I easily could.
Writing is the highest form of communication, and literary fiction is the most challenging, complex and difficult, the summit of all writing genres. Some may conclude that audio and visual communication are superior to the written word. They may be more effective and powerful, but they are not the purest, most truthful forms of communication. The purest form of communication is still the written word.
There is a debate as to how many types of fiction there are. Some say there are over 144 genres and subgenres of fiction, romance fiction being the world's most popular and widely sold. I'm not exactly sure which is the least popular, but I would certainly place among them literary fiction. Some have concluded that the difference between literary fiction and all its other genres is meaning over entertainment. Literary fiction has meaning, and as Ernest Hemingway once said, it is like an iceberg in that 10% of the work's meaning is above the surface of the water, while the remaining 90% is below the surface. I write literary fiction because of my love for it. I want it to be discussed in university classrooms and literary circles. And because it is by far the most difficult type of fiction to write.
I've written several books on natural health, which, of course, are considered to be non-fiction. While they pose their own challenges, they are not particularly difficult to write since you are simply stating facts. The most difficult thing in writing non-fiction is to make certain the average person can read and understand it. I don't write technical health books for academics. I write them for the average person who wants to be healthy and doesn't need to know all the nutritional details. Those particulars are for health geeks who want to know all the intricate details of nutrients, physiology, metabolic pathways, what the brain is made of and what we need to feed it so it’s healthy. However, the health books I write serve one purpose and that is to show the average person who is not a health geek what they must do in their lifestyle to be healthy. That kind of writing comes to me naturally and is quite easy. If they were women, nonfiction would be my wife, fiction my mistress.
A book is designated literary fiction when the prose is excellent, contains symbolism, allusion, complex themes, style and language, examination of the human condition and psychology, and does not have a happy ending. There are many genres of fiction that often have happy endings, but literary fiction is not one of them. The ending does not need to be tragic, but rather ambiguous and open. Literary fiction is the most laborious, difficult, challenging and exhausting type of writing. Sometimes, it is simple and direct, like Stephen Crane. Other times, it is flowery and eloquent, such as Flaubert, Proust or Joyce. Often, it verges on the edge of being either brilliant or laughable. Using the right word or the unexpected phrase can make it brilliant, although it can be clumsy if the wrong word is used and the writing becomes cliché and predictable. That has happened to many writers that I know and love.