Transcending the ordinary to produce something extraordinary

Fiction; Colours Other Than Blue; By Anthony Glavin; Ward River Press, €16.95

Stephen King once proposed a distinction between literary fiction and popular fiction. Literary fiction, he said, is about extraordinary people in ordinary situations (think of Saul Bellow’s Moses Herzog, grappling with his midlife crisis, or Stephen Dedalus as a UCD undergrad, forging in the smithy of his soul the uncreated conscience of his race). Popular fiction, conversely, is about ordinary people ...