Check out this snappy, interesting post by Berlin-based novelist Julian Gough, written in response to this review in London’s Guardian Review about The Opposite House by Helen Oyeyemi (a mainstream literary novel that itself seems to stray a good bit from domestic realism).

Here’s the gist:

“I just read a book review, in Saturday’s enjoyable and infuriating Guardian Review, which throws some interesting light on what’s wrong with the modern literary novel, and with modern literary criticism, and with the modern literary ghetto. (A ghetto that doesn’t know it’s a ghetto: a ghetto that thinks it is the world.) . . . .

“. . . . American Gods is an epic attempt by a British writer to write the great American Novel. It isn’t perfect (a perfect novel is an oxymoron), but it blows almost everything in the literary pages of the Guardian Review out of the green water and high into the blue sky. . . . [A] review of The Opposite House should at least mention American Gods . . . [T]wo books by ambitious writers, dealing with the same idea; displaced gods, struggling to adapt in our modern world. You can’t  ignore the writer who did it first, just because he wasn’t published by Bloomsbury.

The full post is here, and we’d love to know what you think, too.