by Vanessa Di Gregorio --- I have an issue I want to talk about - that of the literary. Books are often categorized into genres, with "subcultures", if you will. YA is one of those subcultures; there are YA bloggers all throughout the blogosphere, and YA communities and Twitter chats and groups galore. People who love YA enjoy talking about YA, and enjoy being around others who are like-minded. I even think that Pub(lishing) Crawl is very YA-centric, though not entirely. The same could be said for romance; they have their own "subculture" if you will; as does historical, and kids lit, and sci-fi/fantasy. And I don't have a problem with any of them. In fact, I myself am immersed in multiple subcultures. It's this literary-ness that bothers me; this term of a genre, you could argue, that sees itself as above and beyond what many call "genre" fiction: fantasy and sci-fi and romance and historical fiction. It's problematic. Just the term "literary" is problematic. It is a "genre" that defines itself on the "literary"-ness of a piece of writing. It denotes that anything other than literary is simply sub-par, purely escapist bits of pop culture and fantasy (and I mean in the sense of personal fantasies, not the genre itself). In fact, it avoids the term of "genre" - a term used to describe everything else