A Novel, Apparently

Every book on this shelf is a novel. This is not an opinion; it is printed on the cover, sometimes twice. We counted one hundred and ten paperbacks that could not trust you to recognize fiction without explicit labeling, as if the reader might mistake The Memory Police for a plumbing manual or Life of Pi for a zoology textbook. They sit here in their identical five-dollar uniforms, each spine insisting on its own story-ness with the nervous energy of a dinner guest who keeps mentioning his thesis advisor. The redundancy would be exhausting if it weren't so democratic. From post-apocalyptic Tokyo to the end of the world in Hard-Boiled Wonderland, every geography is represented, and every title is equally anxious about its identity. You will find no memoirs here, no accidental essays, no cookbook that drifted into the fiction section. These books are novels. They paid for the cover space to make sure you knew. Pick one up. It is, we assure you, a novel. The cover says so.