As books gradually established their dominance as a form of entertainment and instruction, they spiraled off into hundreds of fractal genres and sub-genres: from histories and treatises to epic poems and metafiction. To the consternation of punctilious readers everywhere, genres have always intermingled and mixed themselves up. One of those mixed-up genres, the “autobiographical novel,” once served as a catch-all term for some excellent books, including The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke and So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell.
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