Wednesday 22 May 2013

Arable parables

I had reason to thank anew the tiny electronic post-person who delivers the Bookseller's e-bulletin recently.  The May 20th edition carried a link to a feature in The Atlantic on the surge in popularity of what to me was a newly-defined genre, namely Farm Lit., which is raking in sheaves of female readers, to the detriment of Chick and other varieties.  This school of writing substitutes brawny farm workers and rural female entrepreneurs for silk-suited city slickers.

Regular visitors to this blog will fail to swoon with surprise when I say that this news had me reaching immediately for my literary toolbox, from which I deployed my Genre Torque Spanner (with ergonomic grip design and flange swivel plate) and applied it to a few well-known literary works, so that they could claim their place in the ranks of this mode of fiction.  The results are as follows:


Silage Marner
Farms and the Man
Fifty Shades of Grazing
Kane and Stable
The Rape of the Flock
Hay wain and the Green Knight
Goats from a Small Island
Born Friesian
Udder Milk Wood

These works and similar others would, of course, be feted at the annual Hay Festival.

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