Look at the websites of most agents and publishers and you’ll see the same contradictory statements: (a) that they promote diversity, and (b) that they are seeking genre fiction. And not just genre fiction, but stories with a ‘narrative arc’ and ‘strong characters’, a filter which effectively excludes atypical and divergent writers from the market.
This is not the promotion of diversity.
And it’s not as though there’s no demand for odd fiction. You just have to look at what’s streaming on Netflix and Hulu etc to see that the public has a huge appetite for absurdity, wit, surrealism, incongruity, abstraction and metaphysics in entertainment. There’s money to be made, surely, from serving such non-linear fare on the page as well as on the screen.
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