Coincidence?

The Nonbelieving Literati, my on-line book club, just got our next selection - Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino.

And just this morning I was reading Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing along the Borderlands by Michael Chabon, the essay "My Back Pages":

...when it came to the use of language, somehow, my verbal ambition and my ability felt hard to frame or fulfill within the context of traditional genre fiction.

Let me interrupt for a moment to say that this obsession with "traditional genre fiction" (by which he means "fantasy, horror, crime, and science fiction") and its lowly place in literature - and bookstores - is something of an idée fixe (if that's not a tautology) with Chabon. He returns to it again and again... As a reader of several "genres" I don't get it. Perhaps if I were a writer, I would.) Anyway, back to the excerpt - emphasis mine:

I had found some writers, such as J. G. Ballard, Italo Calvino, J. L. Borges, and Donald Barthelme, who wrote at the critical point of language, where vapor turns to starry plasma, and yet who worked, at least sometimes, in the terms and tropes of genre fiction. They all paid a price, however. The finer and more masterly their play with language, the less connected to the conventions of traditional, bourgeois narrative form—unified point of view, coherent causal sequence of events, linear structure, naturalistic presentation—their fiction seemed to become. Duly I had written my share of pseudo-Ballard, quasi-Calvino, and neo-Borges. I had fun doing it. But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't stop preferring traditional, bourgeois narrative form.

Okay. Ballard, Borges, and Barthelme are some pretty heady company for Calvino.

Now I can't wait for the book to arrive.