Sticking to one genre means “missing a universe of marvels”

This article is from four years ago, but I read it just recently. It's from Emerald City, a web site that publishes reviews of fantasy and science fiction. In the piece the author recommends works of literary fiction to readers who don't usually read that kind of fiction (readers of sci-fi and fantasy, to whom the site is targeted). Some of the names are not familiar to me, but the larger points I agree with.

Here is how the piece starts, with boldface added for emphasis:

Literary Fiction for People Who Hate Literary Fiction
By Matthew Cheney

There is a stereotype of literary fiction shared by both science fiction readers and non-science fiction readers: that academically-sanctioned, "serious" contemporary fiction is all about dull middle-class people having affairs, and that the writers of this fiction do such things as use a couple hundred pages to describe events that could quite easily be described in a paragraph. This stereotype is not entirely inaccurate — such books do exist. But just as it is unfair to condemn all SF as clunkily-written space operas for people who are hiding from puberty, so it is unfair to dismiss all literary fiction as unimaginative hogwash for people who yearn to be seen as sensitive.

A reader only interested in a narrow type of writing (hard SF, for instance) is not going to find much pleasure from any literary fiction, but a reader who is interested in experiencing new realities, strange visions, visceral horror, and supernatural events has plenty to choose from. What follows is an introduction to some writers who might appeal to certain types of genre readers. It is not a comprehensive tour, nor does it focus on the same elements for each writer: some of these writers are worth reading because of their plot devices, some because of their fantastic imagery, some because their approach to language and structure creates a wonder of its own.

The weirdness literary fiction can offer is, in general, of a different sort from the weirdness offered by most genre fiction, but the differences usually are not as much between idioms of writing as they are between the goals and purposes of different writers. . . .

Literary fiction offers "weirdness" too, but of a different variety than sci-fi (or SF) and fantasy.

Cheney goes through a long list of writers and books, then concludes:

[J]ust as anyone who limits their reading to the literary mainstream is missing out on a lot of magnificent writing, so the reader who reads only what gets marketed as science fiction or fantasy is missing a universe of marvels beyond those borders.

Amen.

The full article is here. (And thanks to Kenneth for the link.)