Fiction, n., from the Latin fictio: shaping. 

Most of our inherited literary genres belong to what we might call a parent genre, an Ur-genre, an organizational framework or umbrella term under which all the other little baby subgenres can seek comfort and solace from…the rains of time. Anyway. For short stories and novels written in prose, the parent genre is a word you likely hear all the time: Fiction.  

Literary fiction is a modality of imaginative literature that seeks to explore what the band R.E.M. once called “life’s rich pageant.” Fiction’s materia prima are the complexities of human existence, plumbed with carefully crafted language, an emphasis (usually) on character development, and on the achievement of thematic depth and resonance.