Dirty Realism

Dirty realism is a genre of North American literary fiction, its name coined by the editor Bill Buford of Granta magazine to describe writers who depict the seamier or more mundane aspects of ordinary life in spare, unadorned language. As a sub-category of literary realism it favors plain sentences and unembellished detail over stylistic ornament, letting the flatness of the prose itself carry the bleakness of the lives it describes.