Steven Dinkelspiel’s “note from the president” in the current issue of San Francisco Magazine is about obsession. It’s the Best of the Bay issue, and Dinkelspiel’s obsessions run the gamut from baseball (the Giants) to Sunday brunch (Town’s End), and ice cream (Fenton’s in Oakland, not to mention a great diner in my hood, Bill’s Place).

Fortunately, Dinkelspiel is also a little obsessed with books.

One of the best things about working at San Francisco is getting to read advance copies of books sent to us by publishers. I’ve discovered some terrific local writers this way, most recently Michelle Richmond and her great mystery No One You Know, set right here in our city.

The funny thing is, I never set out to write a mystery. But by the time I’d finished the book, there was no denying it contained a strong element of mystery, and one reviewer even described it as “a literary thriller.”

Back when I was in grad school, there was a strong knee-jerk reaction among us grad students about what we called “genre fiction.” But the field of literature has opened up a lot in the last decade, thanks in part to the rallying cry of some well-respected writers who eloquently make the case for blurring the lines, or at least the labels, between genre fiction and literary fiction–foremost among them, perhaps, Michael Chabon, whose novels have tackled everything from comic book heroes to a revisioning of the state of Israel.

Then of course there was Cormac McCarthy’s apocalypse tale The Road. The brilliant fantasy worlds of Jose Saramago. And in the beginning (well, not quite the beginning) there were Borges and Calvino, who brought their stunning literary talents to bear on impossible fantasy worlds, invisible cities, and mind-boggling labyrinths. Graham Greene’s detectives come to mind, and Ray Bradbury’s outer planets. In their wake has been a cohort of writers, many of them women, writing genre-busting tales with a literary vengeance–Lydia Davis, Kelly Link, Judy Budnitz.

Which is to say that, the next time an interviewer asks me to describe No One You Know, I have a ready answer. Normally, this is a tough question to field, and I stutter all sorts of things about the theme, and the setting, and where this or that character came from, until finally the interviewer cuts me off and moves on to the next question. But now I think I have my answer, or at least the beginning of my answer. “It’s a literary mystery,” I’ll say. “A literary mystery about…” Well, I’m still working on that last part.

Check out this month’s issue for more best of the bay.