Dirty realism is a term coined by Bill Buford of Granta magazine to define a North American literary movement.
[2] The term formed the title of the Summer 1984 edition of Granta, for which Buford wrote an explanatory introduction: Dirty Realism is the fiction of a new generation of American authors.
[3]Sometimes considered a variety of literary minimalism, dirty realism is characterized by an economy with words and a focus on surface description.
Writers working within the genre tend to avoid adverbs, extended metaphor and internal monologue, instead allowing objects and context to dictate meaning.
Michael Kaplan uses "dirty realism" in his 2021 article, "Dustin Hoffman was kicked out of Sardi's while in character for 'Midnight Cowboy'" [5] Modern scholarship preponderantly places at the heart of the movement the authors Buford mentions in his Granta 8 essay, including Raymond Carver[6] (1938–1988), Tobias Wolff[7] (b.