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While the genre problem affects books as well, books evade the question more easily. There's a greater fluidity of self-presentation—including the increasingly popular "nonfiction/literature" genre tag on the back book jacket—and fewer occasions in which literature explicitly has to stake its claim as pure nonfiction or fiction. Still, when Edmund Morris' popular biography of Ronald Reagan, Dutch, with its fictionalized characters, was published in 1999, several newspapers and magazines wrote about the fact that book review editors weren't sure whether to place the book on the fiction or nonfiction best-seller lists.

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