Last Wednesday, I suggested that there was no golden era where everyone was reading complex literary fiction. Is that actually true? Did past readers have more refined taste in fiction than we do now? Here’s a list of the bestselling novel by year from 1900 to the present (source), along with the books published that […]
Literary Fiction
Have we become uncomfortable with uncertainty in fiction?
Over at the Rumpus, Rob Roberge ponders whether we as a society are losing our taste for complexity in fiction. He riffs off of an argument author Jane Smiley made that if society is largely governed by affluent men whose reading of fiction is declining, we are on track for becoming a more selfish and […]
Has Literary Culture Gotten Too Nice?
Writing in Slate, Jacob Silverman argues that literary culture, driven by Twitter and blogging, has gotten too nice: if you spend time in the literary Twitter- or blogospheres, you’ll be positively besieged by amiability, by a relentless enthusiasm that might have you believing that all new books are wonderful and that every writer is every […]
Self-Publishing and Literary Fiction
“Ancient of Days” – William Blake Self-publishing is often denigrated in some circles as a dominion of poor quality, but even among people who don’t sneer at it, what springs to mind when they think of self-publishing is usually genre fiction. People just don’t often think of self-publishing and literary fiction going hand in hand. […]
This Week in Books 8/13/11
This! Week! Books! Saturday! First up, something I neglected to mention last week is that my former client C.Y. Gopinath’s truly fantastic novel THE BOOK OF ANSWERS has been published by HarperIndia, and it immediately shot into the Indian Top 10 bestseller list. TBOA is available as an e-book in the US and I can’t […]
Franzen, FREEDOM and the Era of the Blockbuster
You may have heard from, oh, I don’t know, the Time Magazine cover or the Vogue profile or the rave reviews or the Picoult/Weiner spat or the author video where Franzen says he doesn’t like author videos or the fact that the President of the United States was spotted with it….. anyway, you might have […]
