![]() ![]() Whether this means a wholesale dumbing-down of our culture or a welcome relief from navel-gazing, nothing-happens-twit-lit-well, you decide. Thrillers, mysteries, science fiction, uh huh, even romances-those are the novels that now displace the most commercial and cultural water. Now, many of our literary writers have largely been relegated to the commercial backwaters, with just a few exceptions like Jonathan Franzen and the genre writers have become the big ships. A new book by one of the big modern American literary lions meant that a cultural event had occurred, and sales followed. ![]() ![]() Our great writers-Hemingway, Steinbeck, Faulkner, Cather, Fitzgerald-were the engines of enterprise for the New York publishing houses, and the groundbreakers for the culture, too. Up until the latter part of the 20th century, literary fiction drove American book sales. “We’re rowing our leaky little skiffs like mad,” she said, “as we bail with a coffee can and meanwhile there goes the giant Stephen King cruise ship or the James Patterson aircraft carrier, fully lit, the music playing, the passengers peering down at us from on high.” The remarkable, painterly writer Susan Straight told me once that literary novelists are tiny rowboats next to the ocean liners of popular culture. ![]()
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