the peanut gallery
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3 June 2010. 18:41
I’ve been talking on and off with friends about the New Yorker’s “20 Under 40” list and….it’s been difficult for me to feel any sense of passion about the “debate.” Part of the problem is that I resent the manipulation of the whole thing — I hate the way magazines use lists to drive sales.
But the other part of the problem is that I’ve never felt so bored by the entire fiction industry as I do at this moment. Some of the authors on the list are quite good (I heartily endorse Yiyun Li), but how many of them are writing in a way that’s relevant to our times, our lives?
This is what I don’t want to read about anymore: anything having to do with comic books, anything “quirky-cute,” any more upper-middle-class Brooklyn problems, any more “precocious” child protaganists. And I can’t blame anyone else who doesn’t want to read about this schlock either. Unfortunately that pretty much wipes out literary fiction at the moment.
The publishing industry complains about the lack of readers, but it’s forgotten how to engage the few who are left.
“Truman Capote, 1947”
Copyright Henri Cartier-Bresson
Reblogged from Stereoscopic Magic.
