Thursday, October 13, 2011

In case you wondered ...

... How the National Book Awards made themselves irrelevant - Salon.com. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

In a culture dominated by film and television, all literary novels are so obscure as to be virtually invisible, and books that seem ubiquitous to people embedded in the publishing world are anything but to those who aren’t. (The next time you’re waiting for a bus, ask the person next to you if he or she has heard of Jeffrey Eugenides or “The Art of Fielding.” Hell, ask them if they’ve heard of Jonathan Franzen.)

1 comment:

  1. Fiction, hell.

    Our neighborhood read Timothy Egan's The Worst Hard Time, which in my opinion had execrable prose, and a very sloppy way with history--placing the German inflation nearer 1930 than 1920, misstating the history of the Volga Germans, etc. etc. And the book got an NBA for history.

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