Thursday, June 06, 2013

Success story ...

...The Millions : A Forgotten Bestseller: The Saga of John Williams’s Stoner. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)


That a good book, which may be slightly ahead of its time, gets published and ignored is not an exceptional story. It happens all the time. According to the UNESCO survey of book production, 54,378 books were published in 1965. Some of those had more than a handful of readers. A few might be thought of as works of genius. Many were overlooked. Most are forgotten. This is not a tragedy. It’s realistic. It is ordinary.
When I looked into the story behind Stoner, what I found is the opposite. It is surprising precisely because this book has not been overlooked. This is a story about a novel that is so extraordinary that it’s been remembered.

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