TRUTH.

[substitute]

The decline of fiction starring Jonathan Safran Froer

Last week the Atlantic announced that from here on in, it would be publishing fiction only once a year, in a special issue. Once upon a time, Playboy supported a whole generation of worthwhile authors, from Shel Silverstein to Isaac Bashevis Singer and a host of talented goys, too. Before that, Sports Illustrated published Faulkner. Now, there's The New Yorker and the Paris Review and little else, and the consolidation of publishing houses has nearly wiped out the mid-list author, leaving young authors with just one chance to write that great book before they get dropped, and just a handful of editors deciding who gets that one shot at the brass ring. With the decreasing number of outlets for quality fiction, each season's "young stars" find themselves praised regardless of the quality of their work—there's a common readership for Lahiri and Eggers, even though she's brilliant and he's anything but.

Comments

ebooks

[torgo-x.livejournal.com]

This may sound like utter madness, or like something from Wired in 1996 (which is another way of saying "utter madness"), but here goes:

After my years of insisting otherwise, I now grudgingly admit that I think we need e-books.

We're so close -- even a cheapo mp3 player has a hundred times the processing and memory power that you'd need to run an e-book. Last I saw, PDAs were almost useable as e-books; but the screen quality just isn't there yet.

I'm not going to pretend that once we have e-books (whether they're actually called that, or whether they're just PDAs with decent-enough screens that you can read off them for more than a minute without going crosseyed), that suddenly we'll have such a reflowering of prose that everyone now with an mp3 player will also be carting around ten amazing novels.

But it would be nice.

Re: ebooks

[stimps.livejournal.com]

I used to feel the same way about e-books, until I started knitting a lot. I started reading a lot less, because it's very hard to knit and balance a book and turn the pages. I started to look around, though, and there are a lot of pretty good books in e-book format now. I got a reader for my regular computer (so it's big enough to read without squinting), and I get a lot of knitting and reading done now.

It's not a perfect solution (until I can get voice activated page-turning, bwahaha), but it works! I think the biggest problem is, as usual, that there are a lot more mass production crap books out there (so far) than truly good ones. It's starting to change, but not fast enough for my taste. What I do find fun is the small-production tinfoil hat crowd are really embracing the medium. You can find some truly insane stuff out there.