Long Live Stephen King
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Time magazine on Stephen King's National Book Foundation award.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101031124-543785,00.html
Long Live the King
Is this the end of Western literature as we know it? Let's hope so!
By LEV GROSSMAN
Monday, Nov. 17, 2003
At a Marriott Hotel in New York City this week, the National Book Foundation plans to hand Stephen King its Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Previous recipients of the medal include Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Arthur Miller and Toni Morrison, which makes King, an unrepentant horror monger, a controversial choice, to say the least. Shakespeare scholar and self-appointed canonmaker Harold Bloom called it a "terrible mistake" and added that King was an "immensely inadequate writer."
News of King's crowning met with predictable sneers from the literary snobs, along with a few weak and equally predictable cheers from the reverse snobs. But both sides are kind of missing the point, which is that we — that is, we readers — have an odd and deeply ingrained habit of dividing books into two mutually exclusive heaps, one high and literary and one low and trashy, and we should stop it. Books aren't high or low. They're just good or bad.
Take a look at that second heap, the trashy one, and you'll notice something interesting: it's very, very large. Ipsos BookTrends is a service that tracks consumer book purchases — numbers that, unlike sales figures for albums or movie tickets, are rarely seen outside the industry. According to Ipsos, 34% of all novels sold in the U.S. this year were romance novels. Six percent were fantasy and science fiction, and 19% were mysteries and thrillers. Only 25% fell under "general fiction," the category that includes the even smaller subdivision of literary novels: your Jonathan Franzens, your David Foster Wallaces, your E. Annie Proulxs. Statistically speaking, the literary novel is a small part of a very big picture.
(more)
(Thanks DebL)
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101031124-543785,00.html
Long Live the King
Is this the end of Western literature as we know it? Let's hope so!
By LEV GROSSMAN
Monday, Nov. 17, 2003
At a Marriott Hotel in New York City this week, the National Book Foundation plans to hand Stephen King its Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Previous recipients of the medal include Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Arthur Miller and Toni Morrison, which makes King, an unrepentant horror monger, a controversial choice, to say the least. Shakespeare scholar and self-appointed canonmaker Harold Bloom called it a "terrible mistake" and added that King was an "immensely inadequate writer."
News of King's crowning met with predictable sneers from the literary snobs, along with a few weak and equally predictable cheers from the reverse snobs. But both sides are kind of missing the point, which is that we — that is, we readers — have an odd and deeply ingrained habit of dividing books into two mutually exclusive heaps, one high and literary and one low and trashy, and we should stop it. Books aren't high or low. They're just good or bad.
Take a look at that second heap, the trashy one, and you'll notice something interesting: it's very, very large. Ipsos BookTrends is a service that tracks consumer book purchases — numbers that, unlike sales figures for albums or movie tickets, are rarely seen outside the industry. According to Ipsos, 34% of all novels sold in the U.S. this year were romance novels. Six percent were fantasy and science fiction, and 19% were mysteries and thrillers. Only 25% fell under "general fiction," the category that includes the even smaller subdivision of literary novels: your Jonathan Franzens, your David Foster Wallaces, your E. Annie Proulxs. Statistically speaking, the literary novel is a small part of a very big picture.
(more)
(Thanks DebL)
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