Word: heapings
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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...
...radically polarized, so prissily puritanical, that at best a quarter of what people read (or at least what they buy) qualifies as legitimate literature? It hasn't always been like this. As recently as the mid--19th century, historians of the novel tell us, there was only one heap. Dickens wrote best-selling novels, but they weren't considered "commercial" or "popular" or "your-euphemism-here." They were just novels. No one looked down on Scott and Tennyson and Stowe for being wildly successful. No one got all embarrassed when they were caught reading the new Edgar Allan...
...oeuvre for J.K. Rowling's in a magic moment, or George R.R. Martin's for that matter. But I applaud the National Book Foundation's choice, and I hope it encourages the small but determined school of writers who are carefully, lovingly grafting the prose craft of the literary heap onto the sinewy, satisfying plots of the trashy one to produce hybrid novels that offer the pleasures of both. Writers like Donna Tartt and Alice Sebold, Neal Stephenson and Iain Banks, Jonathan Lethem and Margaret Atwood, writers whose work will most likely define--more than anything by brilliant mandarins like...
...keeping with Kon's taste for offbeat topics, Tokyo Godfathers follows a makeshift family of homeless people?transvestite ex-drag queen Hana, scruffy middle-aged bum Gin and runaway teenager Miyuki?who discover an abandoned baby in a garbage heap and embark on a search for its parents. It's a briskly paced comedy with a gentle core and a prickly surface. ("You can't get milk from an old queer's tits," yells Gin, mocking Hana's burgeoning maternal instincts.) Set during Christmas in a gorgeously detailed, snow-softened Tokyo, it's also one of the most affectionate, meticulous...
Sure, he could have stopped progressing, stopped learning when he was at the top of the heap three seasons ago. But to do that would have been contrary to everything Balestracci has ever known...