Word: novels
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...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...
...America's reading habits become so 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...
...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 Wallace or Franzen--what will be known to later generations as the 21st century novel...
...drawn into Chubb's beguilements, Wode-Douglass is a brittle, amusing narrator. But eventually she's just the audience for Chubb's less gripping story of his daughter's kidnapping by McCorkle, the figment with a beating heart. With this, the book seems to move from novel to fable, a world in which poems and children all have uncertain parentage. Even so, decoding that fable is another kind of pleasure. Carey's book begins with a quote from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Here's a story with another monster who strode into the world. But in a universe where...
Hornby’s latest work, Songbook, recently published in paperback, zeroes in on two key themes in Hornby’s previous novels: music and the art of being a fan. Music has occupied a central place in all of his work. In both High Fidelity and About a Boy, the narrators, who bear more than a passing resemblance to Hornby himself, use music as a tool to live by, measuring their lives in songs. Dispensing with the fictional complications of a novel, Hornby has now brought himself directly into his writing...