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> What Reismann (and her predecessor, Chapters) did initially was bring suburban big box stores into the city and wiped out a lot of the street life and culture
by barry-cotter 8y ago
> What Reismann (and her predecessor, Chapters) did initially was bring suburban big box stores into the city and wiped out a lot of the street life and culture, and with it, small publishers. In effect this polarized the market for fiction, where literary fiction today has been reduced to "content," and a lot of unctuous posturing funded by grant money.
The MFA was born in 1940. Form before content is not a product of Borders. The same kinds of people read pretentious literature worldwide and the same kinds of people write it. It’s like avant-garde theatre, it’s the same everywhere. Literary fiction is no more because of Borders than fantasy or detective fiction is. People aren’t completely useless at realising that there are clusters in the kinds of books people like to read, even without computers. Those clusters are genres and literary fiction is one of them.
- motohagiography 8y agoThe big box model killed small bookstores, then demanded that to access their new market, publishers print in sufficient volumes to stock all their huge stores, and then when they didn't sell all of the copies, the stores returned the unsold books to the publishers and that collapsed them. The big box store killed the more sparse and diverse shops that sustained the market for niches like Nobel, Booker, and other prize winners. Litfic is mainly character driven over of plot driven, so to say it's all pretentious would be a bit much. The result was that Indigo came to resemble a kind of landfill of discarded ideas, where the good stuff got lost in the effort to find it.