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Taken literally, this is a bit silly. I've read (and written) unpublished chapters that were absolutely terrible. There's clearly some kind of quality control g
by strken 5y ago
Taken literally, this is a bit silly. I've read (and written) unpublished chapters that were absolutely terrible. There's clearly some kind of quality control going on.
It's just that the top 1% of literary output is a huge volume of work and most of it is pretty good. The fashion is which of the top books make it in front of you, but you're not seeing the invisible 90% of books that would never get there, or the 9% that need a lot of luck and an editor with a hatchet.
- swatcoder 5y agoHah. Yes, of course I wasn’t saying that quality isn’t applicable to the books they choose, but the quality is measured by genre expectations (and artful deviations therefrom) just like for all genres. Inside the community of contemporary authors, editors, and MFA programs, there’e no real controversy to the idea that the writing suitable for NYRB, The New Yorker, etc is just a genre with specific, evolving expectations. There are countless amazing works that those same authors and editors hold in extremely high regard, but that would not suit those publications on account of being too “something else”. Really, it’s mostly the lay public that still carries a special sense of deference and esteem for this genre, thinking of that work as the inheritor of the Western Canon, itself being something that they were taught to see as the epitome of “Good Writing” rather than “Powerful Examples of a Certain Style”