Definitely not nothing, but do you read authors because they win the Nobel prize? Probably some people do, but how many? A million people in the world would be

Definitely not nothing, but do you read authors because they win the Nobel prize? Probably some people do, but how many? A million people in the world would be my (extremely) generous estimate. And that's literally the highest lifetime honor a literary novelist can receive. Not to disparage these authors, but to put the state of the literary novel in context: that's not a hell of a lot of cultural cache. Again, the question is: what does it mean to be a literary powerhouse in 2023? The stakes seem rather small.