4 ms·
The novel is finally waking up from its 100-year carbonite nap. Old hierarchies of taste are collapsing. Genres are hybridizing. The balance of power is swingin
by thunk 17y ago
The novel is finally waking up from its 100-year carbonite nap. Old hierarchies of taste are collapsing. Genres are hybridizing. The balance of power is swinging from the writer back to the reader, and compromises with the public taste are being struck all over the place.
About damn time if you ask me. Maybe I can finally emerge from my genre fiction bunker. The world is confusing enough without novelists "vaguing it up" for the critics. Perhaps not all difficult novels have nothing to say (beyond "Look how stylish I am"), but most do. That particular emperor's in his birthday suit.
- jseliger 17y agoIt already has woken up, even in literary terms, if you know where to look, as Grossman says -- he cites Chabon, Donna Tart, and others. And although I love the way he expresses himself in this manifesto, he's hardly alone: Tom Wolfe wrote Stalking The Billion-Footed Beast in the 1980s, which has some not dissimilar themes, and B.R. Myers' A Reader's Manifesto came out more recently; see more about it here: http://jseliger.com/2007/11/12/a-readers-manifesto/ http://jseliger.com/2007/11/12/a-readers-manifesto/ .