PUBLISHER'S PRIDE collects insights and perspectives for the book trade. For today, from the inimitable Annie Dillard, a fitting follow-up to our last installment (about Melville's Sales Figures).
... More serious a threat is this notion: that quality will out, that quality has already outed, and that the novelists of whom we have heard are the novelists we have. People who believe this pronounce early and dismal verdicts: no one is writing interesting novels, or great novels, or great poetry, or great short stories. Which is absurd. How do we know who is writing what out there? Could Faulkner find a publisher now?from Dillard's Living by Fiction (1982). 1982, people!
That we are much informed does not mean that we are well informed. What little contemporary criticism we have is responsible, but it must rely on what is available and even on what is expected. The Times could scarcely assign stringers, who also happen to be literary critics, to every garret and kitchen table in the country where the mute, inglorious Miltons are churning it out. And if the Times assigned such stringers, where would it print their reports, when it devotes breathless pages each week to the signing of blockbusters, jogging books, dieting books, and so forth?
