Showbiz 411 - You have to go all the way down to number 81 on Amazon’s bestseller list to find a book by a “literary” writer. That would be “All Fours,” by Miranda July, the writer-filmmaker-artist.Otherwise most of the top 100 is taken up Father’s Day books, Mother’s Day books, self-help, and airport fiction. The latter comprises paperback reads by authors like Colleen Hoover and Sarah J. Maas. There are a few oases: Griffin Dunne’s memoir about his family is at number 51. Stephen King, the rare commercial author who is also a writer, has a new title...
What’s missing? What we used to call literary or quality books. There is no breakout hit. We used to read the bestseller list and count “real” books by Philip Roth, John Irving, Margaret Atwood, VS Naipaul, and so on. Even Amazon’s Literature and Fiction list is cluttered with pedestrian commercial fare, not the stuff that comes from the Iowa Writers Workshop, or Yaddo.
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