Literary Fiction And What You Read

In response to their readers, the New York Times is going to add a new list to their book review section. The current list of best sellers is too, well, too low brow quite frankly.

According to Sam Tanenhaus, the editor of the NYT Book Review, this new list will correspond "closely to what we review in the section and what we gauge our readers are interested in" and that is literary fiction. As for the rest of you down there at the bottom of the reading barrel, you'll still have your common, plebeian list of fodder for the masses. At last, there will be a list for the rest of us, a list of literary fiction titles that the New York Times will track.

Trade paperbacks will make up the backbone of this bestseller list, because the publishers are using the cheaper format for literary fiction that does not fly off the shelves. Only those of us with sufficient intellectual faculties read the stuff, don't you know, and one cannot fault the profit-driven publishing houses for producing these gems at a lower cost. The commoners out there have yet to discover the sort of high-end prose that gets reviewed in the NYT and better that the publishers print on the cheap than not publish at all.

There are those who claim that the New York Times is creating another list so that they can create another source of advertising revenue. It is expected that the publishers who put out the trade paperbacks that will be featured in the list and in the reviews will buy ad space to further promote their stock. Granted, ad revenues for the book review section have grown while other newspapers have seen declines, but the advertising hypothesis is nothing more than a facade. One would not wish to inflame the great unwashed masses with a further reminder of their lack of panache, would one?

There will be a bestseller list for what we, the intellectual elite, like to read, and then there is all the rest. All done to increase advertising revenue? Brilliant bit of obfuscation, but really, Mr. Tanenhaus shouldn't have let it slip.