I don't normally read Book magazine because it's partially owned by Barnes & Noble and I always assumed that meant it was basically a catalogue with a higher-than-average text-to-image ratio. So I've walked by the July/August issue several times and not picked it up, but this weekend I noticed that one of the cover stories was about "the Death of Chick Lit," and hoping (hoping!) that it was true, I flipped through it. The primary cover story, however, was much better. Stephen King, artfully posed in the photo shoot against a trailer park backdrop with a Marlboro red and a tv dinner, writes a fictional essay on how the publishing industry rewards serious literaturemonetarily. (It's fictional, remember?) He says he read Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, and hated it because of "That maddening New York 'tude that seems to whisper, 'I'm smarter than you, more sophisticated than you, better-read than you, just better than you' at least once on every single page," but says there's "something almost endearing about his nearly constant need to take his own creative temperature. How is Jonathan faring today? he asks himself over and over. Will Jonathan be able to write tomorrow, in spite of the Internet, the decay of artistic sensitivity, and the growing idea that television might just be culturally important?"
America the Literate [Book]