The above column from film critic/blogger Glenn Kenny is a good entry point for the Ellis/Wallace dust up that began via Ellis' Twitter feed.
Showing posts with label Jonathan Franzen. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jonathan Franzen. Show all posts
Monday, September 10, 2012
A-list literary feud: Bret Easton Ellis and his disdain for the late David Foster Wallace.
http://somecamerunning.typepad.com/some_came_running/2012/09/ellis-island.html
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
The Oprah Book Club, Jonathan Franzen and a lesson the L.A. poetry community won't learn.
Here's an op-ed article by Julia Keller which appeared in THE LOS ANGELES TIMES today re the Oprah Winfrey Book Club: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-book-club30-2009dec30,0,6657148.story
A salient passage (with highlighting by me):
So forget Kindle. What transformed literary culture in 2000-09 was "The Corrections" (2001) by Jonathan Franzen -- not only the book, which is a big, gorgeous, strapping 19th century novel smuggled into the 21st, and a Midwestern novel to boot, but also the story behind the story. It was selected by Oprah Winfrey for her book club. Franzen was less than thrilled about the honor -- previous Winfrey books struck him as dreadfully down-market and plebeian -- which led to a mini-dust-up with Winfrey and a sudden spotlight on a dirty little truth: Literature is the last refuge of the snob. Most of us thought, in our infinite ignorance, that readers are readers, and the more readers, the better. But not Franzen: He wanted only certain kinds of readers.Winfrey's book club began in 1996, but it was the Franzen episode that put it on the map. Yes, her imprimatur made a huge difference in a book's sales from the get-go, but "The Corrections" -- the intricate, beautifully written story of the slow, tottering fall of a Midwestern family -- made her book club controversial, and in the United States, nothing is truly important until it has started a few arguments.The first decade of the 21st century revealed two things to the literary world: the power of a TV talk-show host to shape our collective taste in books, and the rudeness of a self-important author when that taste happened to include his work. (Never mind that Winfrey also favored William Faulkner, Toni Morrison and John Steinbeck; she was still too lowbrow for Franzen.)
A salient passage (with highlighting by me):
So forget Kindle. What transformed literary culture in 2000-09 was "The Corrections" (2001) by Jonathan Franzen -- not only the book, which is a big, gorgeous, strapping 19th century novel smuggled into the 21st, and a Midwestern novel to boot, but also the story behind the story. It was selected by Oprah Winfrey for her book club. Franzen was less than thrilled about the honor -- previous Winfrey books struck him as dreadfully down-market and plebeian -- which led to a mini-dust-up with Winfrey and a sudden spotlight on a dirty little truth: Literature is the last refuge of the snob. Most of us thought, in our infinite ignorance, that readers are readers, and the more readers, the better. But not Franzen: He wanted only certain kinds of readers.Winfrey's book club began in 1996, but it was the Franzen episode that put it on the map. Yes, her imprimatur made a huge difference in a book's sales from the get-go, but "The Corrections" -- the intricate, beautifully written story of the slow, tottering fall of a Midwestern family -- made her book club controversial, and in the United States, nothing is truly important until it has started a few arguments.The first decade of the 21st century revealed two things to the literary world: the power of a TV talk-show host to shape our collective taste in books, and the rudeness of a self-important author when that taste happened to include his work. (Never mind that Winfrey also favored William Faulkner, Toni Morrison and John Steinbeck; she was still too lowbrow for Franzen.)
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