“It is not the job of critics or awards to simply reaffirm the bestseller, boxoffice, and Billboard lists. Quite the contrary, isn’t it their job to seek out the work that isn’t getting the attention it deserves? Isn’t it a public service, really, to highlight work that doesn’t have the marketing behind it?”
At The Faster Times, Lincoln Michel ponders the heated divide between “commercial” fiction and “literary” fiction in light of the praise recently garnered by Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom.