Nehaveigur

Women read more than men, but that’s an incomplete observation, Oy argues here. Nobody reads contemporary literary fiction any more.

People still read plenty of literary fiction, what they don’t read is contemporary literary fiction.

They argue that it’s at least partly a quality problem:

For the last twenty years American literary culture has been unable to produce a writer we can describe as great without at least feeling a tinge of embarrassment about. We should be worried.

One reason may be that the very best writing talent is being hoovered up by the TV and movie industries.

From a financial perspective then, one attractor away from the pipeline into writing literary fiction comes from the rise of prestige-television over the last several decades.

Another explanation that rings true is that much of contemporary literature feels like it has been written for critics.

The principal reason self-conscious contemporary literary fiction sells no books is because it’s all insider-baseball so to speak. There’s nothing in most of these books for the general reader. The books are written for the critics.