Tournament of Books

[AprilBoo]

Is anybody keeping up with the Dallas Morning News Tournament of Books? I have been, and this morning they posted Dale Peck's critique - he had to choose between Saturday and The Accidental, and he decided to decry all contemporary fiction instead. I think he was a bit harsh.

http://themorningnews.org/tob/match14.php

[JenNipps]

I hadn't heard of this. I'll have to check it out.

And sorry I didn't see this before now. I've kinda flaked out on modding lately and have been trying to make good progress writing.

[pdr]

In an essay in Hatchet Jobs, I referred to fiction as the engine of capitalism...

Wow! Though I would like to add 'American' to fiction.

Regardless, until writers realize the social compact is spiritual and species suicide, a pseudoethical pressure valve that allows Western society to pretend it’s examining its troubled conscience when all it’s doing is assuaging the guilt we feel for exploiting the rest of the world—and destroying it in the process—then the literary novel will remain little more than a series of embarrassing, irrelevant mea culpas.

Now here's man who knows what he means by literary and wants to define literary writing as a stick to stir the social conscience.