/lit/ - Literature

>>8123601
www.nytimes.com/2016/06/04/arts/thomas-pynchon-dies

OH SHIT

>>7993057
There's a point to this. Literary fiction as a commercial category is aimed squarely at insecure middle-class wageslave types who want to appear sophisticated by reading the "right' fiction. Marketing and style of literary fiction aims to surround itself with an aura of prestige and intellectualism while still assuring the reader that the book they're buying will be thoroughly entertaining. Note how every book, even the most depressing, has blurbs about how funny it is.

Marlon James has touched on this, saying essentially that too many decision-makers in literary publishing are timid middle-aged white women with fancy degrees in literature who only like the most vanilla stuff they think will sell.

That's not to say that there aren't novels that contribute to literary discourse in ways that Martin's work cannot, but you have to accept that marketers have caught on to the core audience for "literary" fiction.

>>7815646
That's basically why I wrote it. The sources are both trying to be enormous, universe-scale stories already, but it clicked with me that they touch enough of the same things without contradicting one another and left out enough of the time in-between their respective established timelines that it could be EVEN BIGGER.