The Critic Magazine

New life for a dying trade

HOW STANDS THE WORLD of light literature here in the spring of 2024? Well, you may not be surprised to learn that everything is very flat — sales are supposedly 20 per cent down on this time last year.

You can get into the paperback bestseller chart these days by selling a few thousand copies and ornament the hardback list by shifting a few hundred. The genre known as literary fiction is pretty much dead. Most of the money

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