Codrescu

[jd]

Well I think this fits, since we all seem to like a rather large book,
and especially in regards to Underworld.  I'm reading Andrei
Codrescu's "A Bar in Brooklyn", and really enjoyed Monsieur Teste in
America.  On the third story now.  This is from the introduction:

"I found the form of the novella congenial.  Halfway between a short
story and a novel, it was just the right size for what I had to say.
In France, novella-size books of 100-120 pages are called 'novels' and
accorded the dignity of that form.  American publishers, for some
reasos (practical ones, no doubt) loathe such short books.  The
American novel is supposed to be thick, voluminous, filled with long
stretches of character-development.  What's more, American publishers
prefer these thick volumes to be realistic, drearily realistic, as if
American readers were schoolchildren and they had to be pedagogically
numbed by the tedium of description and the minutiae of psychology.
Unfortunately, this penchant for the realistic Big Book has become a
self-fulfilling mode: American readers have been rendered childlike
and disciplined, unable to make leaps of imagination, or fill in for
themselves what they already know only too well."

Obviously this doesn't exactly fly for GR.  Codrescu worked for NPR
for quite some time, if I am remembering correctly (just for some
biographical information).  It is kind of an interesting topic though
- the Big American Book, especially when compared to the Big American
Big Mac, or Big SUVs, or just Big Anything, a connection that I never
really drew before.  But then again I suppose you could always go on
and talk about the Big Russian Book (Tolstoy, Dostoevsky), or
whatever.