[Monte Davis]

​Karr's is the kind of airy generalization that makes me want to go all
quant. Have those fabulist etc. categories actually increased as a share of
novels published? Is there some per-reader sales tracking data to show that
readers who tried those categories are now reading more memoirs? Is there
any reason to think this argument -- ostensibly about the public world of
books and readers -- is more than  a projection of Karr's preferences?

On Thu, Mar 10, 2016 at 6:07 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> "Changes in  the novel have helped to jack up memoir's audience as fiction
> grew more fabulist or dystopic or hyper intellectual under the sway of
> Joyce and Woolf and Garcia Marquez and Pynchon acolytes, readers thirsty
> for reality began imbibing memoir."   ---Mary Karr, The Art of Memoir 2105
>
> Well, maybe, Mary, partly......
>
> But I, who along with readers and critics' 'lengthy assaults' on memoir,
> such as by Wm Gass, Jonathon Yardley and James Wolcott will just add,
>
> Knausgaard and Ferrante have been hugely read as novelists bringing us
> back to 'reality'. And the rediscovery of* Stoner* and more and more.
>
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