[Mark Kohut]

>From my airship overview of general trade publishing and my occasional
Chums-like participation in a part of it, it
does seem to me that publishing made a turn to believing that memoirs could
sell well, better than ever. They/we
kept publishing more of them.

I see it, from my cultural airship, as the continuation of self-expression
in the US part of the West; the continuation of the mistranslated 'revolt
of the masses", really the democratization of experience. in books.

For me, it is hard to see how most, even the best written of
autobiographies, can have the writer be such a perfect embodiment
of personal experience that an autobiography can penetrate more deeply than
the best fiction into its time, its place, have its vision of the world
illumine like genius. The scenes, the overarching metaphors, the resonances
of the language cannot rise
enough; most autobiographies are inevitably...minor in this sense...

However, as with the rarity of all genius, a few great autobiographies have
always been written. Let me count them......



On Thu, Mar 10, 2016 at 6:44 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:

> ​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.
>>
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20160311/1c4183ed/attachment.html>