Are Today's Best-Selling Books Worse than Those Before? What They Say 75 Years of Bestsellers

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MEXICO CITY.- The thesis is provocative: literary fiction would have suffered a sharp recession in the “economy of prestige” between 1965 and 1999. Although sales and advances grew, the symbolic capital of the great novelists—from Saul Bellow to John Updike—was eroded in the face of the advancement of other cultural forms such as film, television and journalism. The writer’s figure as a public intellectual, the article suggests, ceased to be cen…