Imagine you’re the literary editor for a major US newspaper, like The New York Times or The Washington Post. You know that getting a good notice in your paper can launch the career of a young writer and you’re far from indifferent to the fate of literary culture. You majored in English and once nurtured dreams of being a novelist yourself. But tens of thousands of fiction titles are published each year and it sometimes feels like most of them are piled up on your desk.
As to the others? Some genres don’t stand a chance. Romance fiction? No way. Sci-fi, fantasy, thrillers? No, no, no. In general, that which seems like ‘literary fiction’ will attract your eye and it’s not hard to pick those out from the pile, based on the blurb or the publisher. Occasionally, you might do a round up of recent crime writing.
