why don't Americans read literary fiction anymore?

why don't Americans read literary fiction anymore? To start, take a look at Publisher Weekly's "list of best-selling novels of 1962." 1. Ship of Fools by Katherine Anne Porter 2. Dearly Beloved by Anne Morrow Lindbergh 3. A Shade of Difference by Allen Drury 4. Youngblood Hawke by Herman Wouk 5. Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger It feels a little cruel to rub it in, but for comparison's sake here's 2023: 1. It Ends with Us by Colleen Hoover 2. It Starts with Us by Colleen Hoover 3. Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros 4. Atomic Habits by James Clear 2 5. Dog Man: Twenty Thousand Fleas Under the Sea by Dav Pilkey which features no literary fiction. that the corrections by Jonathan Franzen was No. 5 in 2001 and the most recent work of literary fiction to make the yearly top 10 best sellers list. One quick note, this publisher's weekly data that he is citing is hardcover only. And people in the comment section of the Substack post did very intelligently point out that literary fiction does extraordinarily well, um, as paperback. So take that with a grain of salt. I do think, however, that there has been an MFA-ification of literary fiction which has harmed its popularity with the general public. And my hypothesis is that there's been something of a self perpetuating cycle. As literary fiction has made less money, The culture of literary fiction has been forced to put greater emphasis on prestige, meaning getting published in the right magazine, getting into Iowa Writers Workshop, getting like, the Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, things like that. There just isn't really A huge commercial pie to fight over. And not only does that shift the focus of literary fiction as a subculture but I think it does affect who chooses to write literary fiction, if that makes sense, And so the less money they make the more isolated and niche of a style develops, the more ivory tower that lit fic scene becomes. And that caused them, in my opinion, to lose to lose even more general relevance and make less money. The truth is that according to almost every statistic you can find, Americans aren't reading less. In fact, print book sales have not at all been decimated by the arrival of e-readers in the way that was once predicted. This piece brings up essentially a supply side argument that I really agree with. That certain magazines for instance, Harpers, the Atlantic, once enjoyed far larger circulation than they do now and published far more short fiction to the public than they do now. What's happened is the magazines that used to publish a lot of really high quality literary short fiction, which 1) helps people start their careers and 2) just generally introduces literary writing to the public. That these magazines were subsidized essentially with strong advertising revenue, that the internet has, in fact, decimated and eaten up. This is true, and this is depressing. But this also implies that the publishers of those magazines were once upon a time, making They were choosing to subsidize literary short fiction because they valued it. I don't know if I really believe that, when it comes to books and fiction, That we are all just, like, passive bits of, like, Flotsom on the capitalist ocean being tossed around. I genuinely believe that people respond to what they see. They can't buy a book that they haven't heard about. I believe that a publisher has tremendous agency and power, actually, in showing people things and show that they feel deserve to be read. And I think that that power really extends to any booktok reviewer or any bookstagrammer, if that's what they're called. And I further believe that people's taste surprise themselves. I believe that one's taste can be transformed by a single book. The right book at the right time can change your reading habits forever more.