That’s the title of an article in Publishing Perspectives. Here’s a bit of it:
The outsized influence New York, and Brooklyn in particular, has on the current literary scene is undeniable. It is the center of publishing in the United States.
But is it good for the other 99% of the country?
New York publishers have been accused of publishing books for each other – and the writers, for writing for each other. Has a kind of group-think has set in where people — consciously or not — are perhaps working to impress each other rather than a wider audience?
You often hear publishing personalities and literary journalists on the coasts moan that “the rest of America” doesn’t read books. To this I say, the rest of America does read, they just don’t necessarily want to read the books New York sometimes publishes. How many novels can someone in, say, Chicago or Atlanta, read about a twenty-something Manhattan editorial assistant, junior Wall Street trader, or cupcake shop owner in Cobble Hill looking for love?
I think it has a lot to do with Brooklyn and the advent and dominion of The Hipster. Publishers used to at least take some interest in people who wrote abt the interior of the nation, AND the working classes. Now it’s got to be the bartender at your favorite hipster bar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Of course the irony here is that the great unwashed masses of Hipsters in Brooklyn are from the Midwest, but all they want to write abt is their hipsterhood in BK!
It’s like the great influx of literary novels about college professors which are written by college professors and stamped with the “only this kind of story is literary” mindset of college professors, editors, and reviewers that has plagued literary fiction for years.
Not to mention all those Southern novels that are only accepted because they reflect the false NY-liberal stereotypes of the South, not the reality of the South.
Really? Maybe it’s because I live and work in Brooklyn, and I’m just not seeing it, but I’m not sure that this applies to ALL books. I do agree that literary fiction is currently in it’s Brooklyn-hipster period, but I’m not sure that it’s really relevant to most of publishing.
(Can’t quibble about the cupcakes, though. Bakeries do seem to be expending a lot of creativity on them lately. Oh, and IS there a good cupcake bakery in Cobble Hill? There’s a great one a few blocks over in the Heights, in any case!)
Frankly, I think that a lot of the complaining is because the complainer is trying to stake out his or her credentials in the world of literati. Heaven forfend that we should admit to reading “junk food for the brain.” . . . And we’re back to the cupcakes.