New York Magazine lets readers know that big fat novels are still pretty great.
From the story...
"Today is the day of the sound bite," former Harper Collins CEO Jane Friedman told us last spring, plugging her post-advance imprint HarperStudio and singing the praises of short, cheaply acquired books. Big books — the kinds her underlings still pay millions for — were slow-moving dinosaurs in a world of shorter, faster blog and Kindle-me quickies. But the novel of the year may very well be a brontosaurus: Roberto Bolaño's 2666, a difficult, 893-page translated masterpiece (see Sam Anderson's review). In other words, big might still be big.
If 2666 actually sells (and publisher FSG hopes to God it does), it may answer some serious questions about the future of The Big Book. Why do lots of publishers continue to drop big cash on near-thousand-page books in the era of blog posts, Web porn, and text-message lit? Are America's ADD-addled consumers even capable of immersing themselves in these narratives anymore?
We say yes, and not just because, attention-challenged as we are, we've always used such doorstops (maturing from Stephen King's The Stand — unabridged — to Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day) to test our mettle, like weekend joggers taking on a marathon. We doubt we're alone.
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