Overlooked Fiction

Over at Baseball and Real Life, Stu Shea offers some comments about baseball's monolithic focus on the One True Rivalry (Red Sox v. Yankees–and there's no question where I stand on that) as well as East Coast publishing's self-involvement to the exclusion of other regions of the country--not necessarily a problem in itself except to the extent that the East Coast defines the national book publishing agenda. I think this is another manifestation of the media swarming I discussed below.

As a possible small corrective to all this, I noticed an article in today's Chicago Tribune (which actually first appeared a week-and-a-half ago in the LA Times--both of those papers require registration, so here's what appears to be the same piece on the open Web) about a litblog collective looking to spotlight overlooked works of fiction. Nowadays, it seems a book has to get on the best-seller list to have a chance at success, so if it's not written by Stephen King or Dan Brown (or, for more literary examples, the article suggests Tom Wolfe or Cynthia Ozick), it's been overlooked. I've paid more attention to political blogs than to the litblog scene, so I'm not familiar with the players here, but I'm intrigued by this small attempt to break the New York monopoly on culture (LA is also involved in the monopoly if we broaden the types of media, but if you're talking books, you're just talking New York.) The group blog is here, and it provides links to the various participating blogs. They're scheduled to announce their first overlooked book on May 15.