Don’t Write Western Civilization Off Just Yet

Putnam senior editor Rachel Kahan (who told me she “loves—and buys—unabashedly commercial literature”) isn’t very sympathetic to those unnamed publishing insiders who’ve been writing to me with complaints about our declining cultural standards. “It should be noted that this debate is as old as print itself,” Kahan emailed yesterday. “Many authors who have taken up permanent residence on the classics shelf were considered pornographic, downmarket, and unintelligent—or all three—when they were first published, including Dickens, Defoe, Joyce, Salinger, Nabokov and a whole host of others.”

“Yes, there’s lots of crap out there,” she concedes, “but let’s stop fussing about the quality of what people read. It’s not our job as publishers to sit in judgement on what people like to read. I publish the books I think people will enjoy, books that speak to their experience. Period. If you don’t agree with what I publish, rest assured that somewhere out there is an editor publishing something that suits your Old Fogey tastes too.”

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