Reality Hunger is a book-length essay about literature and culture by David Shields that's getting a lot of attention for its provocative key argument: we are wrong to think of fiction as the most exalted form of literature, because as readers we mostly value writings that bring us reality and truth -- which are, by strict definition, beyond the scope of fiction. Shields presents today's literary community as blind and confused, trained to pine after the ideal of the perfect novel, the sublime work of art, when in fact we crave something more primal than artistic excellence when we read.

I've spent this weekend reading David Shields' exciting Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, a book that urges us to reject the notion that fiction is artistically or philosophically superior to nonfiction. This impressive book is empowering me to accept and embrace for the first time the dread and boredom I have always felt when I pick up a new issue of the New York Times Book Review and see a bunch of articles about novels and short story collections I've never heard of and have no clear use for.

(Please welcome Mark Cohen, author of Missing A Beat: The Rants and Regrets of Seymour Krim and proprietor of the culture blog Stumbling Into Jews. -- Levi)

Author and literary critic Seymour Krim has fallen off today’s Beat bookshelf. But when he let loose in 1957 with his slanted, rankling, fight-picking essays in the Village Voice he was a Beat, because what else could he be? Especially when he saluted Jack Kerouac's On the Road as his escape hatch from literary criticism, his pre-Beat beat. And then in 1960 he edited The Beats and appeared in The Beat Scene. Still, his first and most celebrated book of essays, the 1961 Views of a Nearsighted Cannoneer, made it clear he was less a Beat than one of the establishment’s casualties (unless that’s one category of Beat). With its foreword by Norman Mailer, and back cover summary of Krim’s publications and death-riddled family history, Nearsighted Cannoneer is torn between sticking its tongue out and making excuses for what the reader will find inside. Krim mined that inner tension his entire writing career, which produced two more collections of essays, garnered him a Guggenheim and a Fulbright, and brought him teaching posts at Columbia and Iowa. Since his death in 1989, Beat anthologies have ignored him. But he still has impressive fans, including James Wolcott, Phillip Lopate, and Vivian Gornick, who called Krim "a Jewish Joan Didion."

I can't ever seem to get on board with the hot new young writers selected by our literary/critical/blogosphere group mind. I haven't gotten into Joseph O'Neill, or Marisha Pessl, or Junot Diaz, or Tower Wells, or Joshua Ferris. Is it my fault? Am I carrying too many prejudices with me, or not trying hard enough? Mark Sarvas recently seconded some comments Joshua Ferris made about readers or reviewers who don't like his latest work. Ferris said:

... they don't allow the book's rules to establish themselves before applying their own aesthetic criteria to it which I think is a mistake. I think a careful and adult reader allows the book to establish its world and then evaluates it on how well it does so.

Jay McInerney impresses me today. I didn't know if he had the cojones to give a trendy "serious novel" like Joshua Ferris's The Unnamed a bad review, but apparently he does. Maybe my concern that we'd have to spend this entire decade hearing about the genius of Joshua Ferris was misplaced; the novel has gotten mediocre reviews in Chicago and Washington DC as well. Sometimes the lit-crit establishment is better at spotting fakes than I expect.

Fourteen days into the new decade, tastemakers and hipsters are already buzzing about two groundbreaking artistic sensations that may define the current generation: MTV's "Jersey Shore" and Joshua Ferris's The Unnamed. What I'm really concerned about is that I've sampled both and I like "Jersey Shore" a whole lot better.

I still haven't mentally returned from vacation, still haven't gotten back into the LitKicks swing. I've been running around a lot, actually, as well as working hard behind the scenes on a new software platform for the site that has so far only succeeded in breaking the Action Poetry pages (they will be back soon, I promise). More soon! Till then ... links:

It's a funny thing about book reviews. It's been documented by publishing industry researchers that a negative book review can sometimes bump sales as well as a positive one, and good writers have bemoaned the fact that a great review, even a great front cover review in the New York Times Book Review, might not help sales at all. Of course, publisher incompetence can help cause the latter situation, as was recently revealed in a rather shocking New York Magazine interview:

I was wondering if Sam Savage's worthy The Cry of the Sloth would get attention in the New York Times Book Review (Savage's earlier Firmin did not). The novel only gets a paragraph within Joseph Salvatore's "Fiction Chronicle" in this weekend's Review, and Salvatore finds that "as rich as the humor is, such satire does not finally sustain the novel".