In Which I Cross Some Strange Cultural Divide

Apologies from this corner for the paucity of posts: it’s been a deadline-packed week and the pace won’t ease up until early next week. Which is why I’m late on directing you to yesterday’s Guardian Books Blog post – my first in many months – on what seemed to be a strange pile-on of barely suppressed envy and jealousy towards Jonathan Safran Foer not just on, say, Gawker, but within Off-Broadway circles and the pages of the New Yorker and PEN. The commenters there (including, allegedly, Malcolm Gladwell?!) are quite nonplussed, but Flavorwire’s Caroline Stanley picks up on the underlying subtext of indicting the Stateside obsession with celebrity and scandal: ‘If there’s anything more entertaining than a literary culture war, it’s

British people judging us for being entertained by a literary culture

war.”