What Books Last and (Mostly) Don’t Last
“I’ll save the speculation for a science fiction novel, I suppose. But even limiting ourselves to literature, it%u2019s simply the case that what endures has minimal correlation to either contemporaneous popularity or contemporaneous acclaim. Acclaim has a bit better track record%u2014the names of early Pulitzer Prize winners are more familiar than the names of bestselling novels of the 1920s for example%u2014but neither is a guarantee of anything. Here%u2019s the bestseller list of 1924, which includes titles so obscure they have red-ink dead links because no one has bothered to even make a perfunctory Wikipedia page for them…”
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