Differences Between Literature and Best Sellers

[Molokai]

i was wondering if anyone had thoughts on what qualities make a book 'good' or 'well written'. today, the best seller lists are full of books that many consider poorly written pap. john grisham, tom clancy and stephen king are frequent targets of this criticism.

for my questions, i'll be picking on stephen king as an example:

1) what makes stephen king different from f. scott fitzgerald or hemingway? most people would agree that the latter two are worlds better in writing ability than s. king. if you think this, why?

2)why do authors like stephen king sell more books than a critically acclaimed author such as john updike? is it a genre thing? is it the material?

curious to hear you what you think.

[star blue]

actually, king doesn't really sell that many books. most of his income is paid in roylaties from film adaptations of his novels. if you're looking for a popular author to attack though, how about jonathan franzen or annie proulx? their books are total trash.

but you want to know what sets king apart from fitzgerald and hemingway . . . how about his lifestyle, for one? he is extremely ordinary, almost to the point of absurdity. he has an appreciation for classic literature, like ulysses, but he's the most unpretentious writer of them all. secondly, I think the same thing that distinguishes king from classic novelists distinguishes horror films from the more aesthetic films, like 2001: a space odyssey. but remember, it was stanley kubrick who adapted the shining to the big screen, so there is a lesson here to be learned about the importance of shock value and the interest it provokes in people. and interest is the only thing that matters when it comes to defining literature.

[Lara]

I must disagree with you Star Blue. I am a former Bookseller, and Stephen King does sell alot of books. Even the old ones are kept on the shelf and still sell on a regular basis.

Molokai, it is my opinion that a literary novel has a great deal of depth and gets to the core of a characters psyche, however, I believe there are differences in opinion where that is concerned. I don't think writing a literary novel makes an author more skilled than an author who writes horror, or fantasy, for example. There are many wonderful authors out there who are well known and many who are considered 'no names'. You want to know what makes a Bestseller, I think, in the case of Stephen King, he started off as a no name, just as anyone else, his stories caught on and then you get a large following. Now when a new novel comes out, people will flock to the bookstore and purchase a $45 hardcover (in Canada), without batting an eyelash.

I think just saying a novel or an author is crap is extremely unfair to the person who poured their heart and soul into creating a story. Our personal preferences are only a matter of opinion.

Take Care,
Lara

[star blue]

fyi: king makes just over $100,000.00 a year, lara. popular novelists like franzen and proulx make well over a million.

[Robert E Lee]

Originally posted by Molokai
i was wondering if anyone had thoughts on what qualities make a book 'good' or 'well written'. today, the best seller lists are full of books that many consider poorly written pap. john grisham, tom clancy and stephen king are frequent targets of this criticism.

for my questions, i'll be picking on stephen king as an example:

1) what makes stephen king different from f. scott fitzgerald or hemingway? most people would agree that the latter two are worlds better in writing ability than s. king. if you think this, why?

2)why do authors like stephen king sell more books than a critically acclaimed author such as john updike? is it a genre thing? is it the material?

curious to hear you what you think.


My AP literature book has a good chapter on this issue.

It basically boils down to this:
1. Commercial fiction is meant to entertain and not to provoke thought or leave a particularly lasting impression.
2. Literary fiction is thematically deep, challenges conventional notions, leaves us with something to think about, has characters that aren't cardboard, and basically has aesthetic merit.

Commercial fiction is more popular (i.e. commercial) because of the same reason that the most popular films are often the ****ties: Because the majority of people lack either the education or the intellect to appreciate art.

[IWilKikU]

Originally posted by Robert E Lee
1. Commercial fiction is meant to entertain and not to provoke thought or leave a particularly lasting impression.
I just finished the Great Gatsby by Fitzgereld and I must say, it was damned entertaining. Just before that I read Carrie, by King, and I am still feeling guilty for all the crap I put this one kid through in grade school. I never really felt guilty for messing with this dorky little sh*t before, but I'll be damned if "Carrie" wont make me remember him for the rest of my life. I would say that King made a fairly lasting impression on me there. There are other examples from King books that I could give you, but that one just fell upon me like 3 weeks ago, so its nice and fresh. There's also "The Stand". I don't know about the rest of you, but when the SARS virus was flying around the eastern hemisphere, I was thinking "Captain Trips". There are many more.


2. Literary fiction is thematically deep, challenges conventional notions, leaves us with something to think about, has characters that aren't cardboard, and basically has aesthetic merit.

King wrote about violence in America's youth long before anyone wanted to hear about it. He wrote about school shootings back in the '70s! If people had payed attention to what he was saying back in the day, I wouldn't go so far as to say that tragedies like Columnbine could have been prevented, but at least people would have acknowleged there was a problem before some punks left 17 dead in the hills of Colorado. How 'bout challenging the conventional notion that our kids are little angels. He's the only writer, including Dickens, Fitzgereld, Hemingway, Hawthorne, ect. that has ever made me angery by killing off one his characters that he made me love. Nobody better call those people cardboard. Check out the characters in "It". You watch them grow up. You are there! Dream Catcher builds the same kind of closeness. As for Aesthetics, two words: "Needful Things." So I guess what your getting at, is that King is a great exaple of literary genious. I'm glad we finally see eye to eye on somthing, E. Lee.


Commercial fiction is more popular (i.e. commercial) because of the same reason that the most popular films are often the ****ties: Because the majority of people lack either the education or the intellect to appreciate art.

Sadly, there is alot of comercial bullsh*t floating around, both in the literary world and in the film industry. But I for one consider myself both educated (a work in progress albeit) and intellectual. And thanks to my appreciation for art, I have been able to deduce for myself good art from bad art, in literature, propor art, film, music, ect. And in all those catagories, I have found good art in heavily commercialized environs. I will admit that the goods are few and far between, but dismissing a whole genre on the basis that alot of it is crap is stupid, wether your dismissing commercialized literature or classics. And I know people who do both.

[Robert E Lee]

Originally posted by IWilKikU
I just finished the Great Gatsby by Fitzgereld and I must say, it was damned entertaining. Just before that I read Carrie, by King, and I am still feeling guilty for all the crap I put this one kid through in grade school. I never really felt guilty for messing with this dorky little sh*t before, but I'll be damned if "Carrie" wont make me remember him for the rest of my life. I would say that King made a fairly lasting impression on me there. There are other examples from King books that I could give you, but that one just fell upon me like 3 weeks ago, so its nice and fresh. There's also "The Stand". I don't know about the rest of you, but when the SARS virus was flying around the eastern hemisphere, I was thinking "Captain Trips". There are many more.



King wrote about violence in America's youth long before anyone wanted to hear about it. He wrote about school shootings back in the '70s! If people had payed attention to what he was saying back in the day, I wouldn't go so far as to say that tragedies like Columnbine could have been prevented, but at least people would have acknowleged there was a problem before some punks left 17 dead in the hills of Colorado. How 'bout challenging the conventional notion that our kids are little angels. He's the only writer, including Dickens, Fitzgereld, Hemingway, Hawthorne, ect. that has ever made me angery by killing off one his characters that he made me love. Nobody better call those people cardboard. Check out the characters in "It". You watch them grow up. You are there! Dream Catcher builds the same kind of closeness. As for Aesthetics, two words: "Needful Things." So I guess what your getting at, is that King is a great exaple of literary genious. I'm glad we finally see eye to eye on somthing, E. Lee.



Sadly, there is alot of comercial bullsh*t floating around, both in the literary world and in the film industry. But I for one consider myself both educated (a work in progress albeit) and intellectual. And thanks to my appreciation for art, I have been able to deduce for myself good art from bad art, in literature, propor art, film, music, ect. And in all those catagories, I have found good art in heavily commercialized environs. I will admit that the goods are few and far between, but dismissing a whole genre on the basis that alot of it is crap is stupid, wether your dismissing commercialized literature or classics. And I know people who do both.

Don't be a smart aleck. You know damn well that King writes to entertain and writes with an appalling cheapness.

[star blue]

if you say so.

[crisaor]

Originally posted by Molokai
i was wondering if anyone had thoughts on what qualities make a book 'good' or 'well written'. today, the best seller lists are full of books that many consider poorly written pap. john grisham, tom clancy and stephen king are frequent targets of this criticism.
curious to hear you what you think.
I guess that in the end, in all depends on your definition of best seller. If you base your case solely in people like Grisham, Clancy, King, Coelho, and many others, then my answer is yes. That can't be considered as 'well written literature'. As Robert E Lee said, that doesn't promote thought at all. It's a product already diggested, you can do nothing else with it but to swallow it and be done; the reader doesn't have to do anything else but being so. At the end, nothing will have changed, and with any luck (it doesn't happen to me), he'll amuse himself for a while, but no more. At least, not until the next bestseller book comes along. Because that's what all these books are about: endless and constant repetition.

On the other hand, if you consider a wider definition, I'd have to say that there is no reason to consider bestsellers books as bad written. Take Michael Moore, or Noam Chomsky, for instance. You can hardly say that their books aren't literary, even when they're not fictional. Dickens was a bestseller, so was Balzac, and many others. It depends on the particular author.

[IWilKikU]

Originally posted by Robert E Lee
Don't be a smart aleck. You know damn well that King writes to entertain and writes with an appalling cheapness.

...And you know damn well (if you've read half of my posts on this forum) that he's one of my favorite authors. Its sad that you're so simple that you can't get more out of King's books than mere forgetable entertainment. I feel for you E. Lee. I really do.

[sloegin]

Get your nose out of the book, AP lit or not, and live life.

[ajoe]

Yeah... I was wondering about this question, too. In general horror/sci-fi/fantasy/romance are considered "trash" but the most popular genres in a bookstore. Why? And how come best-selling books do not make good books?

I'm also wondering if horror stories truly are trashy, then how come Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are considered classic?

[Robert E Lee]

I came to this site a long while ago seeking refuge from boards where people talked about what commercial shhit they read and how amazing it is. Sadly, it's changed.
Get your nose out of the book, AP lit or not, and live life.

:rolleyes:
I'm also wondering if horror stories truly are trashy, then how come Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are considered classic?

The word classic means that the book has had an impact on literature or society or ****ing anything. Those two novels were commercial as hell when they were released. But those were different times, as I've already stated. Commercial literature back then still had some thought-provoking thematic elements and those two novels in particular were products of imaginative minds. Sure enough, there was plenty of crap throughout history like those western dime-novels written last century; but today, commercial literature constitutes entirely of derivative junk with dialogue worthy of a porno film.

[subterranean]

Here's one thing that i know about the difference between literatures and best sellerrs :

The first ones are kinda hard to find in my book stores and sometimes I have to go to the "Import books" section to look for them :(. While on the other hand, the later is so darn easy to find..they are everywhere...
Moreover i can always borrow best sellers book from my friends..most of them love best sellers, while on the other hand I can't borrow literatures from anyone I know since no one really like classic enough to buy them...except Shakespeare's of course...
I know this post is so shallow..but actually that's the main difference that I know about those two

[den]

Literature and best sellers... hmm, well, I think it's a matter of supply and demand.

While both types of books sell well, best sellers seem to follow more current pop-culture trends, and often fade in popularity over time. Look at the whole memoirs genre for instance. I don't have a lot of opinion about `current' books, or following best seller list, as my interests lie in reading classic literature. I got bored of Stephen King ages ago. His cookie cutter, proven format of writing that always sells is wholly predictable. Which is fine for most, a lot of people look to reading for escape and fantasy, a break from reality. Immediate gratification which is endemic to our culture now.

Best sellers are often advertised/described in dollar figures, and the direct correlation of sales to dollars is sometimes misconstrued as `quality' writing, instead of `quantity'.

I'm sure there are business/political ramifications to best sellers too ie: the author's committment to their publisher that they must fulfill within agreed time-frame; publishing/media mogul/gazillionaire writers like Conrad Black probably owns the publishing company that did his Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom door-stopper/ tome. Or getting kudos, positive reviews from the leading critics in order to cement the success of a book. A lot of classic lit has already proven itself, by the very fact that it is old has been around for a lot longer than best selling authors.

Best sellers translate to feature film fairly quickly. But I think many classic literary novels have also had great adaptations made to screen. But there is not so much demand for classic films as there are middle of the road mediocrity that fills megaplexes these days. But then, what was it, the film, Brother, Where Art Thou?[i] was, albeit loosely, based on Homer's [i]The Odyssey.

`Literature' transcends faddish and contemporary fluctuations. Books like Ulysses will always be relevant and there will always be demand for it because for one thing literature comprises core reading material for post-secondary studies. There is recognised timeless quality to a lot of literature that is used as foundation for further intellectual development.

[Munro]

The chain of bookstores I work for don't even stock King's latest novel anywhere in Sydney now, after a month or so since it was released. Reason being, it was a giant hard back novel, with a weak story and sloppy writing within a genre he hardly seems versed in (fantasy fiction). It was called 'The Dark Tower' and, get this, it cost $A50! It looked really lame, me and my workmates were joking about it all morning of its barely noticed release.

[Sitaram]

This looks like a very interesting and useful thread.

I did not read the book, but the story of The Shawshank Redemption in the movie version is breathtaking. And for me, since I am always looking for symbolism and religion and philosophy embedded in fiction and poetry, it is impressive to consider something which can stand on its own simply as a great story, without any hidden meaning or esoteric level.

I suppose the test of time, of centuries even, is the most reliable touchstone to separate great literature from best sellers.

My 88 year old father told me of the best seller "Anthony Adverse" during the 1930's, by Hervey Allen, as being the first "best seller" he was ever consious of as an adolescent. I had never heard of the book, and to think it was something everyone was talking about a mere 70 years ago.

The opposite extreme of the forgotten best seller, is the great poet or novelist who dies in poverty and obscurity, but whose works are "rediscovered" decades after their death, and revived, and become immortalized as classics of their time. Clearly, Emily Dickinson is a writer of this genre.

Perhaps Fernando Pessoa is another one to look at, as someone "discovered" posthumously.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernando_Pessoa

http://www.quebusca.com.br/buscaSite/?palavra=534

[mono]

Very interesting thread!
When speaking of definitions of literature, as I posted in another thread, I must still consider best-sellers as literature, though, sometimes, lower quality, in my opinion; now and then, I will find a best-seller that makes me jump out of my seat, the same way a beautiful classical piece of literature will.
Most best-sellers that I have encountered, I have noticed, seem to engender less depth, metaphor, and simile (with a few exceptions, such as Stephen King's The Green Mile) as compared to most classical works. I think I can have some empathy with most of the contributors of this thread, but, in my very blunt opinion, most best-sellers just seem to contain less intelligence; otherwise, I merely just misunderstand them. Works by writers like Ernest Hemingway, Leo Tolstoy, Virginia Woolf, and Gustave Flaubert, for example, I would like to say seem written more qualitatively than quantitatively, as compared to most contemporary best-sellers, who produce books, it seems, every few months, like John Grisham, Stephen King, and Dean Koontz. Some classical pieces I have encountered have recently, I have seen, boosted to best-sellers again, such as novels by J.R.R. Tolkein. Do not misunderstand, as I have read some books that an author wrote very quickly that I absolutely loved, like J.D. Salinger's The Catcher In The Rye, which he apparently wrote in a matter of days.
In essence, though I try to encorporate a reverence for all literature, including certain seemingly mindless best-sellers (no specifics need mention), in my experience of reading literature, I have often found classical literature to simply contain more wisdom and quality than several best-sellers, that communicates to a reader without words, sometimes sending shivers down my spine. I cannot, however, claim the same for poetry, which, I think, nearly every era had (and has) its incredible poets, not-bad poets, and poets with whom I just cannot relate. :D

[EAP]

Best-sellers are a subset of literature.

[mono]

This morning, I oddly thought of this thread.
Among his/her contemporaries, if an author now considered to have written classical literature, but earned the best-seller's list during his/her era, I wonder if that author's readers also found their work "trendy," "less intelligent," or consisting of weaker plots, as we have compared today's best-seller books from classical literature.
I know of many classical authors who many readers neglected for numerous reasons, such as William Blake, D.H. Lawrence, Emily Dickinson, Jane Austen, and Arthur Rimbaud. Among similar classical authors, others had astoundingly high sales of books during their time, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Virginia Woolf, William Shakespeare (staging many plays), and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Many more neglected (now classical) writers seemed to gain fame after their death.
Does anyone else find this strange? :rolleyes:

[faith]

Well, in my opinion a best seller is the kind of book that many people wanna read. I mean, that's what makes them best sellers. And why best sellers might be of a sertain kind (well, books like Grishams), is cos most/many people wanna read entertraining books which are easy to read and don't necesarily reguire that much thought. I think a lot of people read to get out of the (hard) real world for a while. And when u want to get out of the real world, u probably want entertrainment and not necessarily art. (And I'm not saying that art (artistical/literary books) couldn't be entertarining.)

And I must admit that even thou I would never read a Grisham-book, I generally see it as a good sign wenn it says best seller on a book..., but that's no guarantee off course.

[Literal]

This is definitely a very fascinating thread!
But one must also consider the time period when replying to this thread, since many of the replies that I've read thus far seem to be focusing (if I am wrong, I apologize beforehand) on present bestseller books. For instance, books such as Gone With the Wind and Pride and Prejudice were, and still are, considered pieces of literature as well as bestsellers.
But when one focuses on the present, the difference between a bestseller and literature have become more apparent. In my opinion, bestsellers today somewhat fail in comparison to literature. Bestsellers today contain substandard morals and ethics (if they are even present at all), and focus mainly on high-paced entertainment. But this opinion is entirely based on my own experiences as a reader; other people may read this and say to the contrary.