Today's book news

After all the fuss raised by the news that the NYT plans to dumb down the NYT Book Review, executive editor Bill Keller tries some damage control.

Mr. Keller said The Times had no intention of sacrificing fiction, and literary fiction in particular. "The goal is to somewhat increase the emphasis on nonfiction, but not move away from fiction." He said that fiction versus nonfiction did not amount to a "zero-sum game," because the paper would be adding more pages to The Book Review—although he said he didn’t yet know how many.

I'd like to see a study done a year or two from now, counting the number of pages devoted to literary fiction, commercial fiction and non-fiction, to see if his promise holds up.

Meanwhile, I got a rejection from one of the agents who's looking at my novel. That leaves one agent still looking over the excerpt I sent. I don't know, by the way, whether my movel falls into "literary fiction" or "commerical fiction." Those categories aren't written in stone, I suspect. Toni Morrison's books were probably thought of as literary fiction until she started selling in the hundreds of thousands; then they turned into commercial fiction.