Literature Is On A Dead-End Street

July 22, 2010 - PRLog -- The days when people queued in Russia, one of the prime lands of literature,  to buy a new book coming out to the market, are out. Now it is the publishers that are qeueing to sell their books. The world market seems to be drowning among a huge crowd of titles.
Bookstores seem to be filled with new choices in literature :  criminal novels, sex books,
cooking books, crossword puzzles, self-help books, books by the famous, childrens books, travel guides.
Best-seller lists seem to vary from bookstore to bookstore. Top literary prizes seem to go sometimes to authors who prefer money or fame, to art. Big publishers, squeezed by the tight conditions of sales and profit making and having lost  forty percent of their business to the new digital publishers who mushroomed in every corner in the past fifteen years, seem to publish only those titles that are sure to sell- rather than those that are  surely literature. "Optimum sales" has taken over from the "optimum art" in literature.
The new generation don't seem to have heard of the old masters : Tchehov, Tolstoy,
Kafka, Solzhenitsyn, Dostoyevsky, Sholokov, Pasternak, Panait Istrati, Steinbeck, Somerset Maugham, Hamsun, Ibsen,  Strindberg, Sillanpaa, Undset, Sartre, Bergson, Shakespeare, Dante, Moliere, Cervantes, Schiller, Goethe, Balzac, Proust,  Faulkner, Joyce, Eliot, Buck, Beckett, Naruda and hundreds more from each nation and culture from east to west and south to north. The new set of authors lead the way into a new literature and into a new life style: crime, gourmet cooking, self help, killing time by crossword puzzles, sex without love,
travel-craze, fashion ...
What happened to the  lovely short stories, fiery poetry, autobiographies by interesting persons, romantic love and life stories, true stories of human happiness, miracles,
exciting novels of  adventure, historical novels ?  These are forgotten in the shadow of the new literature of crime and sex and crossword puzzles and rubbish literary products which face us in the front rows of books when we enter a bookstore.
And the literary critics write about as many books as they can, but the count never reaches more than a few percent of books sent to them. Aren't there any good books among the mass of books sent to them?
Literature seems also strongly invaded by TV and Internet.
A good publisher says, "Books are more important than buildings; as they last longer."
How to bring literature into its good position, so fewer and better books are published and
not so many bad-taste books crowd the shelves? This is a very important question, as art and literature are strong manifestations of our existence which shape our lives.

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The author of this article, Askin Ozcan, has published six titles in the U.S.A. :
(Available at 200 internet bookshops incl. www.amazon.com)
Global distribution by Ingram Book.

Wisdom In Smile (Xlibris) , ISBN 142577153X
www.xlibris.com/WisdomInSmile.html

Small Miracles (Outskirts Press) , ISBN 1598001000
www.outskirtspress.com/smallmiracles

The Second Venice (Outskirts Press) ,  ISBN 1598000888
www.outskirtspress.com/thesecondvenice

Stockholm Stories (Xlibris) , ISBN 1425771629
www.xlibris.com/STOCKHOLMSTORIES/.html

Lightning And A Bouquet Of Roses (Publish America) , ISBN 1424111870

The Mini-Submarine (Xlibris) ISBN 978-1-4363-9414-7
www.xlibris.com/TheMiniSubmarine.html

Two of his books ("Wisdom In Smile"   and  "Small Miracles" ) will be published this year also in India by Prakash Books.

Askin Ozcan writes  for www.thesop.org , www.newsblaze.com, www.theseoultimes, www.americanchronicle.com
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Author's web-page:   www.xlibris.com/AskinOzcan.html

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