"In our analysis, the Ditz Lit formula for
bestsellerdom breaks down into two main parts: (1) write to the emotional level of a fourteen-year-old; (2) apply huge amounts of marketing to the book," says Richard Buzzell, founder of the New Edge Authors.
Yet current American political culture owes an astonishing amount to this Irish Catholic son of D.C.'s Georgetown neighborhood, even as he fades into disgraced
bestsellerdom. Notions such as the "silent majority," liberal media bias, and the modern culture war all sprang, more or less fully formed, from the head of this former Nixon and Reagan aide, as did a Republican critique of "vulture capitalism."
Hence the delicious irony implicit in Dawkins's remark: "I would happily have foregone
bestsellerdom if there had been the slightest hope of Duns Scotus illuminating my central question of whether God exists." (16) There was in the Middle Ages and remains now an alternative view that exposes the New Atheists' bluster as built not on the findings of science, but on a philosophical position to which they unknowingly subscribe.
Professor and chair of Harvard's Department of the History of Science Harrington looks at how faith or "the power of positive thinking" or its opposite have crept in the last hundred years from the twilight zone to mainstream
bestsellerdom.
The big lottery of metropolitan success and
bestsellerdom sits out there like gold at the end of the rainbow.
Kirchhoff has a lot of fun with all the fashionable brand names, from Daniel's Porsche (the garaged one) to his watches and his wardrobe, which bespeak life in this "fast lane." But he seems himself, with this book, to be trading, on the one hand, on the obvious currency of the financial crisis and, on the other, on the still persisting
bestsellerdom of Roche's book.
The
bestsellerdom of Khaled Hosseini's "The Kite Runner" couldn't make a Stateside hit of the 2007 film version, but it should provide ample subscription bait for regional theaters via Matthew Spangler's sturdy stage adaptation.
By 1837, all the preconditions for
bestsellerdom were in place: cheap paper strong enough for rotary steam presses, competing publishing houses, a sizable literate public, and a bit of extra time.
Berry, and Diane Glancy, yet all contributing to a canon of American fiction that is no more hampered by the academic politics of creative writing programs than it is by the constraints of
bestsellerdom. True, The Fiction Collective's rhetoric overstresses the latter (in an awkwardly unexamined way) while pretending the former does not exist.