This year I found it difficult to put more than a couple literary works on my list of 10 Best for MyShelf.com.  I felt totally at sea.  Did I really read fewer books this year?  Is my taste level dissipating?  I began to wonder if I should go back to school to take a literature class.  You know, to stop my slide into the dungeons of meaningless reading. 

Then I started going through my files and I was both relieved and chagrined.   It’s not that my taste is disintegrating.  It may not be that such work is not being written.  It is because no one is publishing it, no one is reviewing it and no one is supporting it!  And that’s according to the best and brightest in the industry. 

Here is my sorry report for 2002:

In March the New York Public Library hosted a symposium of publishers.  Dan Simon, publisher of Seven Stories Press, noted that the “publishing environment dictates that something so normal as publishing quality books and stories is considered ‘radical.’”

Oh, where are the mentors, the editors, the muses for fine literary work?

In April Oprah announced that she could no longer find literature that excited her enough to choose one book a month (that’s only 12, right!!!!!???)—at least not books that that she could be passionate about. In one of my “Back to Literature” columns, I suggested that her list had degenerated into an unneeded rehash of the New York Times Bestseller List anyway.

Who will speak for the unknown author?  Who will find the pearls that Oprah claims she—with all her resources—cannot find?

In August Newsweek reported that the New York Times Book Review has been “plagued by the same plummeting ad revenue that has starved many publiiations” and that, as a result, will be publishing fewer reviews.  We authors know that it is tough to make it in a big way if the NY Times chooses to ignore our work.  It is clear that more will be ignored this year than ever before.

Where, oh where are the patrons of the arts?  The advertisers?  The readers who should be flooding the Times’ letters-to-the editors e-mail boxes with venom unlike anything they ever before experienced?

Then this summer Carolyn Howard-Johnson (moi) jumped in to the fray and said she would fill the gap.  She knew of several books of very high caliber that Oprah had not found at the bottom of her slush pile.  Or perhaps it was that the authors and/or their publishers had been so dissuaded by the size of that slush pile that they didn’t even make the effort to be noticed.   Whatever.  These were books that Ms. Howard-Johnson thought should be recognized!

Now, where are those books?  I receive books.  By the scads.  I receive how-to books and recipe books.  I receive books I have agreed to review and those I haven’t.  Very few are literary.  I am beginning to sympathize with Oprah.

I am looking for fine literary works by unknown or obscure authors.  First books.  Subsidy published books.  Books pulished by small presses.  The book that Dan Case published (see above) was by Noam Chomsky.  If he qualifies as radical or risky, I’ll eat my old fountain pen, ink and all.  Chomsky’s name is a household word in the literary world. 

No, I am looking for new authors who sing a song with their stories and their words.  Authors who are trying to make the world a better place by examining the human condition.  Authors who are concerned about not only the state of publishing and reading but the state of the world. 

Please, please, help me out!