Want to Bring Back Books? Here's How

Was there really a time when short fiction routinely popped up in general circulation? If so, it's more than my 20-something years of experience can attest to. All the same, the rumors persist. Periodicals once published -- and paid -- fiction writers as a means of boosting circulation. Life magazine originally published Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea as a serial -- a five-million copy printing that sold out almost immediately. Seventeen magazine used to accept poetry submissions from its readers (including a young Sylvia Plath) for publication.

If I didn't know any better, I would swear it was all the work of some talented fiction writer.

This week, Woman Up! briefly turned book club with the help of the New York Times op-ed pages, which posted a short story in space usually reserved for columns. I couldn't have been happier. With the dismal reports on the state of literature reading, I can't help wondering if the problem is that literature is so hidden in our daily lives.

Of course, short fiction is still published in magazines like the New Yorker, Harper's and Esquire. But, unless you pop into a bookstore or a library, it's unlikely that you'll encounter much literature in your day, certainly not on the scale you encounter movies or television, both of which get regular and widely read coverage in newspapers and magazines. (Consider the note that the Times editors tacked on at the end of the story, "This is a work of fiction." It's a helpful guidepost considering that only an estimated 50 percent of American adults read a work of literature in the form of any novel, play, poem or work of short fiction last year, according to the NEA.)

I agree with you, Bonnie, though, that the op-ed section is a confusing place to put it. It would be far better to have a regular fiction feature -- and not just for the Times. I'd love to see fiction become an ordinary feature of newspapers and general-circulation magazines. The less of a wall there is between literature and our daily lives, the more readers we're going to see.