As the novelist and critic David Lodge has remarked, in summing up a lecture about the coexistence of fabulation, minimalism, and other movements, "Everything is in and nothing is out." Coming from insiders to whom a term like "fabulation" actually means something, this hyperbole is excusable, even endearing it's as if a team of hotel chefs were getting excited about their assortment of cabbages. The absence of a dominant school of criticism, we are told, has given rise to an extraordinary variety of styles, a smorgasbord with something for every palate. For years now editors, critics, and prize jurors, not to mention novelists themselves, have been telling the rest of us how lucky we are to be alive and reading in these exciting times. I realize that such a declaration must sound perversely ungrateful to the literary establishment. Myers, the author of A Reader's Manifesto, argues that the time has come for readers to stand up to the literary establishment. Also see: Interviews: "A Reader's Revenge" B.
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