The U.S. has no great writing?

Members of the Nobel panel for literature have said that "the United States is too insular and ignorant to compete with Europe when it comes to great writing." The Literary Review feels differently, but we're interested in your thoughts.

New Issue of TLRWeb

Issue 2 of TLRWeb is live, featuring work by Robert Gibbons; George Godeau, translated by Kathleen McGookey; Oscar Hahn, translated by James Hoggard; Nathan Hoks; Bryan Tso Jones; Iztok Osojnik, translated by Barbara Siegel Carlson; Rush Rankin; Kent Shaw; Lesley Strutt; and Charles Harper Webb.

A snippet from Lesley Strutts's "Grace":

There’s a moment
when the day forgives you everything,
lights up its eyes for you.
And every branch of every tree
bends your name into a rising;
one swift shot at the mark -
a ladder to heaven, illuminated.
For one moment.
And then you move on.

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"Literature's Invisible Arbiters" by Esther Allen

Check out this interesting article by Esther Allen published in Guardian about "the make or break" of books. Straight from Allen:

Reader, I confess: For more than a decade, I've been writing reader's reports. I evaluate books written in or translated into French or Spanish for editors who, for the most part, can't read those languages. Writing the reports is a time-consuming, often frustrating, and always financially unprofitable pastime, and there can't be many of us willing to do it; sometimes two or three different publishers in sequence will, unbeknownst to each other, send me the same book to evaluate. I often wonder - particularly when a deadline is looming - why I do reader's reports at all.

More after the jump.