Fifty years from now, if people are still reading long-form fiction (say, anything longer than a Twitter feed), what contemporary authors' works will survive? I'll wait.

People often speak of Cather's story about Jim Burden and his friendship with his childhood playmate Antonia as one of our great American novels

Can the phrase "Great American Novel" only be applied to realistic novels that attempt to capture the mainstream American experience? Or can it be applied to other novels that are more diverse in terms of either subject matter or literary approach?

Dubbing the pre-publication furore "Franzenfrenzy", Weiner put out a call to her 15,000 Twitter follows "for non-Franzen novels about love, identity, ...

"The heart of fandom," John Updike once wrote, "is identification": that's my team at the top of the division, those are my guys chasing the pennant, and c'mon, let's face it, we're the best.