How Jonathan Franzen Blew My High

Barnes & Nobles' PR firm (5W Public Relations) is taking a bold direct email approach with bloggers.  Here's the pitch I received in my mailbox today.

Finished flipping through this summer’s bestsellers? Well the classics are making a comeback!

On this week’s episode of Barnes & Noble Tagged! (www.BN.com/Tagged), host Molly Pesce shares the top five bestselling classic novels of the year that have been flying off the bookshelves this summer:

Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
1984 by George Orwell
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald and…
Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen

But you’ll have to watch the whole episode to see what the latest Barnes & Noble Recommends pick is for this summer – a classic in the making, announced this week on Barnes & Noble Tagged!

Here is a link to the video:
www.bn.com/tagged

For more information about the Barnes & Noble Studio or for embed code to post the video, please contact me.

For all the readers of this blog who think literary fiction is best defined as classics with long dead authors, this one's for you.  I will warn you that the video above is super annoying.  

My opinion of the promotion? Yuck.  But I felt similarly betrayed when Oprah started pushing the classics (including at least one of those listed above). I still blame that misogynist idge, Jonathan Franzen, BTW, for ruining any possibility of the Big O's blessing for the rest of us. 

Plus, I've read all those books, most of them more than once.