U.S. Not Translating, Reading Foreign Books

The New York Review of Books considers claims that Americans do not read enough foreign fiction and examines the cost of this alleged, “culturally catastrophic American isolationism.” Tim Parks says it’s not so surprising that we are moving toward a literary internationalism whose driving force, for better or worse, is the mainstream American novel, “Since many people have come to share a vision of the novel as a peculiarly liberal art…dedicated to the construction of a better future through an account of the present, and deeply hostile to anything that curbs the freedom of the individual.”