“If you look at the books that are backlist classics now, they were almost invariably best-sellers when they were new. The Catcher in the Rye. The Sun Also Rises. The Great Gatsby. These books were not discovered by the academy over centuries. They were sensations! Even Virginia Woolf was a best-seller in the U.S. during her lifetime. So a publisher is very strongly motivated to make their new books as successful as they can.”

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