Keeping silent is hard to do

Anis Shivani's essay in The Huffington Post, "The 15 Most Overrated Contemporary American Writers" is causing more people to say, "aw, it's just sour grapes" rather than seriously looking at the state of American novels today.

En route to naming names, Shivani says (and this isn't new) that MFA writing programs are teaching students to imitate writers who are already in vogue and that big publishers are happy to facilitate that.

I said something like that ten years ago, but luckily my words did...