Resumen de Ni cínics ni cofois. Vuit notes sobre els suplements literaris
What¿s the real meaning of literary supplements? Should they be specialized or should they act as a sort of Indian reservation for the book news? The eight notes of this article would like to cast some light on the dilemma. The answers are not easy, at least in the Catalan cultural scene. The laws of the market have corrupted, in a way, the role of the supplements. Almost every newspaper belongs to a big company, which at the same time has a publishing house of its own. There is a great deal of inside pressure to produce good reviews of their own books in the supplement. Speaking of critics: one of the principles of The Saturday Review, as their founders proclaimed, was ¿the resistance to cynicism¿ in their collaborators¿ articles. In contrast, especially in Catalan culture, there¿s the constant flattery, which increases the value of mediocrity and transforms reality into something flabby and putrid. Jason Epstein, one of the founders of The New York Review of Books, gave a list of concepts to characterize a good literary supplement: involvement, passion, character, eccentricity and a literary tone.
