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"  Horace Engdahl, permanent Secretary of the Swedish Nobel Academy, explained to the AP why most writers who win the Nobel Prize for Literature are European. U.S. writers are &amp;quot;too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture. The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don&amp;#039;t translate enough and don&amp;#039;t really participate in the big dialogue of literature.That ignorance is restraining\u2026Of course there is powerful literature in all big cultures, but you can&amp;#039;t get away from the fact that Europe still is the center of the literary world ... not the United States.&amp;quot; Well shit, Horace, our ignorance might restrain us in a lot of ways (books are least of our problems at the moment), but plenty of our literature can compete globally.It doesn&amp;#039;t have to win every time, but it can certainly put up a fight.I&amp;#039;m not one to launch into a defense of America, but it seems unfair to expect the same things of American literature (America is one country) that you would of European literature (a place made up of many countries), and that those expectations, which sound very personal, ultimately define what good literature is.There is a growing presence of immigrant voices in American fiction, and while that perspective is still the American immigrant perspective, it&amp;#039;s very sensitive to and inclusive of a wider-range of views and issues familiar to a global community.If you simply don&amp;#039;t like Americans (doesn&amp;#039;t seem like you do, weird), you might struggle with American literature because of course whatever worldview we do or don&amp;#039;t have will be there.But you could say the same things of a lot of European literature that&amp;#039;s distinctly English/French, etc. Anyway, Horace, I&amp;#039;m sure you&amp;#039;ve heard that you&amp;#039;ve pissed people off. You probably don&amp;#039;t care, but I do, at least enough to enjoy it.   "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a5170/horace-engdahl-blog/>