The Lovely Bones | Daniel Mendelsohn

In the following excerpt, Mendelsohn argues that the general failure to recognize the book's weaknesses says something about the cultural climate in which it was first published.

Daniel Mendelsohn

In the following excerpt, Mendelsohn argues that the general failure to recognize the book's weaknesses says something about the cultural climate in which it was first published.

On May 22 of this year, six weeks before the official publication date of Alice Sebold's debut novel [The Lovely Bones], which is narrated from Heaven by a fourteen-year-old girl who's been raped and murdered, the novelist and former New York Times columnist Anna Quindlen appeared of the Today show and declared that if people had one book to...

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