Literary Churchman Sermons, a Selection, Repr

How can you even carry on a conversation about reading?" She may be overstating the case, but book clubs, for example, are finding it increasingly more difficult to choose monthly selections that appeal to large numbers of divergent readers. Nor is the process of media differentiation confined to commercial publishing alone. Non-commercial literary magazines are proliferating. "Never in American history have there been as many such magazines as there are today," reports The New York Times Book Review. Similarly, "underground newspapers" have sprung up in dozens of American and European cities. There are at least 200 of these in the United States, many of them supported by advertising placed by leading record manufacturers. Appealing chiefly to hippies, campus radicals and the rock audience, they have become a tangible force in the formation of opinion among the young. From London's IT and the East Village Other in New York, to the Kudzu in Jackson, Mississippi, they are heavily illustrated, often color-printed, and jammed with ads for "psychedelicatessens" and dating services ...»