The truth is that, in the United States, maybe as few as two hundred writers of prose fiction make a living at it. Every Thursday, in USA Today’s entertainment section, there’s a list of the top fifty bestselling books. Non-fiction is grouped with fiction, hardbacks with paperbacks. Fifty books. A longer list of 150 books is available on that newspaper’s Internet site. The lowest book might have sold only a thousand copies nationwide. Seen from this perspective, the figure of two hundred fiction writers who make a living at it seems huge. A couple of years ago, I came across an article somewhere that said the average income for a fiction writer in the U.S. was $6,500. I believe it. The unescapable moral, I tell my students, is that anyone who wants to become a writer had better not give up his or her day job.

from Backspace– The Writer’s Place

Mise en abyme [acc. ii Wikipedia]

a paradigm of the intertextual nature of language, the way language never quite reaches the foundation of reality because it refers in a frame-in-frame way to other language, which refers to other language, etc.

The Subject Steve: A Novel: Sam Lipsyte

…an intriguing experimental concept, but the absence of coherent, linear plot means the commentary must be particularly sharp and interesting, and much of what Lipsyte offers is rambling, self-absorbed and at times just plain annoying. The troubles of the alienated and estranged offer plenty of opportunities for an adventurous approach, but much of what Lipsyte submits is familiar, a mannered echo, product of a sensibility halfway between Lish and Vonnegut.Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.