Christianity in Literature

Upcoming cover-story of the New York Times Book Review:

Christian belief figures into literary fiction in our place and time as something between a dead language and a hangover.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/23/books/review/has-fiction-lost-its-faith.html?nl=books&emc=edit_bk_20121221&_r=0&pagewanted=print

I would not bother to post that -- the truth of its thesis is well-known -- save that, by coincidence, a couple of minutes before reading the announcement of this article in my inbox, I’d received an email from a friend saying she’d tried to buy my books on Amazon  and couldn’t find any (apart from The Semantics of Form in Arabic, which is way overpriced).  
Now, in their own modest genre-fiction way, these books and stories are all counter-examples to the reviewer’s thesis (featuring the two-fisted wise-cracking preconciliar detective Murphy) -- but, counterexamples that do not count, since Amazon has insured that you will never learn of them, even if (for some reason) you go so far as to search explicitly (in “Advanced Search”) on the name of the author (“David Justice”) in the Author-field.

What you get, if you do that,  is a long list, headed by -- well, by books  none of which match the search criteria.  Books by other guys named “David”, mostly (oh yeh, hey, close enough), and some about the “Justice” system (which is fine, but hey, Amazon, newsflash, that’s not in the Author field).

If you PageNext PageNext PageNext, eventually you’ll see some of mine -- but not before encountering titles (by, of course, authors that do not match the search criteria) which are actually out of print.   In other words, Amazon promotes unavailable non-Christian books before it will mention available titles by available books that exactly match the author you asked for.

(They also actively promote the paraphiliac agenda, which I resoundingly do not, but presumably that is a coincidence.)

This is truly depressing.  I could almost understand it if, when you attempted to find a book by a Christian author, Amazon interrupted your search saying “HEY WHADDAYA WANNA READ THAT FOR READ DAN BROWN INSTEAD, YA YA, READ PORN WHY DONCHA”;  but to be subordinated to books that are actually out of print…. ( Aber brechen wir hier ab.)

Anyhow -- to hell with it.   My experience with commercial publishers over the years -- over the decades --  has been depressing beyond belief -- beginning, indeed, with that book about Arabic, which quickly sold out in paperback, but which was never reprinted in that format, and which understandably died on the vine in hardcover, since it was priced delusionally high.   Although aimed at a Western audience, that book was actually translated into Arabic, and may have sold more copies in Arabia  than it did in the United States.

So:  to hell with Amazon.  If you’re interested in my fiction, click here,

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justice.html

though God knows how you can actually obtain a copy.

On this blog:  I'll continue to pursue the truth as I (dimly) perceive it,
but with no hope of distribution  save by word of mouth.
(Hey -- not complaining here ... Boethius had it worse ... ... .... )