" I think writers were viewed and treated as far more powerful beings in the nineteenth century than they are today and that we can feel their awareness of that power in the prose from that time. The twentieth century has seen the cultural disenfranchisement of fiction writers for reasons we all know—film, TV, the Internet. But to read a novel by Zola or Dickens or George Eliot is to encounter—in different forms, of course—a loose, swaggering, charming, flexible narrative voice. It’s a voice that has a bewitching authority. I wish there were more swagger in contemporary fiction, but I suppose it’s hard to swagger when one feels in constant danger of marginalization and obsolescence. Even a swagger might not read like a swagger anymore.

— jennifer egan