Departing Granta editor Ian Jack muses on the future of literary fiction:

In the last few years advances have gone rapidly down and unless a novel wins a prize, or has an audience that already exists, merely getting good reviews won’t mean a thing. Writers want a style of living that is at least no worse than a journalist. They want to live in a £200,000 flat in Stoke Newington, but literary fiction won’t bring this.

A £200,000 flat in Stoke Newington!? That’s what literary novelists dream of nowadays? No wonder the modern novel is on the brink of bankruptcy. What happened to the Paris of Joyce and Hemingway? Or Kafka’s Prague? Durrell’s Alexandria and Byron’s Greece? Paul Bowles in Morocco? Lowry in Mexico, and Goethe in Rome?

Dream big, we say, or go home…