13 April 2009

Amazon.homophobia?

Thomas Jones

Amazon.com has branded James Baldwin'sGiovanni's Room, Gore Vidal'sThe City and the Pillar, Jeanette Winterson's Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and thousands of other books with gay characters as 'adult' – and not in the sense that Virginia Woolf had in mind when she said Middlemarch was 'one of the few English novels written for grown-up people'. One consequence of this is that they don't get to have a 'sales rank', so they can't appear near the top of bestseller lists, so people are less likely to see them and buy them.