Bookstorm

I initially saw this during my eight-hours-a-night gig as the humble, mindless property of a sprawling corporation. The irony was almost too depressing to contemplate: inwardly, I refer to my work environment as "Kafkaesque," though I've resigned myself to the groupthink that's become a necessary part of corporate existence. I can rattle off propaganda in a numb voice that probably makes people wonder if my mother just passed away. Here's the thing: I think too much about my job--which isn't to say that I give a damn about it. It's not particularly fulfilling, and it's certainly not something on which I'd stake my life and reputation. It's merely a means to an end. I've perfected the art of caring without really caring.

So to all the corporate hacks moonlighting as literary geniuses: I salute you.

Nicholas Sparks is the direct literary descendant of William Shakespeare, Ernest Hemingway, and Sophocles. Don't laugh--he's quite serious:

... [H]e always does kill someone by the end of his tales, usually to maximum handkerchief effect.

"Of course!" Sparks says. "I write in a genre that was not defined by me. The examples were not set out by me. They were set out 2,000 years ago by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. They were called the Greek tragedies. A thriller is supposed to thrill. A horror novel is supposed to scare you. A mystery is supposed to keep you turning the pages, guessing 'whodunit?'

"A romance novel is supposed to make you escape into a fantasy of romance. What is the purpose of what I do? These are love stories. They went from (Greek tragedies), to Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, then Jane Austen did it, put a new human twist on it. Hemingway did it with A Farewell to Arms."

Right: not even Miley Cyrus could finish his latest novel The Last Song.