What Have They Got Against Fiction?

ArtsJournal blogger Our Girl In Chicago is upset at some of the changes coming to the Times books section. “It’s not as though my reading habits are going to take a big hit even if the NYTBR banishes fiction reviews from their pages altogether. Yet the blinkered reasoning proffered by [Times executive editor] Bill Keller rankles. First there’s his general blithe condescension toward novels, apparently based on an assumption that while nonfiction is serious, fiction is just playing around. Even if Bill Keller really thinks this, it astonishes me that he’d say it, let alone that the Times would base editorial policy on it.”