It has been a long time since Granta last published literary criticism. In this issue, Christian Lorentzen confronts a specious new form of pseudo-materialist critique – colophonoscopy, in a word – that would have taken György Lukács to task for bothering to read Balzac when he should have been modeling the outputs of Moscow’s State Publishing House. The point is not that sociological readings of literature have no merit, but that, by abandoning the notion of literary value as anything other than elite consumerism, they are misguided, even on their own narrowly sociological grounds. In the Marxist tradition from Trotsky to Jameson, the phenomenon of individual genius – an idea currently under suspicion – is not just aesthetically but sociologically richer than more ordinary production: Daniel Deronda or A House for Mr Biswas tells us more, both symptomatically and in their own words, about their societies than most bestsellers of the time. But then who reads fiction for information?