We had Günter Grass after WWII. Who the hell under the age of 30 has heard of Günter Grass now?

We also had British working class fiction. There's not so much of that around at the moment - but there is quite a bit of immigrant ethnic colour (of all sorts) fiction.

I'd lay reasonable odds that a great immigrant novel by an Eastern European will be discovered by the UK's literary industry within the next year or three - and there will be at least one rape scene in it, and probably also shocking scenes of violent human trafficking.

In the US Katrina fiction is just about starting to make an appearance. Iraq isn't - it's still too real to be mythologised. But give it five to ten years.

We don't have:

Native American fiction
Puerto Rican fiction
Indonesian fiction
Amazonian rain forest fiction
Etc...

It's not that these aren't being written - I'm sure they are. It's not that there isn't the potential for cathartic brutality and violence in those stories, because there certainly is. It's not that someone somewhere isn't reading them, or even writing abou them. It's more that they're not relevant to Western interests, so they'll remain outside the usual circuit of culture industry shindigs -  forever invisible to the New York Times and Guardian best-seller lists, which will continue to be populated by Dan Brown, Who Moved My Cheese?, and novels about married women meeting old boyfriends.