There was a time when shopping for books was an adventure. You would walk into a bookstore and follow your gut, hoping something would resonate with you, possibly enlighten you, give you something you needed without knowing you needed it.

You would visit the home of an acquaintance, a new girlfriend or boyfriend, and one of the first things you would do was to study their bookshelf. We understood that what someone read said something about who they were as human beings.

Today, that adventure is largely gone. And the way we meet and interact with others has changed for the worse.

Bookstores have become glorified gift shops, with the same tired “bestsellers” pleading for your attention from a few shelves and bins. The sad fact is that many people have simply given up on literature. If they still read at all, they return to the classics because so little recent work has truly engaged them. What gets published is rarely a measure of quality and cultural relevance; it’s a matter of marketing to the latest trend.

We are bombarded with sameness. Social agendas masquerading as character. Prose stripped down until there is nothing left to discover. Stories constructed from the same familiar clichés, written for an audience presumed to have neither the imagination nor the intelligence to want anything more.

These books may win awards. They may become bestsellers.

That doesn’t make them good.

And when a culture begins rewarding sameness while treating difficulty, originality, and independent thought as problems to be solved, it is a wake-up call, a sign that things need to change.

We realize something has gone wrong, and we feel literature needs to become important again.

That’s why we are building Fringe Books.

Fringe Books didn’t wait for permission. And neither should you.