The last time there was an economic meltdown in the UK — during the eighties, aka the Thatcher era — with factories closing, unemployement skyrocketing, inflation spiking, public spending plummeting, strikes and riots, something strange happened in Great Britain, observes Boyd Tonkin in a commentary for The Independent: a new literary scene exploded. There were exciting new writers, bookstores, and publishers. Take, for example, Granta‘s first “Best of Young British Novelists” list, which included Salman Rushdie, Julian Barnes, William Boyd, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Graham Swift, Timothy Mo, Kazuo Ishiguro, Pat Barker, and Rose Tremain. Meanwhile, Tim Waterstone started a new chain of “classy upmarket bookshops, just as the retail world froze,” and “Culture hounds who, a few years previously would have burned ‘modern British novels’ for warmth while they queued to catch the new Scorsese or Bertolucci or see The Clash, haunted the faux-library charms of the new chain in search of excitement ….” New independent publishers such as Bloomsbury and Serpent’s Tail launched then, too. Could it happen again in the current financial crisis? Tonkin asks prominent indie publishers such as Simon Prosser of Hamish Hamilton, Pete Ayrton of Serpent’s Tail, and Carol Welch of Scptre, as well as novelists and critics such as Gordon Burn and Tom McCarthy, for their take on the possibility of literature emerging from the mess. He gets some interesting responses … such as that of Geoff Dyer, who says, “Anyone who has an eye on the market is not a writer but a whore.”