Literary prestige is a strange economy. It operates by its own rules, distributes its rewards unevenly and sometimes arbitrarily, and maintains its value partly through the mystification of how it is assigned. Like all prestige economies, it is most powerful over those who believe in it most — and most writers, at some point in their working lives, believe in it considerably.

This is worth examining not to dismiss prestige as meaningless — it is not meaningless — but to understand what it actually is, how it is produced, and what it costs the writers who pursue it.