>>9
Yeah, novels that win the Booker Prize in the Commonwealth or the Akutagawa Prize in Japan get huge sales.
Someone once described the difference between an arthouse film and a "Hollywood" film as arthouse films are designed to get you to think, whereas mainstream films are designed to get you to feel. Or something to that effect.
I think it is the same with all artforms, especially books. Appealing to emotion is popular in mainstream fiction.
I also find that the books classified as "literature" in the bookstore are often not genre books. Not action or science-fiction in any mass entertainment sense, not fantasy, not crime thriller.
As Michael Chabon has pointed out, the literary community is guilty of pushing genre aside in favour of small dramatic stories or allegories, etc.