A defense of contemporary fiction

It might be worse-written, but it's usually more enjoyable

My corner of Substack is pretty suspicious of contemporary literature. I don’t think it would be mischaracterizing

John Pistelli

or

Gnocchic Apocryphon

or

Chris Jesu Lee

to say their opinion is that most of what Knopf or Holt or Scribner is publishing today is poorly-written middlebrow dreck, designed to flatter the biases of the professional managerial class. That’s my opinion too! That's exactly why I chose these particular people to follow. The rest of the literary world, and especially literary Twitter, seems to spend all its time extolling new books. Everything is beautiful, lyrical, thrilling, ground-breaking, controversial, and important, and oftentimes the books in question aren't even mediocre: they're actively bad.