Recently I hung out for a few hours with one of my readers: Arjun. This man, Arjun, is a twenty-three year old engineer who reads three literary newsletters: Woman of Letters, The Republic of Letters and The Metropolitan Review .
We need a Hugos for litfic but also a Billboard Hot 100 for litfic. This will introduce both normal fans and stans into the ecosystem. I am not going to do those things bc it sounds boring but somebody who is hungry for power should.
Very interesting and sensible all through! I find myself wondering where I fit in this ... I do read "highbrow" literature and much of it is old -- all that Trollope (if you call him "highbrow") plus Eliot and Dickens and all the usual suspects. But I also read a subset of contemporary "highbrow" literature -- I Who Have Not Known Men, The Last Samurai, On the Calculation of Volume (all from small presses I think?) ... And of course if I'm known for anything I am known for writing about science fiction. And I read trashy bestsellers from the early 20th Century. And romance. And ... just about anything. Am I responsible for not supporting contemporary literature enough? Or do I not count because I am an editor (in a tiny way) and a critic (in a tiny way) -- but not a writer of fiction. In the end though, the basic point -- that the oligopoly is the biggest problem -- seems spot on.
With the rapid encroachment of AI, I've been thinking a lot about why many people (including myself) become writers. Most of us are probably those who feel like we have a lot to say and in that regard, deeply crave attention, yet for other reasons, disdain striving for it. Or at least doing so too openly. The ideal is that of the influential recluse.
But with AI that can produce grammatically perfect, even beautiful, sentences and even ingenious plots, what's the worth of a human writer? It would be the real-life connection between a reader and a real-life writer, as opposed to between a reader and an algorithm. But writing doesn't have the equivalent of a live performance, like in music or drama, where that connection can be obviously established. Nobody wants to watch a stream of a writer sitting at a desk, writing line by line.
So it seems the answer is, as you say in your piece, for writers to actively cultivate a fandom. Become almost as much of an influencer as they are a writer. And for the reasons mentioned above, this makes many of us deeply uncomfortable. We'd rather aim to be those influential recluses. But trying to outcompete AI (not to mention the vast library of established titles with unsurpassable prestige and) on pure writing alone is like being a chess player decades ago, hoping to always stay one step ahead of the next Deep Blue.
As an enthusiastic fan who's written letters to living authors I love and received no response, I say, bring it! I'd love to be included in the fandom of writers. I'd love to have just a brief acknowledgment that I'm a reader of their work. That said, cultivating it for myself as a writer seems icky. I'm more comfortable with the ideal of the recluse -- it's how I already live. Idunno what the answer is, but I'm here while the writing lasts.
That's how to do it. I mean...it can be hard to respond to every letter. But I personally don't get that many emails still, even now. I feel like a few writers at the top get a lot of attention--everyone else not so much.
Then there's also an art to writing these emails because many people (myself included) feel embarrassed by praise. It's hard--getting peoples' attention is such an art. I've definitely had fans who've succeeded in getting mine, but I'm not totally sure how they managed it. I think it's nice when people seem very genuine and don't seem to want anything overt from you.
Thanks for this, Naomi. It hits. I mean, even when I try to write a fan letter that's purely a fan letter, I'm still hoping for a response. I bet it shows, and that's enough to prevent a response.
Yeah, I mean the influential recluse model doesn't need AI to kill it. That model has already gone away! It's gone away today in 2025.
I don't know how a writer can cultivate a fandom for themselves. I feel like the answer is more for writers to participate in fandom. The most valuable thing that a person has, in 2025, is their own attention. If you direct your attention to other people, then there's a chance that can come back in a good way.
I'll preface this by saying that most of what I know about literary culture I learned by reading your newsletter. So thanks for the updates.
I'm getting a sense, referring to past posts from you and the general sense from other sources, on Substack and otherwise, that this isn't about writers not connecting to their audience or readers being stupid/non-existent, but PUBLISHERS not focusing on what readers want and CRITICS focusing more on helping sell books than serving their readers with unbiased, educated analysis on what publishers are sending them.
In the literary world, I'm first and foremost a reader. I may have studied literature in university and dabbled in writing myself, but I'm not a published author. I read. And like Arjun, I tend to prefer novels published before 2005. But it's not for lack of trying new things. A lot of the books I've read in the last five years were by authors that were new TO ME. And at the same time, the few books I read that were recently published turned out to be the books I didn't enjoy as much, not because of the choice of topic or the main character's demographic/identity, but because they just weren't written that well. So my reading experience has reinforced my opinion that my time is better served reading books that have built a reputation over time than reading the latest award-winner or highly praised bestseller. And it isn't about the talent of today's writers. It's about which books the publishers choose to publish, which books the panels choose to reward with a Giller/Booker/Pulitzer/Nobel. I'm sure the next Atwood/Franzen/McCarthy/Murakami is out there right now, plugging away. The gatekeepers just aren't getting them into our hands.
I agree, but I'm not sure any of that can change just by people being better or more honest. There are structural reasons why critics find it hard to build their credibility. If you're going to be a critic, you ultimately are mostly going to review a lot of these big new releases--many of which publishers have invested a lot of money into--and you really have to praise at least some of them.
If you're going to keep working, you should probably praise at least half of them. Most critics praise a much larger percentage than that. But if the percentage that are actually good is closer to ten percent, then you've got a problem. If that's how you feel, you can't really be a critic, because editors won't keep publishing you.
So the people who succeed at critics are generally those who have lower standards for books than I do.
In anticipation of Mother’s Day, our largest bookstore chain in Canada, Chapters Indigo, highlighted some books that they believed would make a nice gift for Mom. I was floored by their choices! The immediate impression I received was of mushy, quick-read, fiction only and newly published books with those cheap looking cover designs that all look the same now. I wrote a complaint (as a standing member of their customer review group) that Chapters should have a look at say, Blackwell ‘s weekly newsletter that seems to stay away from “the mush” and assume that their readers have higher brows and wider horizons regardless of their gender or age. To Chapters credit, I received a note back acknowledging my criticism and a pledge to improve.
So glad to read this. I just received agent permission to publish my book- never picked up by an editor- here on Substack. It feels silly to wait around for some change of heart or worse, to shelve it permanently. My husband is a book gobbler, reading all on his phone, and all from the public library. Another Arjun.
Thanks! Hope putting your book out there meets your expectations. It's nice to actually have things out there and not just moldering away, forever unread.
Great read. I love 'highbrow literature having a fandom' because that's what it feels like here.
Also relate to Arjun because I am very much in the whimsically-and-randomly-read-what-I-like camp and, more often than not, choose older books rather than new releases.
You clarify a lot here, it's a wonderful post. And you articulate a lot of what was going on with my starting a Substack on Jane Austen - it was just a weariness of new fiction and the dismal and desperate publishing world cycle that shows through the launch of new releases (a process I'll be in myself in the autumn). Substack really is a fascinating answer to so much of this. Very excited to follow the conversation - with or without the populism 😊 - as we go, as you say, together. (Also - reach out if you tackle Austen again!)
Very cool post Naomi. Yes, I feel like it’s possible to turn the corner in some way here with Substack. I think your profile really was the first major turn in that direction.
I can't tell you the number of times I've picked up recent releases of literary fiction, read happily to their conclusions, but then thought: Nothing happened. It was immaculately written, yes, but...I'll never read anything else by that new author. Where was the story? After reading this, I understand more about the industry and am galvanized to write for readers. I think the focus is STORY, story, story. We need storytellers, not just stylists...
Naomi, this essay, like all of them, is so good, so thorough -- and so generous to others, I don't know where to start except to say that I, too, read the post about Proust as it got HQ's attention and I've, of course, read Swan's Way and was blown away--long ago but unforgettable.
Maybe I could beg for a read from you of my novel, almost totally up now and beloved at least by the incomparable Alisa Kennedy Jones. Hate to beg, but here's the link to the Table of Contents--though, admittedly, begging is not my style so I probably just degraded myself (Oh well): https://marytabor.substack.com/s/who-by-fire-a-novel
xx No matter what you decide. Have you read Richard Deming's _This Exquisite Loneliness: What Loners, Outcasts, and the Misunderstood Can Teach Us About Creativity_? I think he did the amazing ... and I may write about this book when my novel, previously published, is fully up.
I looked at the prize, but two things: I am not self-published and this is "literary fiction," for lack of a better term and not fantasy or sci-fi. I do hope you will take a gander ... xx
Personally, as a university undergrad who's semi-interested in literary discourse but only getting exposed to it through Substack, I guess I've found myself without much faith in the publishing industry despite intending to eventually try to get published (self- or otherwise). Although I do read mostly classics (just finished The Brothers Karamazov, making my way through Shakespeare, exploring some Ancient Greek plays, etc.) I still vary my diet with some more recently published books (e.g.—as I mentioned when I talked to you at the panel—Infinite Jest) and Substack-inflected choices from the last decade or so (Helen DeWitt's Lightning Rods; Daniel Lefferts' Ways and Means; Tony Tulathimutte's Rejection; Danzy Senna's New People; your own The Default World).
Coming from that perspective—I also find it hard to partake in the pessimism you’re talking about here with regard to the endurance of literature in general, even if pessimism in the publishing industry specifically seems warranted. Honestly, I’ve been feeling pretty lucky to have this access, at nineteen years old, to so much wisdom from people who have been writing and reading far longer than myself and are interested in sharing what they’ve learned. It’s a pretty bleak time otherwise—as an American, as a trans person, and as someone spending the summer with family in LA County watching the National Guard and Marines pour in. So compared to that, Substack tends to offer me much in the way of optimism!
Literature will definitely endure! I'm glad Substack is making you feel optimistic. Obviously it's been a great source of light in my own life as well.
I covered Perfection back in March and agree that there’s a little more to it than “modern life is vacuous.” I think —intentionally or not—it’s about the struggle with contentment. Is it enough? Should we want more? Should we feel guilty about having it?https://bradymp.substack.com/p/review-vincenzo-latronicos-perfection
It's almost as if genre readers have been intelligent all along and there's no such thing as "literary" fiction except a desperate clinging to some imagined caste. It's almost as if "literary" readers — the actual buyers of books — read both and only blush when someone tries to publicly shame them for reading "garbage." Frankly, I've often found better literature in the garbage than whatever artisanal culinary experience is being served up by the denisons of "literary."
Midsummer Night's Dream and Moby Dick are fantasy and they're read by "literary" and "low brow" readers alike, I meet these readers at spec fic conventions and MFA programs.
Jane Austin and Edith Wharton write romance, read by all sorts of readers.
The Road and A Canticle for Leibowitz are both apocalyptic novels, ready by all sorts.
I could go on and on, but I'm reminded of the interview The Onion did with Terry Pratchett back in 1995 that Patrick Rothfuss unearthed for us:
"O: You’re quite a writer. You’ve a gift for language, you’re a deft hand at plotting, and your books seem to have an enormous amount of attention to detail put into them. You’re so good you could write anything. Why write fantasy?
"Pratchett: I had a decent lunch, and I’m feeling quite amiable. That’s why you’re still alive. I think you’d have to explain to me why you’ve asked that question.
"O: It’s a rather ghettoized genre.
"P: This is true. I cannot speak for the US, where I merely sort of sell okay. But in the UK I think every book— I think I’ve done twenty in the series— since the fourth book, every one has been one the top ten national bestsellers, either as hardcover or paperback, and quite often as both. Twelve or thirteen have been number one. I’ve done six juveniles, all of those have nevertheless crossed over to the adult bestseller list. On one occasion I had the adult best seller, the paperback best-seller in a different title, and a third book on the juvenile bestseller list. Now tell me again that this is a ghettoized genre.
"O: It’s certainly regarded as less than serious fiction.
"P: (Sighs) Without a shadow of a doubt, the first fiction ever recounted was fantasy. Guys sitting around the campfire— Was it you who wrote the review? I thought I recognized it— Guys sitting around the campfire telling each other stories about the gods who made lightning, and stuff like that. They did not tell one another literary stories. They did not complain about difficulties of male menopause while being a junior lecturer on some midwestern college campus. Fantasy is without a shadow of a doubt the ur-literature, the spring from which all other literature has flown. Up to a few hundred years ago no one would have disagreed with this, because most stories were, in some sense, fantasy. Back in the middle ages, people wouldn’t have thought twice about bringing in Death as a character who would have a role to play in the story. Echoes of this can be seen in Pilgrim’s Progress, for example, which hark back to a much earlier type of storytelling. The epic of Gilgamesh is one of the earliest works of literature, and by the standard we would apply now— a big muscular guys with swords and certain godlike connections— That’s fantasy. The national literature of Finland, the Kalevala. Beowulf in England. I cannot pronounce Bahaghvad-Gita but the Indian one, you know what I mean. The national literature, the one that underpins everything else, is by the standards that we apply now, a work of fantasy.
"Now I don’t know what you’d consider the national literature of America, but if the words Moby Dick are inching their way towards this conversation, whatever else it was, it was also a work of fantasy. Fantasy is kind of a plasma in which other things can be carried. I don’t think this is a ghetto. This is, fantasy is, almost a sea in which other genres swim. Now it may be that there has developed in the last couple of hundred years a subset of fantasy which merely uses a different icongraphy, and that is, if you like, the serious literature, the Booker Prize contender. Fantasy can be serious literature. Fantasy has often been serious literature. You have to fairly dense to think that Gulliver’s Travels is only a story about a guy having a real fun time among big people and little people and horses and stuff like that. What the book was about was something else. Fantasy can carry quite a serious burden, and so can humor. So what you’re saying is, strip away the trolls and the dwarves and things and put everyone into modern dress, get them to agonize a bit, mention Virginia Woolf a few times, and there! Hey! I’ve got a serious novel. But you don’t actually have to do that.
"(Pauses) That was a bloody good answer, though I say it myself."
People forget that Steinbeck's first novel was a pirate fantasy and his second novel was a werewolf thriller. They forget that Hemingway was jilted by the spec fic magazines: he wasn't good enough to sell to the pulps.
They forget because they want to be seen as academic. They want to be seen as smart. They want to have honors and awards and the privilege that comes with prestige. They want the power connected to it. The pleasure of trading favors for being inside some sort of gnostic inner circle.
But these are all proximate goods. They are not beauty, truth, and goodness. They're irrelevant to what great books are actually trying to do.
These readers you're talking about (i.e. all readers) are incredibly intelligent and they don't have discriminating tastes in the sense of genre. What they have is discerning taste: a much better sense for bullshit than the average critic for two simple reasons (1) they're not worried about their own careers in literature, generally, (2) they're curious and joyful with the things they like and don't mind telling you what's good and what sucked.
In this way, plenty of genre writers believe it's their job to improve the reader. Plenty of literary writers attempt genre without having any knowledge of the field and truly believe, for instance, that they're the first one to invent a time traveling super soldier or a nonlinear narrative about a plague or what have you. If anything, there's an ignorance in the literary crowd of the foundational works of literature that isn't present in the genre crowd because, for whatever reason, American lit has been tidally locked around 20th century cynicism for the last century.
It's eating its own tail.
Don't believe me? Take a look at all of the Pulitzer Prize winners for fiction. Ask yourself: in recent years, how many of these are remakes or riffs on classic works of literature as opposed to new stories? Certainly that's allowed — there's something downright medieval in a good way about trying to get your version of, for instance, Arthur or Virgil right — but almost all of them are. The Road was Dante's Inferno. March was Allcot. Gilead was the retelling of the Abraham / Sara story. James was Mark Twain. Demon Copperhead was Dickens.
This isn't a bad thing, but its direct parallel is Hollywood remakes.
Ezra Klein is right here too: we have stopped looking forwards. All of us, that is, but the genre writers and the readers who truly do not care. They are HUNGRY for good, new stories. They always will be — this is why great screenplays always set the pace for blockbusters. I know a brilliant producer who lives in the Hamptons. She reads classics. She reads Game of Thrones. She reads Pulitzer Prize winners. She reads romance. She reads memoir. She doesn't care, she reads it all, and she's that kind of oldschool, blunt, smoker New York lady who will tell you exactly what she thinks and why: she has the literary pedigree to know it all and to deconstruct or exalt it equally. She does. She doesn't care. She's no respecter of awards or sales or whatever.
If the folks in this business stopped talking down to people like her (she — a very educated, wealthy, and powerful reader!), erased the completely arbitrary boundary line, and saw that readers don't care for the genre distinction at all, they would actually revive both sides of the publishing industry. Both sides would benefit because there aren't sides from the reader's perspective. There are merely "books."
That's hard, of course, because both political parties thrive on the arbitrary distinction between "coastal elite" and "rural ignorance." Both pride themselves on their side.
But neither paints the truth of things. As Emerson said, "The city is recruited from the country." We are interdependent. We are interpenetrated with one another. We are, in a way, consubstantial and always-already elite while always-already ignorant; always-already urban while always-already rural. The city eats rural food. The rural folk come to the city for baseball games. It's an endless cycle and it cuts right through literature.
Literature merely means "written works" as in "letter" or "letter of the law."
To be "literary" is anything related to the written word.
That includes all genres and includes all readers, most of whom read both.
I avoid all this drama by writing low-brow, trashy, transparently commercial fiction.
LOL. Good luck with your book release! I'm excited for the book =]
I love you Amran.
My wife's specialty (she read like 120 books last year).
We need a Hugos for litfic but also a Billboard Hot 100 for litfic. This will introduce both normal fans and stans into the ecosystem. I am not going to do those things bc it sounds boring but somebody who is hungry for power should.
Both of those things would be great =]
Very interesting and sensible all through! I find myself wondering where I fit in this ... I do read "highbrow" literature and much of it is old -- all that Trollope (if you call him "highbrow") plus Eliot and Dickens and all the usual suspects. But I also read a subset of contemporary "highbrow" literature -- I Who Have Not Known Men, The Last Samurai, On the Calculation of Volume (all from small presses I think?) ... And of course if I'm known for anything I am known for writing about science fiction. And I read trashy bestsellers from the early 20th Century. And romance. And ... just about anything. Am I responsible for not supporting contemporary literature enough? Or do I not count because I am an editor (in a tiny way) and a critic (in a tiny way) -- but not a writer of fiction. In the end though, the basic point -- that the oligopoly is the biggest problem -- seems spot on.
You are a noted critic and anthologist who transcends genre categories! You do not fit into any schema, and that's why you're worth reading =]
With the rapid encroachment of AI, I've been thinking a lot about why many people (including myself) become writers. Most of us are probably those who feel like we have a lot to say and in that regard, deeply crave attention, yet for other reasons, disdain striving for it. Or at least doing so too openly. The ideal is that of the influential recluse.
But with AI that can produce grammatically perfect, even beautiful, sentences and even ingenious plots, what's the worth of a human writer? It would be the real-life connection between a reader and a real-life writer, as opposed to between a reader and an algorithm. But writing doesn't have the equivalent of a live performance, like in music or drama, where that connection can be obviously established. Nobody wants to watch a stream of a writer sitting at a desk, writing line by line.
So it seems the answer is, as you say in your piece, for writers to actively cultivate a fandom. Become almost as much of an influencer as they are a writer. And for the reasons mentioned above, this makes many of us deeply uncomfortable. We'd rather aim to be those influential recluses. But trying to outcompete AI (not to mention the vast library of established titles with unsurpassable prestige and) on pure writing alone is like being a chess player decades ago, hoping to always stay one step ahead of the next Deep Blue.
As an enthusiastic fan who's written letters to living authors I love and received no response, I say, bring it! I'd love to be included in the fandom of writers. I'd love to have just a brief acknowledgment that I'm a reader of their work. That said, cultivating it for myself as a writer seems icky. I'm more comfortable with the ideal of the recluse -- it's how I already live. Idunno what the answer is, but I'm here while the writing lasts.
That's how to do it. I mean...it can be hard to respond to every letter. But I personally don't get that many emails still, even now. I feel like a few writers at the top get a lot of attention--everyone else not so much.
Then there's also an art to writing these emails because many people (myself included) feel embarrassed by praise. It's hard--getting peoples' attention is such an art. I've definitely had fans who've succeeded in getting mine, but I'm not totally sure how they managed it. I think it's nice when people seem very genuine and don't seem to want anything overt from you.
Thanks for this, Naomi. It hits. I mean, even when I try to write a fan letter that's purely a fan letter, I'm still hoping for a response. I bet it shows, and that's enough to prevent a response.
Yeah, I mean the influential recluse model doesn't need AI to kill it. That model has already gone away! It's gone away today in 2025.
I don't know how a writer can cultivate a fandom for themselves. I feel like the answer is more for writers to participate in fandom. The most valuable thing that a person has, in 2025, is their own attention. If you direct your attention to other people, then there's a chance that can come back in a good way.
I'll preface this by saying that most of what I know about literary culture I learned by reading your newsletter. So thanks for the updates.
I'm getting a sense, referring to past posts from you and the general sense from other sources, on Substack and otherwise, that this isn't about writers not connecting to their audience or readers being stupid/non-existent, but PUBLISHERS not focusing on what readers want and CRITICS focusing more on helping sell books than serving their readers with unbiased, educated analysis on what publishers are sending them.
In the literary world, I'm first and foremost a reader. I may have studied literature in university and dabbled in writing myself, but I'm not a published author. I read. And like Arjun, I tend to prefer novels published before 2005. But it's not for lack of trying new things. A lot of the books I've read in the last five years were by authors that were new TO ME. And at the same time, the few books I read that were recently published turned out to be the books I didn't enjoy as much, not because of the choice of topic or the main character's demographic/identity, but because they just weren't written that well. So my reading experience has reinforced my opinion that my time is better served reading books that have built a reputation over time than reading the latest award-winner or highly praised bestseller. And it isn't about the talent of today's writers. It's about which books the publishers choose to publish, which books the panels choose to reward with a Giller/Booker/Pulitzer/Nobel. I'm sure the next Atwood/Franzen/McCarthy/Murakami is out there right now, plugging away. The gatekeepers just aren't getting them into our hands.
I agree, but I'm not sure any of that can change just by people being better or more honest. There are structural reasons why critics find it hard to build their credibility. If you're going to be a critic, you ultimately are mostly going to review a lot of these big new releases--many of which publishers have invested a lot of money into--and you really have to praise at least some of them.
If you're going to keep working, you should probably praise at least half of them. Most critics praise a much larger percentage than that. But if the percentage that are actually good is closer to ten percent, then you've got a problem. If that's how you feel, you can't really be a critic, because editors won't keep publishing you.
So the people who succeed at critics are generally those who have lower standards for books than I do.
In anticipation of Mother’s Day, our largest bookstore chain in Canada, Chapters Indigo, highlighted some books that they believed would make a nice gift for Mom. I was floored by their choices! The immediate impression I received was of mushy, quick-read, fiction only and newly published books with those cheap looking cover designs that all look the same now. I wrote a complaint (as a standing member of their customer review group) that Chapters should have a look at say, Blackwell ‘s weekly newsletter that seems to stay away from “the mush” and assume that their readers have higher brows and wider horizons regardless of their gender or age. To Chapters credit, I received a note back acknowledging my criticism and a pledge to improve.
Good job to whoever answers their emails! You've got to give them that at least.
So glad to read this. I just received agent permission to publish my book- never picked up by an editor- here on Substack. It feels silly to wait around for some change of heart or worse, to shelve it permanently. My husband is a book gobbler, reading all on his phone, and all from the public library. Another Arjun.
Thanks! Hope putting your book out there meets your expectations. It's nice to actually have things out there and not just moldering away, forever unread.
Great read. I love 'highbrow literature having a fandom' because that's what it feels like here.
Also relate to Arjun because I am very much in the whimsically-and-randomly-read-what-I-like camp and, more often than not, choose older books rather than new releases.
As usual, the most thoughtful and well-considered take on this topic.
Thank you!
You clarify a lot here, it's a wonderful post. And you articulate a lot of what was going on with my starting a Substack on Jane Austen - it was just a weariness of new fiction and the dismal and desperate publishing world cycle that shows through the launch of new releases (a process I'll be in myself in the autumn). Substack really is a fascinating answer to so much of this. Very excited to follow the conversation - with or without the populism 😊 - as we go, as you say, together. (Also - reach out if you tackle Austen again!)
Thank you! If I start posting about Austen, please reach out!
Will do! 💮
Very cool post Naomi. Yes, I feel like it’s possible to turn the corner in some way here with Substack. I think your profile really was the first major turn in that direction.
Thank you!
I can't tell you the number of times I've picked up recent releases of literary fiction, read happily to their conclusions, but then thought: Nothing happened. It was immaculately written, yes, but...I'll never read anything else by that new author. Where was the story? After reading this, I understand more about the industry and am galvanized to write for readers. I think the focus is STORY, story, story. We need storytellers, not just stylists...
I agree a lot of these books could use more attention to story.
Naomi, this essay, like all of them, is so good, so thorough -- and so generous to others, I don't know where to start except to say that I, too, read the post about Proust as it got HQ's attention and I've, of course, read Swan's Way and was blown away--long ago but unforgettable.
Maybe I could beg for a read from you of my novel, almost totally up now and beloved at least by the incomparable Alisa Kennedy Jones. Hate to beg, but here's the link to the Table of Contents--though, admittedly, begging is not my style so I probably just degraded myself (Oh well): https://marytabor.substack.com/s/who-by-fire-a-novel
xx No matter what you decide. Have you read Richard Deming's _This Exquisite Loneliness: What Loners, Outcasts, and the Misunderstood Can Teach Us About Creativity_? I think he did the amazing ... and I may write about this book when my novel, previously published, is fully up.
Hi Mary! Thanks for reading! Happy to take a look at your novel, but no promises I will get to it. You're welcome to submit it to the Samuel Richardson Prize though! https://www.woman-of-letters.com/p/the-samuel-richardson-prize-for-best/comments?utm_source=post&comments=true&utm_medium=web
Thank you for the kindness of a reply, dear Naomi. Read all of you with pleasure and admiration. — Mary
I looked at the prize, but two things: I am not self-published and this is "literary fiction," for lack of a better term and not fantasy or sci-fi. I do hope you will take a gander ... xx
It's a prize for literary fiction, and isn't the book published on your Substack? Who is the publisher?
Outer Banks Publishing Group. I did not pay for publication, and Alisa Kennedy Jones with Empress.net, a subsidiary of Simon and Schuster, will republish in a special addition. Here is the link to her announcement: https://alisakennedyjones.substack.com/p/the-empress-questionnaire-theres
Here is the Amazon link to its publication: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Mary+L.+Tabor&crid=192H4B3VF2PWZ&sprefix=mary+l.+tabor%2Caps%2C288&ref=nb_sb_noss_2
I serialized the novel for free ... xx
Personally, as a university undergrad who's semi-interested in literary discourse but only getting exposed to it through Substack, I guess I've found myself without much faith in the publishing industry despite intending to eventually try to get published (self- or otherwise). Although I do read mostly classics (just finished The Brothers Karamazov, making my way through Shakespeare, exploring some Ancient Greek plays, etc.) I still vary my diet with some more recently published books (e.g.—as I mentioned when I talked to you at the panel—Infinite Jest) and Substack-inflected choices from the last decade or so (Helen DeWitt's Lightning Rods; Daniel Lefferts' Ways and Means; Tony Tulathimutte's Rejection; Danzy Senna's New People; your own The Default World).
Coming from that perspective—I also find it hard to partake in the pessimism you’re talking about here with regard to the endurance of literature in general, even if pessimism in the publishing industry specifically seems warranted. Honestly, I’ve been feeling pretty lucky to have this access, at nineteen years old, to so much wisdom from people who have been writing and reading far longer than myself and are interested in sharing what they’ve learned. It’s a pretty bleak time otherwise—as an American, as a trans person, and as someone spending the summer with family in LA County watching the National Guard and Marines pour in. So compared to that, Substack tends to offer me much in the way of optimism!
Indigo! Nice to hear from you =]
Literature will definitely endure! I'm glad Substack is making you feel optimistic. Obviously it's been a great source of light in my own life as well.
I covered Perfection back in March and agree that there’s a little more to it than “modern life is vacuous.” I think —intentionally or not—it’s about the struggle with contentment. Is it enough? Should we want more? Should we feel guilty about having it?https://bradymp.substack.com/p/review-vincenzo-latronicos-perfection
It's almost as if genre readers have been intelligent all along and there's no such thing as "literary" fiction except a desperate clinging to some imagined caste. It's almost as if "literary" readers — the actual buyers of books — read both and only blush when someone tries to publicly shame them for reading "garbage." Frankly, I've often found better literature in the garbage than whatever artisanal culinary experience is being served up by the denisons of "literary."
Midsummer Night's Dream and Moby Dick are fantasy and they're read by "literary" and "low brow" readers alike, I meet these readers at spec fic conventions and MFA programs.
Jane Austin and Edith Wharton write romance, read by all sorts of readers.
The Road and A Canticle for Leibowitz are both apocalyptic novels, ready by all sorts.
I could go on and on, but I'm reminded of the interview The Onion did with Terry Pratchett back in 1995 that Patrick Rothfuss unearthed for us:
"O: You’re quite a writer. You’ve a gift for language, you’re a deft hand at plotting, and your books seem to have an enormous amount of attention to detail put into them. You’re so good you could write anything. Why write fantasy?
"Pratchett: I had a decent lunch, and I’m feeling quite amiable. That’s why you’re still alive. I think you’d have to explain to me why you’ve asked that question.
"O: It’s a rather ghettoized genre.
"P: This is true. I cannot speak for the US, where I merely sort of sell okay. But in the UK I think every book— I think I’ve done twenty in the series— since the fourth book, every one has been one the top ten national bestsellers, either as hardcover or paperback, and quite often as both. Twelve or thirteen have been number one. I’ve done six juveniles, all of those have nevertheless crossed over to the adult bestseller list. On one occasion I had the adult best seller, the paperback best-seller in a different title, and a third book on the juvenile bestseller list. Now tell me again that this is a ghettoized genre.
"O: It’s certainly regarded as less than serious fiction.
"P: (Sighs) Without a shadow of a doubt, the first fiction ever recounted was fantasy. Guys sitting around the campfire— Was it you who wrote the review? I thought I recognized it— Guys sitting around the campfire telling each other stories about the gods who made lightning, and stuff like that. They did not tell one another literary stories. They did not complain about difficulties of male menopause while being a junior lecturer on some midwestern college campus. Fantasy is without a shadow of a doubt the ur-literature, the spring from which all other literature has flown. Up to a few hundred years ago no one would have disagreed with this, because most stories were, in some sense, fantasy. Back in the middle ages, people wouldn’t have thought twice about bringing in Death as a character who would have a role to play in the story. Echoes of this can be seen in Pilgrim’s Progress, for example, which hark back to a much earlier type of storytelling. The epic of Gilgamesh is one of the earliest works of literature, and by the standard we would apply now— a big muscular guys with swords and certain godlike connections— That’s fantasy. The national literature of Finland, the Kalevala. Beowulf in England. I cannot pronounce Bahaghvad-Gita but the Indian one, you know what I mean. The national literature, the one that underpins everything else, is by the standards that we apply now, a work of fantasy.
"Now I don’t know what you’d consider the national literature of America, but if the words Moby Dick are inching their way towards this conversation, whatever else it was, it was also a work of fantasy. Fantasy is kind of a plasma in which other things can be carried. I don’t think this is a ghetto. This is, fantasy is, almost a sea in which other genres swim. Now it may be that there has developed in the last couple of hundred years a subset of fantasy which merely uses a different icongraphy, and that is, if you like, the serious literature, the Booker Prize contender. Fantasy can be serious literature. Fantasy has often been serious literature. You have to fairly dense to think that Gulliver’s Travels is only a story about a guy having a real fun time among big people and little people and horses and stuff like that. What the book was about was something else. Fantasy can carry quite a serious burden, and so can humor. So what you’re saying is, strip away the trolls and the dwarves and things and put everyone into modern dress, get them to agonize a bit, mention Virginia Woolf a few times, and there! Hey! I’ve got a serious novel. But you don’t actually have to do that.
"(Pauses) That was a bloody good answer, though I say it myself."
People forget that Steinbeck's first novel was a pirate fantasy and his second novel was a werewolf thriller. They forget that Hemingway was jilted by the spec fic magazines: he wasn't good enough to sell to the pulps.
They forget because they want to be seen as academic. They want to be seen as smart. They want to have honors and awards and the privilege that comes with prestige. They want the power connected to it. The pleasure of trading favors for being inside some sort of gnostic inner circle.
But these are all proximate goods. They are not beauty, truth, and goodness. They're irrelevant to what great books are actually trying to do.
These readers you're talking about (i.e. all readers) are incredibly intelligent and they don't have discriminating tastes in the sense of genre. What they have is discerning taste: a much better sense for bullshit than the average critic for two simple reasons (1) they're not worried about their own careers in literature, generally, (2) they're curious and joyful with the things they like and don't mind telling you what's good and what sucked.
In this way, plenty of genre writers believe it's their job to improve the reader. Plenty of literary writers attempt genre without having any knowledge of the field and truly believe, for instance, that they're the first one to invent a time traveling super soldier or a nonlinear narrative about a plague or what have you. If anything, there's an ignorance in the literary crowd of the foundational works of literature that isn't present in the genre crowd because, for whatever reason, American lit has been tidally locked around 20th century cynicism for the last century.
It's eating its own tail.
Don't believe me? Take a look at all of the Pulitzer Prize winners for fiction. Ask yourself: in recent years, how many of these are remakes or riffs on classic works of literature as opposed to new stories? Certainly that's allowed — there's something downright medieval in a good way about trying to get your version of, for instance, Arthur or Virgil right — but almost all of them are. The Road was Dante's Inferno. March was Allcot. Gilead was the retelling of the Abraham / Sara story. James was Mark Twain. Demon Copperhead was Dickens.
This isn't a bad thing, but its direct parallel is Hollywood remakes.
Ezra Klein is right here too: we have stopped looking forwards. All of us, that is, but the genre writers and the readers who truly do not care. They are HUNGRY for good, new stories. They always will be — this is why great screenplays always set the pace for blockbusters. I know a brilliant producer who lives in the Hamptons. She reads classics. She reads Game of Thrones. She reads Pulitzer Prize winners. She reads romance. She reads memoir. She doesn't care, she reads it all, and she's that kind of oldschool, blunt, smoker New York lady who will tell you exactly what she thinks and why: she has the literary pedigree to know it all and to deconstruct or exalt it equally. She does. She doesn't care. She's no respecter of awards or sales or whatever.
If the folks in this business stopped talking down to people like her (she — a very educated, wealthy, and powerful reader!), erased the completely arbitrary boundary line, and saw that readers don't care for the genre distinction at all, they would actually revive both sides of the publishing industry. Both sides would benefit because there aren't sides from the reader's perspective. There are merely "books."
That's hard, of course, because both political parties thrive on the arbitrary distinction between "coastal elite" and "rural ignorance." Both pride themselves on their side.
But neither paints the truth of things. As Emerson said, "The city is recruited from the country." We are interdependent. We are interpenetrated with one another. We are, in a way, consubstantial and always-already elite while always-already ignorant; always-already urban while always-already rural. The city eats rural food. The rural folk come to the city for baseball games. It's an endless cycle and it cuts right through literature.
Literature merely means "written works" as in "letter" or "letter of the law."
To be "literary" is anything related to the written word.
That includes all genres and includes all readers, most of whom read both.