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The cultural decline of literary fiction
- pfdietz 1y agoI've never been able to give myself a good justification for why I should be reading any of that stuff.
- Papazsazsa 1y agoThe reason you read literary fiction is because you're curious about the outer edges of human thought or experience.
- nottorp 1y agoThis is HN, they may be looking to put a monetary value on it.
- kayodelycaon 1y agoInteresting. That’s exactly why I read science fiction.
- mcnamaratw 1y agoBut that’s new. Until ca 1970-2000, people read literary fiction because it was high quality, much more than because it was unrelateable. O’Hara, Salinger, and Franzen were not writing about the outer edges of human experience.
- esafak 1y agoBut does it have to be inaccessible to be so? It's easy to write something incomprehensible that says nothing. Is the writer writing about something that is inherently complex, and that's why it is inaccessible? Not typically in a novel. The prospective reader may then ask, why should I bother? I'm also curious what Pynchon has to say, but not enough to justify the investment.
- tekla 1y agoIt's not inaccessible. Its just that you don't have the reading skills from lack of use.
- pfdietz 1y agoYes, I'm sure it all our faults, not that of the product.
- tekla 1y agoYep, skills need to be practiced before you engage with harder material
- pfdietz 1y agoOr, authors need to be subservient to the needs and desires of the customers.
- antasvara 1y agoAround 54% of adults read at a 6th grade level or below: https://www.apmresearchlab.org/10x-adult-literacy https://www.apmresearchlab.org/10x-adult-literacy Based on this, you could reach both of these conclusions: 1. Most literary fiction is inaccessible to the average adult. 2. It's a big problem that even moderately complex novels are inaccessible to the average adult. The first statement (which I think is where you're coming from) is absolutely true. If you want to write a very popular book, it should be easily readable at a 6th grade level. The second statement is more a statement of values. Some people (such as myself) find it problematic that the average adult can't read/understand a book that is more complex than Harry Potter. You don't have to agree with the second statement. A lot of people don't. But I think understanding why someone might find that problematic is important. Personally, I think there are a lot of things worth knowing that can't be written at a 6th grade level.
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- awongh 1y agoThere's nothing more effective than a piece of fiction at transmitting the subtle complete world-view ideas of an author directly into your brain. I mean that in the sense that non-fiction is still very much fictionally presenting a world view of the author or the subject, but in a way that's bounded by real facts. Literary fiction doesn't have that constraint. Human history and society is actually made up of ideas and by taking 2-300 pages to digest a set of ideas you come away with a new perspective you can't get any other way.
- drakonka 1y agoFiction is alive and well. This article is specifically about the decline of literary fiction. I think people simply realize how boring and pretentious much of contemporary literary fiction is; many choose to go pick up a science fiction, or thriller, or even romance novel that can convery all the same ideas in more interesting and accessible ways.
- awongh 1y agoI think it's pretentious too, but I also think it's a useful distinction in the sense that the category aspires to deeper and broader ideas than a lot of fiction- Harry Potter, Hyperion, Dennis Taylor, We Are Legion, Twilight. Not to say that the distinction itself, literary vs non-literary fiction, isn't extremely pretentious. But we all recognize that some book's ideas are more shallow than others.
- LordShredda 1y agoIt's fun
- mcnamaratw 1y agoWhat is that stuff? Is Kurt Vonnegut that stuff? Folks, downvoting the comment above is literally destroying what you claim to support.
- julianeon 1y agoI can give one. As far as I can tell, as far as your entertainment options go, literary fiction is THE best option to exercise your mind. Ranked, in order, it's: literary fiction, nonfiction, computer games, movies, TV. "Meta-analyses show fiction reading has stronger associations with cognitive skills than nonfiction, with medium-sized benefits for verbal abilities and general cognition. Fiction enhances social cognition by exercising the brain's default network involved in theory of mind. Reading fiction increases brain connectivity, particularly in language areas and sensorimotor regions, with effects lasting beyond the reading session."
- protocolture 1y agoLiterary fiction is a category of fiction. Why read literary fiction over other fiction?
- BalinKing 1y agoWhat's the source of that last quote? I Googled it but got no results....
- CGMthrowaway 1y agoIt's probably AI but you can find the studies here and in the related links below https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38602788/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38602788/
- easterncalculus 1y agoSimply put, these are some of the greatest stories ever told and can teach about the world, its history, and the fundamental questions of the human experience. "Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth." - Albert Camus
- WalterBright 1y agoMy car magazines have all disappeared other than Hot Rod Magazine.
- 7thaccount 1y agoTo be fair, those were fun, but extremely information sparse. You'd have a main story or two, some mail inbox stuff, a listing of a selection of cars you probably could never afford, and 35 pages of advertisements. The car magazine has been replaced by forums and other online tools that are likely free and vastly superior. I do miss physical magazines though.
- WalterBright 1y agoI knew where to get the upgraded speed parts I wanted from the advertisements. The advertisements were the main attraction. Some magazines in the olden days were literally nothing but ads - like Computer Shopper.
- 7thaccount 1y agoI can still sort of remember that in the 90s, but was mainly reading magazines in the late 90s and early 2000s, so I probably missed out on some of that. I did go back and read a lot of old magazines on microfiche at the library a few years ago (I think Byte magazine) and yeah...a lot of ads, but I guess they would have been super useful pre-internet. Did you use the BBS as well? I was too young when that was common.
- WalterBright 1y agoI ran a BBS for a while. Still have it on a hard disk, but no way to read it.
- 7thaccount 1y agoI'll add it to the Dlang roadmap;)
- TimorousBestie 1y agoWhile I disagree that “the publishers went woke” is a salient reason (or even true in any real sense), I give the essay props for resisting the urge to reduce a very complicated problem down to a single causal factor.
- peacebeard 1y agoSome better versions of this take might be “In the culture war many people are only willing to consume media that perfectly signals their virtues, so even innocuous content can seem antagonistic.” or “Our culture changed and I don’t like it anymore, get off my lawn.”
- MangoToupe 1y agoFor the most part I think this culture war is a figment of the media's imagination/desire. I think people just don't want to read for the most part—even those who purchase the books.
- gherkinnn 1y agoI find the culture war to exist primarily in the minds of the terminally online.
- peacebeard 1y agoMaybe if you include "terminally watching the news on TV". But either way, it's a lot of people.
- hotmeals 1y agoMost TV news now is talking about stuff in Twitter and I Can't Believe It's Not Twitter.
- xhkkffbf 1y agoMy issue with the wokeness is that it makes the stories very predictable. One race of characters is pretty much bad. The other race needs some saviorism. It's not the message of wokeness that is boring, but the repetitive and insistent manner in which it is delivered.
- fullshark 1y agoAffording someone status for being someone with an opinion on cultural artifact X no longer exists. No one is impressed, there's too many people with thoughtful opinions on important books doing absolutely nothing valuable in society.
- JKCalhoun 1y agoHow has that changed since the mid 20th Century?
- dmoy 1y agoSelf publishing your opinions in a way that is cheaply (freely) accessible to anyone became a thing. Previously if you wanted a book review you had to spend a chunk of time and/or money to even find a review, and when you did there was like a handful of reviews. If the thing was more esoteric, maybe zero reviews.
- vintermann 1y agoSo it isn't that we become stupid from browsing, it's that the internet has an unlimited supply of critics?
- jl6 1y ago> Books like Pride and Prejudice, War and Peace, The Brothers Karamazov, etc still sell many thousands of copies every year, more than even big hits in contemporary literary fiction. I think the author skips past the real answer right here. The old books haven’t gone away. Even if we assume there are good new books, they have to compete with the supply of existing books, which grows without bound - unlike the time and attention of consumers. Every form of media has this problem. A human lifetime can only consume so many books, so many films, so many hours of music. A new movie comes out: what are the odds of it being more worth your while than one on the existing IMDb Top 1000? Decreasing. Books are no different. What are the odds that something new is going to displace something existing off the shortlist of greats that you already don’t have time to read?
- Animats 1y ago> I think the author skips past the real answer right here. The old books haven’t gone away. Even if we assume there are good new books, they have to compete with the supply of existing books, which grows without bound - unlike the time and attention of consumers. That's a real phenomenon in music. New works have to compete with the entire body of existing work, some of which is pretty good.
- xhkkffbf 1y agoAnd movies and TV. Why try some random new stuff when any of the classic movies is both guaranteed to be good and probably available for free from the library's DVD collection?
- sdenton4 1y agoRelevance! eg: What's it like to be a teenager alongside the rise of AI? It's a hell of a lot different than the old sci-fi imagines, and old sci-fi generally skipped to the 'end-phase-ubiquitous-AGI' instead of focusing on the transitionary 'awkward teenage' period of the technology.
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- mcnamaratw 1y agoThat’s the old standby argument, and it may be right. I can’t really read John Barth or George Saunders the way I can read Richard Russo or Lionel Shriver or Kurt Vonnegut or Michael Chabon or Barbara Kingsolver. For me the experimental writers are very unpleasant to actually read. David Foster Wallace is just inside that frontier for me, and I can enjoy IJ. Bernard Malamud was pretty dark but I could hang in. But Paul Auster … I love what nonfiction writing I’ve seen, but the New York trilogy is so dark and Spartan it makes Joy Division look like disco. Nitpick: I finally gave up on Pynchon, but is he really postmodern??
- xhkkffbf 1y agoThe unpleasantness is definitely a problem. It's like the cool writers want to prove they are making something challenging by stripping away all of the sugarcoating that we normally love in narrative (and food!). I realize that the kind of pat endings that are so common in broadly popular narratives are a bit dull and predictable, but they're better than watching the protagonist go through the realities of life. We all have to suffer the worst parts of life each day. No need to do it at night too.
- voidhorse 1y agoRight. It's just like music. Some people can appreciate noise music, some people view it as just that: abrasive noise. It's a matter of taste. For some, the unpleasantness is of aesthetic interest and they have an aesthetic appreciation for it.
- mcnamaratw 1y agoGreat example. It is absolutely a matter of taste. Sadly noise music doesn’t support a lot of full-time jobs compared to writing songs more or less the way the Beatles did. Which was all new and stuff, but not completely foreign to what Stephen Foster did. We can try to reinvent writing, or we can focus on writing. But one may come at the expense of the other.
- tptacek 1y agoThe time frame for Pynchon fits and, of course, so does the style. He's postmodern.
- kayodelycaon 1y agoMy own issue with modern literary fiction is the pretension. It’s been shoved in my face from middle school through college. Everyone writing “genre fiction” is not a Real Author. Writing to be like one of the great writers of the past is completely missing the point. It’s one thing to follow a tradition. It’s another to think that tradition makes you great.
- jimbob45 1y agoThis is my issue with it too. If you’re a good student, then you’re done with any book that even hints at its own self-importance by the time you graduate high school.
- photochemsyn 1y agoScience fiction, and related or subgenres like sci-fantasy and sci-horror is just much better these days than literary fiction. The literary snobs won't admit that One Hundred Years of Solitude (which I read years ago and liked) could have been a scifi novel placed not in historical south/central america but instead on a set of planets orbiting a star 100 light years from here. If it had, they wouldn't consider it 'real literature'. Science fiction is more fun to read, and often more creative - authors aren't limited to the sociopolitical realities of 18th century South America, they can invent whatever systems they like, and then the question is whether their world-building skills are good enough to avoid obvious inconsistencies. Yes, people are still reading - but they're reading Adrian Tchaikovsky, Iain M. Banks, William Gibson, Susanna Clarke and host of others who aren't limited to scenes of 'historical realism' (which to be honest are often distorted pictures of history that were socially acceptable to the publishing houses of their day). You can still read the classics - Conrad is my favorite late 19th/early 20tth century author - but Lovecraft is just as worth reading.
- A_D_E_P_T 1y ago[dead]
- gherkinnn 1y agoTurning a personal preference (I like sci-fi) in to a universal statement (sci-fi is more fun to read) is so unbecoming.
- lmm 1y agoAnd yet we somehow excuse it when the fans of literary fiction do it.
- com2kid 1y ago99% of science fiction settings are historical fiction but now In Space(tm). I'm not saying that is a bad thing, and some fiction explores forms of government that haven't been tried on earth, and also explores systems of government and commerce that may need to happen on a post scarcity society. That is all good, and arguably those explorations need to happen, but still most sci-fi is just some portion of earth society thrown into space. (Banks explores alternatives, but arguably most Gibson doesn't, though I haven't read anything by him in a decade or more so they may have changed). This is frequently useful as it allows us to examine our existing biased from an outside view. I am definitely less racist/bigoted for having read science fiction. As a final point, it has been noted that a lot of sci-fi has an undertone of "wow isn't this benevolent monarchy great!" Which is rather disturbing if you think about the implications too much.
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- mcnamaratw 1y agoOf course that’s punishing, though 75% may be closer than 90%. But I don’t buy it as the root cause. Where is the new Susanna Kaysen or Lionel Shriver or Laurie Moore or Barbara Kingsolver?
- bccdee 1y ago> explicit institutional discrimination Wild leap to a conclusion there. The article you linked makes some similarly strange leaps, based apparently on poor reading comprehension: > A baffling New York Times op-ed (“The Disappearance of Literary Men Should Worry Everyone”) casually confessed to systemic gender discrimination in MFA admissions. “About 60 percent of our applications come from women, and some cohorts in our program are entirely female,” lamented David Morris, a creative writing professor at UNLV[.] That's not discrimination? The fact that men are not applying as often as women does not imply that men are actively being kept out—in fact, quite the opposite. Men are not even asking to be let in. The rest of the NYT op-end goes on to point out the ways in which men being underrepresented in literary circles parallels their underrepresentation in the rest of academia: > In recent decades, young men have regressed educationally, emotionally and culturally. Among women matriculating at four-year public colleges, about half will graduate four years later; for men the rate is under 40 percent. If men are dropping out at higher rates and are less represented in liberal arts programs, it's absurd to leap to the question, "who is doing this to men." That's a very grievance-oriented mentality. The real question is simply, "why is this happening," and a cursory investigation will indicate that the most likely answer is, men simply choose to avoid pursuits they perceive as feminine. As the number of female participants in a college major rises, men stop wanting to take it. > “There was really only one variable where I found an effect, and that was the proportion of women already enrolled in vet med schools… So a young male student says he’s going to visit a school and when he sees a classroom with a lot of women he changes his choice of graduate school. That’s what the findings indicate…. what's really driving feminization of the field is ‘preemptive flight’—men not applying because of women’s increasing enrollment.” - Dr. Anne Lincoln > For every 1% increase in the proportion of women in the student body, 1.7 fewer men applied. One more woman applying was a greater deterrent than $1000 in extra tuition! https://celestemdavis.substack.com/p/why-boys-dont-go-to-college https://celestemdavis.substack.com/p/why-boys-dont-go-to-col... As tempting as it may be to cry discrimination, there's really no evidence of that. The decline in popular male writers is most likely a product of the same cultural forces that caused a decline in male veterinarians. Women started doing it more often, and men decided they wanted to go somewhere with less female competition.
- ang_cire 1y agoThis is a really good analysis article. Thank you for posting it. I think the critic vs consumer decoupling rings true to me, and this is obviously the worst economy to exist in as a "struggling" anything. There are a lot of industries that are struggling right now to figure out how to re-monetize independent from large corporations (like magazines/ publishers/ movies/ etc) because those corporations are cutting out anyone not already hugely profitable. I feel like whatever solution we eventually land on to 'democratize' media funding will also be a good solution to our FOSS funding problem.
- amanaplanacanal 1y agoI'll toss two theories into the pool: The rising tide of anti-intellectualism. The decline of humanities education in favor of stem education. This has both economic drivers and national security drivers.
- voidhorse 1y agoI think these are factors to the extent that one sort of needs formal training and schooling in the historical development of the form to appreciate experimental and more contemporary work. The same can generally be said about visual art. Because of that, yeah, hyper-specialization in schooling and a general movement toward stem means that a lot of people don't actually acquire the requisite background to engage with and appreciate modern work in a sufficient way—just like someone untrained in computing probably would not have an easy time understanding or appreciating significant breakthroughs in computer science.
- whstl 1y agoThis remind me of something. In music criticism there are two terms, Rockism and Popism. I feel like the intial drive against "Rockism" was to embrace different subcultures, like punk and post-punk, but later the result was "Popism", which became its own kind of orthodoxy, pushing critics into treating label-engineered chart pop as deep just because it’s popular or polished. Back when I was a journalism student wanting to work in music in the early 2000s I used to frequent early internet hangouts for critics and it was interesting to see the change happening progressively, with critics increasively and progressively adopting a certain air of superiority over anyone who couldn't conflate popularity with genius. For me the big chasm was over brazilian funk music. Sure I could see it a few times as somewhat interesting, and I could understand the appeal as dance music, but the old guard was trying to use old arguments to push it as "descendants of Kraftwerk" while the new guard was using socio-anthropological arguments to defend it. The music rarely stood for itself, and when it did was often on the back of previous music. I'm not saying it's automatically "bad" but its positive qualities were blown out of proportion by critics for me that it become grating. Today the internet made it all even worse, lots of "pop culture centric" communities are 5% about music and 95% about the personal life of artists, the TMZ-level gossip, the memes, the constant fighting virtual wars with other pop-music fandoms, the metacircular discussion around the fandom itself... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockism_and_poptimism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockism_and_poptimism
- voidhorse 1y agoThis was a great read! I think the analysis of the declining pipeline is spot on. Up until around 2016 or so, I was on track to try my hand at the world of literary fiction—I had participated in several circles in college, sat on the review board of a lit mag, joined a group of writers post graduation, all just to eventually...set it aside. I always had a "day job" during this time, but other than that I was single and had few responsibilities. This made holding a typical nine to five and actually getting some writing done somewhat tenable. As my sphere of responsibility expanded (relationships, etc) this quickly became untenable. There's only so much time in a day, unfortunately, and as we continue along a career path, we're incentivized to invest ever increasing amounts of time into that, rather than a far-from-lucrative gamble on literary pursuits. When you're able to actually make money on your literary work, it establishes a virtuous circle. Writing more makes you a better writer and writing more gets you paid (allowing you to support those other aspects of your life). Contrast this with the modern experience of desperately trying to carve out whatever time you can to make at least a brief writing session happen, amidst being exhausted already by the other demands on your time (your non-writing job being a big one). From the critical side, I think the situation is pretty much analogous to that of contemporary art. The common person would meet most experimental literary works with a quizzical look, just as they meet most contemporary and conceptual art with the a quizzical look. Artists, however, have had better success with this because their objects are not generally mass produced. This has allowed the critical narrowing and distance from the common taste to be buoyed up economically by natural scarcity and the concomitant transformation of the object into a value-holding asset. That can never happen with literature, which is definitionally reproduced at scale.
- tolerance 1y ago> What made the fiction literary was it spoke the language of memory, where the reader inhabited the experience of the characters, and this changed how readers experienced the world after. > > — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36882341 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36882341 People don't turn to books for this sort of experience anymore. People are not "literary minded". For the average person, interpolating another person's experience against their own through the written word is counterintuitive if not impossible and detached. It takes a literary mind to feel through text. Electronic media of all sorts, aside from long form text displayed electronically is just that; electrifying. I think that the quote I pulled from motohagiography applies to all writing and when we go further: > Writing on the internet is participatory, impersonal, performative, and anti-intimate. The cultural decline of all writing becomes more obvious. Anyone who cares about this sort of stuff needs to understand that their brain is rewired but their spirit still craves the same old stuff that it sought out for when the mind could stomach total absorption in a dry block of pulp.
- citizenpaul 1y ago> it spoke the language of memory, We are living in the tower of Babel. No one speaks the same "language" anymore. I truly believe this was the true metaphor behind that story. Once a civilization reaches a certain level of standard wealth people hyper converge on their personal beliefs to the point where they can literally no longer speak about other forms of personal belief or preference that conflicts with their own. And they no longer are coerced into going along with another belief system (compromise) due to economic need from the majority. At that point the civilization unravels due to lack of coherent direction. Look at all the arguments about definitions of clearly defined words in modern politics.
- tolerance 1y agoEven so, mass media today is better posed to present a shared language. I'd go as far as to think that there is a shared language in society today, but it's more like athletes jawing off amongst each other than something like what we expect the effects of culture and art to be.
- jtwoodhouse 1y ago"A good deal of literary criticism serves only to reinforce a caste system which is as old as the intellectual snobbery which nurtured it. No one can be as intellectually slothful as a really smart person.” — Stephen King
- cubefox 1y agoSour grapes. I've read enough of Stephen King in my youth to know that he is a very skilled writer, but he only produced large amounts of popular genre literature. The literature equivalent of enjoyable but forgettable popcorn movies. He wasn't taken seriously by literature criticism because he didn't produce anything sophisticated.
- lubujackson 1y agoI don't know if that's entirely accurate. I just read The Body (basis for Stand By Me) and it was as personal and emotionally complex as any literary-approved fiction. It reminded me a lot of The Things They Carried, actually. I think the biggest issue is that once he was pidgeonholed into being a "trope-master, scary fiction guy", no one would look at his writing any other way. And to be fair, MOST of his writing is overwrought genre stuff, but he has certainly developed into a fine craftsman at his best. The reality is that most "literary" fiction is terrible and navel-gazing, seemingly written to land tenure somewhere or push some stupid literary trend that is just as vapid as any other publishing trend, only less fun. Historically, most fiction (or art in general) that persists was wildly successful in its time as a prerequisite.
- cubefox 1y ago> The reality is that most "literary" fiction is terrible and navel-gazing, seemingly written to land tenure somewhere or push some stupid literary trend that is just as vapid as any other publishing trend, only less fun. I think that's just prejudice. Literary fiction simply has artistic or intellectual value beyond entertainment, and beyond using familiar tropes. It's possible that King has some of these qualities somewhere. I have only read ten to fifteen of his novels. But that was enough that I could e.g. predict the ending of The Shining after about 50 pages.
- Ekaros 1y agoI wonder if part of it is that culture is more fragmented. There is lot more of it and it is often in other mediums. Like say TV-series. So there is no need to read certain type of fiction to stay on top of the recent thing...
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- libraryofbabel 1y agoI love how this article cuts right through a lot of bad trite explanations for literary fiction’s decline that have been pushed by its adherents (“the internet made people stupid”) to really try and analyze the supply side and demand side factors of why not many people buy contemporary literary fiction anymore. His point that people still read challenging literary fiction, just by dead people, also seems an important one (see HN’s recent discussions of reading Ulysses) and rather damning for contemporary literary novelists. So is the point that many good writers who wanted to actually earn a living that way ended up writing for prestige TV in the 2000s instead. I do wish he’d discussed more why Sally Rooney seems to be the exception, in terms of commercial success. What is it about her books that’s different? What did she do (or avoid doing) to appeal to a wide readership? Finally, he seems to draw a pretty hard boundary between literary and “genre” fiction that I’m not sure always exists. Ursula Le Guin is a good counterexample here.
- andrewflnr 1y agoIain M Banks is another example of "literary sci-fi" or whatever you want to call it.
- sitkack 1y agoIf someone likes Le Guin, they also like the writing of Toni Morrison. Morrison follows a more complex but similar abstract structure in her writing.
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- mkoubaa 1y agoEven the most challenging work of fiction wasn't challenging to an 18 year old contemporary reader of average intelligence. The fact that in order to appreciate these works in present day requires more intellectualism doesn't actually say anything about the works themselves.
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- pclmulqdq 1y agoPeople seem to forget that many of the books we find to be "literary" today were 1800s smut. These were commercial successes in their time, and weren't considered "highbrow," that was just what people read. Dismissing all of the books people read today as "genre" and not literary is the problem.
- kayodelycaon 1y agoInteresting idea. Literary fiction never actually existed; it’s an artificial construct. I’d really love some professors to analyze a furry solarpunk story I wrote and dig through the symbolism like Virginia Woolf wrote it. It would be interesting to see if a random internet dog’s scribblings can provide just as much content for discussion. From what other people have told me, it does.
- rsynnott 1y agoScifi is somewhere in the transition from "always genre fiction" to "sometimes respectable literary fiction" (people write serious analyses of sci-fi, now!) Granted, furry solarpunk might take a bit longer.
- api 1y agoLiterary is a genre. Like all genres it has its popular tropes, fandom, cliches, etc. A long time ago someone on a forum described a new lit fic book as a “TOBADNY” — a “trendy overhyped book about dysfunctional New Yorkers.” I LOLed and then realized this was totally the case and that this was a popular lit fic trope.
- 0xDEAFBEAD 1y agoI mean, maybe that's part of the problem, it's a genre that's just becoming less popular? Akin to Western novels?
- rsynnott 1y agoHrm, not sure I _totally_ buy this; a big part of "is it literary fiction?" is just "it is _proper, respectable_ literature that people write analyses of?", and that tends to shift over time a bit. Some current novels which are not considered literary fiction today will be in 2050.
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- perching_aix 1y agoI don't know what could possibly make me read books. Reading is a chore, and not very efficient at the best of times. There's also the eye strain and the neck pain, and comfort in general. Best would be to read from bed, but bed is for sleepy time, a hard earned lesson. But that's just me. Here's why I think books are no longer being read in general. It's simply a format that time has moved on from. First came the radio, but radio wasn't gonna compete with books. Radio was succeeded by television though, and that sure could, but television is presently being succeeded by the internet, with TV companies desperate for any remaining attention, attention that they keep bleeding. All this time the format has failed to find a foothold, and carve out its stay. You may discover that this is not universally true across the world, such as in Japan, where light novels are decently popular. It has its own place, but in the Western world, the only reliable place books have is in the classroom. I stipulate that the reason you see a prominently female readership is for the same reason: girls are (were?) taught in school that they're the more artsy type, that humanities should interest them more, and so they proceed(ed) to take that on the chin. Fast forward a few decades, and there you go. The same applies for all other foregone forms of art. Theater? Opera? Ballet? Classical music performances? You'd have to pay or coerce me to attend these. Where I live, all the institutions hosting these are living off of government money, as they're simply unable to sustain themselves otherwise. People just don't care. The shows put on are basically live-action museum exhibitions. Although I guess even museums should be included in this list. Modern audiences are simply completely out of tune with these, they are an exercise in anachronism. And until the communities behind these continue to hammer in their formal position in art over their actual one, rather than try to connect with said modern audiences, this trend will continue. That is assuming such a connection is even possible still at this point.
- 7thaccount 1y agoPlenty of people still read and read a lot. I also have other hobbies, but I don't think it's going away. There are more books being published than ever before. There are also genres like science fiction and fantasy that are HUGE now and were once much smaller.
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- dfedbeef 1y agoThere are better ways to tell stories now; good story tellers are doing fine. The only ones left holding the bag are people who wanted specifically to be 'literary fiction writers' because they have some conception of what that is and why it's important to have a story physically printed on paper.
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- unignorant 1y agoI really enjoyed this article but the claim of no literary fiction making the Publishers Weekly yearly top 10 lists since 2001 isn't really true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publishers_Weekly_list_of_bestselling_novels_in_the_United_States_in_the_2020s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publishers_Weekly_list_of_best... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publishers_Weekly_list_of_bestselling_novels_in_the_United_States_in_the_2010s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publishers_Weekly_list_of_best... It is true that there isn't that much literary stuff that breaks through, and the stuff that does is usually somewhat crossover (e.g., All the Light We Cannot See in 2015 or Song of Achilles in 2021) but it exists. These two books are shelved under literary codes (though also historical). Song of Achilles in particular is beautifully written and a personal favorite of mine, at least among books published in recent years. Then there are other works like Little Fires Everywhere and The Midnight Library that I might not consider super literary but nonetheless are also often considered so by book shops or libraries (e.g., https://lightsailed.com/catalog/book/the-midnight-library-a-novel-haig-matt/9780525559481/?utm_source=chatgpt.com https://lightsailed.com/catalog/book/the-midnight-library-a-...; the lit fic code is FIC019000). I was really surprised that Ferrante's Neapolitan series, the best example (I would have thought) of recent work with both high literary acclaim and popular appeal, did not actually make the top 10 list for any year.
- sdenton4 1y agoYeah, and looking through the lists makes one suspect that there's a problem of incommensurate measurements... There's a lot of 'very hungry caterpillar' in the recent lists, but I'm unsure whether children's books were even in the running in the 1960's. Or else there's been a revolution in buying books for children since the 60's, which, honestly, I wouldn't be sad about...
- cafard 1y agoIs the author using Drury, Michener, and Morris West to beat up on 2023? I haven't read Colleen Hoover, but I have read the others, and they haven't made my must-reread list. Honestly, if one takes the best-seller lists of a few arbitrary years, one will find an awful lot of dross.
- mslansn 1y ago[dead]
- LgWoodenBadger 1y agoI’ve been wanting to buy a copy of Flowers for Algernon. It’s easy too, my local Barnes and Noble has it in stock. But it’s $19 (in paperback!) for a book published almost 60 years ago.
- LeonB 1y agoTake a slow and steady look through every second-hand book store within travelling distance. You might find it or you might not. But the search will be far more interesting than browsing any website.
- ethagnawl 1y agoKeep an eye out for library sales in your area. The selection is usually very good and you can buy books/CDs/etc. by the pound.
- dyauspitr 1y agoMass market paperback is $6 on Amazon
- mkoubaa 1y agoTo produce a good work of fiction its important to both 1) have a story to tell and 2) tell it masterfully. By the time people collect enough life experience to satisfy (1) they've aged out of the demographic that's willing to put in the work to learn (2). This is why great writers are and will always be rare. People who write slop in their 20s will either fail and give up or be a victim of their success and produce more slop to satisfy their audience.
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- BrenBarn 1y agoI agree with what seems like the article's main point, namely that literary fiction has declined because it's not actually good anymore, it's just targeted at a tiny subculture of critics with weird tastes. In a way this is prefigured by the whole idea of "literary fiction"; the article never explains what this is, but it seems to mean something like "fiction that intends to be something other than pure entertainment". > after postmodernism a kind of MFA minimalism came to dominate literary fiction I totally agree with this and it more or less sums up why I hardly read any contemporary literary fiction. (And I'm one of those people the article talks about who does read a lot of novels, just not many new ones.) Although it's contrasted here with postmodernism, in a way I see a contiguity between them, as the irritating background sensation I get from most such writing, is a deliberate attempt by the author to create a distinctive "voice". Some of the postmodernist stuff does it by being very weird, but the new stuff can be even worse because so many writers are trying to create "their own voice" within this tiny range of the style space. I make an effort to sample this sometimes when I'm in a boosktore, but I'll pick up a book and read the first page or two and a wave of ennui washes over me. Around 20 years ago, in college, I went to a talk by a classics scholar (as in, ancient Greek classics), who made an offhand reference to "The sort of story you read in the New Yorker, you know, one everyday American preaching a gentle sermon to another." I've always remembered that line and it still rings true today. The article seems to talk about the "wokeness hypothesis" on this issue in terms of attributes of authors (e.g., their race or gender) rather than of stories. I don't know much about that. But if there's a way that wokeness or something like it has influenced writing, I'd say it's from a different angle: I just get the sense that there's a lot more risk today in writing about characters very unlike the author. It can be perceived as trying to "tell [insert group name here]'s story" without their involvement or consent. I think the severity of this is overstated by right-leaning reactionaries, but it's hard to argue that it's not a genuine shift in societal mood and values. I think this is somewhat unfortunate, because it has a chilling effect on the role of imagination in writing. When we assume that a writer writing about some character is "telling the story" of people in the real world who are somehow similar to that character I think we sometimes close ourselves off to interesting stories that can potentially speak to many readers across cultures and categories. Like I say, this effect isn't decisive, but it's real. When reading the article I also kept thinking about "classical" music, which seems like the musical counterpart to "literary" fiction. I've met people my age, younger, even kids, who respond with visceral enjoyment to Beethoven, Chopin, etc. I've met people who genuinely like stuff like Debussy and Ravel. I'm not sure I've ever met someone who unironically liked contemporary classical music on that level. Like literary fiction, it's become an inside game for people who want to push boundaries and move beyond conventions, and making something that sounds nice is secondary. There are exceptions to various degrees (Philip Glass comes to mind) but on the whole I get the sense of the same phenomenon mentioned in the article, which is that everyone seems to take it as given that no one is writing any music today that is even in the same league as Beethoven or Bach. In the realm of fiction, that kind of connects to this: > For the last twenty years American literary culture has been unable to produce a writer we can describe as great without at least feeling a tinge of embarrassment about. We should be worried. That feeling of embarrassment feels connected to the rise of irony in art in general, and I wonder if it's another reason literary fiction has suffered. It's hard to write in the modern world without working in a significant wink-wink-nudge-nudge about how stupid and banal things are, not in the sense of satire or even witty commentary but just a kind of devil-may-care acceptance. But there may be hope for us yet. According to a story that may be apocryphal, around 100 years ago someone asked Andre Gide who the greatest French poet was and he answered: "Victor Hugo, alas!"
- lapcat 1y agoI think the first half of the article is the strongest, most plausible part. The argument: Economic opportunities for professional writers have declined dramatically. The two crucial pathways were mentioned for novel writers to support themselves economically: (1) magazine writing and (2) academia. In the first case, magazine circulation has suffered because advertisers left for the internet, and in the second case, academic job oportunities have declined because of governmental cutbacks to universities, especially in the humanities. The second half of the article argues that authors have made a tradeoff, deciding to maximize critical praise instead of book sales, thereby turning off general audiences who don't share the obscure and trendy tastes of the critics. This argument felt weak. As far as I can tell, there's no real explanation of how it supposedly came about. Even the article author seems to admit there are holes in the argument: "There are still some important open questions: the exact role of the critics in moving authors away from popular taste." Indeed. I'm personally a fan of contemporary literary fiction. My own suspicion is that the problem in literature is the same as the problem in music and movies: corporate consolidation and the ascendancy of data-mongering penny-pinchers with no taste except for profit maximization. Their preference in all the arts is derivative dreck that's easily marketed, ideally with a built-in audience and reproducible, with the goal of spawning an endless series based in the same "universe." The leaders of the industry don't want to take chances on new artists, unless they can guarantee a massive hit.
- kevinmchugh 1y agoMagazines were so flush with cash that Vonnegut was paid $750 for his first story. That's unadjusted for inflation. I'm no expert, but I think a first time author getting $750 from a magazine would be doing pretty well these days. He saw that market fall apart within his lifetime, and blamed it on th audience moving to TV, for what it's worth.
- pclmulqdq 1y agoThe last time I checked (2022), top-tier lit mags will pay about $50-100 for a story. They pay mostly in "exposure" these days.
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- protocolture 1y ago>Literary fiction, serious fiction,[1] high literature,[2] or artistic literature,[2] and sometimes just literature,[2] encompasses fiction books and writings that are more character-driven rather than plot-driven, that examine the human condition, or that are simply considered serious art by critics. Same reason new christmas carols dont land. And people dont listen to new classic music styles. It has to meet arbitrary rules regarding art, seriousness and get past critics to even be added to the category. I say category because anyone can write fiction, its just magical fairy dust better than you wankery when you add literary to the front. Much easier to instead simply write good fiction and let idiots clutch pearls over its literariness. Boils down to "This arbitrary category with a bunch of great nostalgia based entries doesn't have modern competition" Meanwhile genre fiction printer goes brrrrrr which contains a lot of shit, but due to sheer quantity contains so many gems you never even need to worry about critics or "literary" fiction. Actually I feel like this is yet another example of how stupid it is to gatekeep art as higher than process. Art comes from process. It isnt a single part of the process that can be separated from it. People complained video games could never be art. People complain that genre fiction cant be art. These days its AI image generation. Its all art, or can be art.
- anal_reactor 1y agoMy problem with books is that it takes a lot of time to read a book, and it's very difficult to tell beforehand if I'll like the book.
- allturtles 1y agoIsn't this easily solved by reading part of the book and then deciding whether you like it enough to continue? The typical novel takes no longer than watching a season of a serialized TV show... and because it is written as a coherent whole rather than piecemeal, it is much less likely than a TV show to suffer from a bad ending that undermines everything that came before it.
- romaaeterna 1y agoYounger people don't read books as frequently as they did when I was young (pre-internet). Bookstores are flooded with junk, with the SEO-equivalent of publishing spam having won out on the bookshelves. Libraries are as bad or worse. Students do not pursue Greek and Latin and classical literature, and have no reference point of high culture apart from the distracting now. And the English language has declined. English has always been a scraped-together, something-of-everything tongue. But jargon and abstractisms have killed expression. Meanwhile, French and German have eaten so many Americanisms that they're in terminal indigestion, and now the whole planet thinks and talks like a slightly below-average bumpkin American with a college journalism degree.
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- ryao 1y agoI had no idea that literary fiction was a genre rather than a generic term for fictional literature until I read this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_fiction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_fiction There is a very simple explanation for the decline. The books are garbage that only masochists enjoy and that sadists force children to read in school. The description “Literary fiction may involve a concern with social commentary, political criticism, or reflection on the human condition” is full of antipatterns that are largely the mark of bad literature, since they miss the core purpose of fictional literature, which is to entertain. This is why “light novels” out of Japan and adaptations of them are popular while literary fiction is not.
- Filligree 1y agoLiterary fiction is not a genre. It’s disjoint from genre fiction, which contains SF, fantasy and so on.
- b00ty4breakfast 1y agowhen has litfic ever been relevant to the wider culture? There are exceptions of course but those are remarkable specifically because they are the exception. The average reader has always wanted Peyton Place, not Proust
- sandy_coyote 1y agoIf it's true that lit fic started leaving the best seller lists around the early 70s, could that also be due to people finding other media to express themselves? Like experimental music, film, and other fiction genres?
- dsign 1y agoIf I or anybody else publishes a novel about LLMs taking over the world, it would be classed as science-fiction, not as social commentary. We suffer the same vices and the same diseases of one hundred years ago, and by then we had already invented capitalism and “enjoyed” it for quite some time. So I recon nobody would be able to write something like Les Miserables or David Copperfield and expect to have the same impact. Our technological world and the nature of our collective miseries are constantly changing, and IMO are fertile ground for literary creation, but writers trained on the classic literary fiction works would not be prepared to handle the intricacies of our broad technology sectors and its social implications, and if they did were prepared and did write on those topics, they wouldn’t be recognized by their peers and the New Yorker as literary fiction writers… Think about The Martian, and a long list of wonderful works that have never made it to any of the high-brow lists this article refers to.
- cs02rm0 1y agoVideo killed the radio star. I remember listening to that as a kid and thinking it must be wrong because we still had radio, we even had books everywhere as far as I could see. Of course we still do, but it's not just literary fiction suffering; book sales tend to go down (pandemics excepted) while the numbers being published goes up. Anecdotally, I followed an interesting ex-MI6 bod on Tiktok (@theenglishspy) who had ~50k followers and admitted, maybe a few months after publishing a book he'd been pushing, that he had sold less than 100 copies. I had my own go [1] at narrative non-fiction for a cause and also didn't manage to break 100 copies. Perhaps it's a good thing; the market's saturated, while overall demand for books is falling it's because there are more instant, engaging formats that people are seeking to invest in finding stories. If the internet ever goes down, those books will still be there, we'll just have to find a way to order them. [1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0DVC8XG1X/ https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0DVC8XG1X/
- BlackFly 1y agoAccording to the author this isn't the case, but the take is complicated: > People don’t read books or short stories in magazines anymore because they’re too busy scrolling? There’s data on this: according to the National Endowment of the Arts, the number of Americans who “read literature” has fallen from 56.9% in 1982 to 46.7% in 2002 to 38% in 2022. I’m not even going to bother pulling data on the percent of time people spend on their phones or on the internet. So the internet means people spend less time reading books and (presumably) less time reading literary fiction in particular because it’s weighty, boring, dense, etc. There are two problems with this theory: one is that the facts are wrong — the actual size of the fiction reading population has not shrunk a meaningful amount (population growth), and the second is that even if the facts were right, it couldn’t be correct: in 1955, the number of Americans who even read one book a year (39%) was lower than it is today (53%).3 And the 1950s and 1960s were supposedly the golden-age of American fiction. What’s actually going on? Most easily digestible evidence submitted by the author is https://fred.stlouisfed.org/data/DRBKRA3A086NBEA https://fred.stlouisfed.org/data/DRBKRA3A086NBEA showing that actual per capita expenditure on reading material has increased indexed to 2017 dollars...
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- sublinear 1y agoGot too politcal
- 0xDEAFBEAD 1y agoWhat is "literary fiction"? Is it possible that the word "literature" just refers to fiction which has had time to accumulate gravitas, in part due to being old? If that's true, "literature" production will always appear to be in decline ;-)
- chairmansteve 1y agoMany years ago, I was in Foyles in London, trying buy A Portait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce. I scoured the fiction section, surprised that they didn't have it. Then I asked a staff member. He told me to look in the Literature section....
- HeartStrings 1y agoDon’t forget rise of audible.
- Zaylan 1y agoI’ve noticed my reading habits changing too. I used to read a lot of literary fiction in my twenties, but now I mostly go for nonfiction or short-form stuff. It’s not that I think fiction is less important, it just feels harder to make space for slow, quiet stories that don’t offer an immediate payoff. Maybe it’s not just a cultural decline, but a deeper shift in how we deal with time, attention, and meaning.
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- JakeHPark 1y agoI have noticed this too. I spent my childhood immersed in fantasy and dystopian fiction, but nowadays, all I do is read nonfiction. Granted, part of it is probably because I realised that reality is typically much stranger (and therefore often more interesting) than fiction.
- TulliusCicero 1y agoI read books to have fun, and litfic isn't really fun for me. I absolutely acknowledge that I read schlock -- mostly progression fantasy these days -- because it's immediately fun and engaging to me. If I wanna think harder, I read about politics and current events, or work on side projects, or maybe play a strategy or puzzle game.
- BlackFly 1y agoYeah, this is basically the argument of the op. That somewhere in the 70s, that whole genre started to target critics as the audience instead of the general population and sales have been dwindling since that alienation.
- hoseja 1y agoWhenever I look at some award list of contemporary "serious" literature it's filled to the brim with variations on "semi-fictional biography of a 20th century human". I have no idea why this is. Why is this the only type of story that is "taken seriously"?
- randomcarbloke 1y agoit doesn't help that the craft of writing is being forgotten, even if you don't read you can see the same issue in film and television.
- narrator 1y agoI'm a bit of an old timer so I'll throw something out there. Entertainment used to be rare. Albums used to cost $20 back when that used to be a lot of money. TV was 13 channels, and that was if you had cable. People had to read because there was no other option. Now there's absolutely unlimited free/cheap entertainment and literary fiction is highly politicized because of critics. There's no such thing as a controversial novel that gets any mention by anyone post 2008. The last contemporary literary novel I read was Michel Houellebecq's "Submission" and I read it only because it was controversial, extremely well written and Hourllebecq writes novels that appeal to middle aged men. I'm always up for a novel like that, but it seems impossible to find these days.
- tgv 1y agoPlus what 'social media' has done to our attention span. It takes some to read a book, especially literature.
- kreyenborgi 1y agoat least takes away the ability to comprehend substack articles
- JakeHPark 1y agoClay Shirky calls it "filter failure": https://mascontext.com/issues/information/its-not-information-overload-its-filter-failure https://mascontext.com/issues/information/its-not-informatio... > The cost of producing anything by anyone has fallen through the floor, famously, and as a result, there is no economic logic that says you have to filter for quality before you publish. Moreover: > What we are dealing with now isn’t information overload, because we are always dealing with information overload, the problem is filter failure. I think this is a compelling take. It's gotten to the point where I have to use ChatGPT to look for good sources instead of Googling directly. I held out for a while, but had to capitulate in late 2024 when search engines just became a total slopfest. As a sidenote, I did enjoy Houellebecq's Le sens du combat. :P
- flufluflufluffy 1y agoWtf is “literary fiction?” Sounds like a genre invented by snobs. Same old [people from past generation complaining that x medium art made by the current generation is worse/lacks a soul/etc/etc] that has been happening since the beginning of art. There is a wealth of extremely artful, literary written works being made by young people today. Just like there’s a wealth of extremely artful, boundary pushing music being made by young people today. You’re not gonna run into most of it if you only listen to top 40 radio but that doesn’t mean it’s not there. Even so, with the “top 40” songs/books/what-have-you, I feel like these things are always framed as “cultural decline” when in fact it’s “cultural change” and you just don’t like the thing it’s changing into currently.
- JakeHPark 1y agoOn the other hand, music is demonstrably becoming more self-centred and narcissistic: https://brainfodder.org/song-lyrics-simpler-repetitive/ https://brainfodder.org/song-lyrics-simpler-repetitive/ Christopher Lasch talks about this in The Culture of Narcissism, but essentially it's a response to greater levels of emotional insecurity due to atomisation and social disconnection.
- alexitorg 1y agoI wonder if the same thing is happening in genres like sci-fi. These trends sound familiar: Publishing books to appeal to critics, more prestige fiction published, less published white male authors, less published books on best seller lists (by published I mean published by a professional publishing firm). I am not sure that big authors of the 80's and 90's such as Iain Banks, Neil Stevenson, Peter F Hamilton would get published now days. I've noticed the big sci-fi awards seems to have a lot more books with social justice themes than I remember. I find I don't like a lot of the newly published sci-fi. I'm reading a lot more self published books amd, at least judging by best seller lists on amazon, so are a lot of other people. It is a pity, I think professionally published books are generally better written, perhaps it is the pipeline of authors writing about themes I like being broken?
- antupis 1y agoPretty much all the best stuff is self-published first weekly basis on sites like Royal Road, and then some mainstream publisher will pick it up when it gains momentum.
- thom 1y agoI assume you're joking, but hopefully everyone will be aware that Ian (M) Banks was woke as fuck, and Neil Stevenson and Peter F Hamilton continue the noble struggle of publishing through such minor imprints as HarperCollins and Random House.
- philwelch 1y agoThis is a bad faith response. Of course publishers aren’t going to drop established best-selling authors; alexitorg’s point is that these authors would not get the same chance if they were starting out today. Also, I think Banks was more of an old fashioned utopian socialist, which is very different from “woke as fuck”.
- thom 1y agoI guess it's at least some comfort that Banks didn't have to live to see a world where a white man couldn't publish a series about gender-bending space communists.
- metalman 1y agoit's quite clear to me that the author, and peers of the article dont get out enough. the issue is not the decline of literary fiction, it is rather the fact of fiction it lself is no longer possible, which is quite evident when listening to the surreal, harrowing, epic tales to be told by the people all around the edges, haltingly, and reluctantly told, but everywhere. we no longer live in a "golden age" where we can mull over the causes and effects of human lives lived large and bold, as the inescapable reality is serving you coffee, in a 3d printed sci-fi setting, the furnishings hard, the light eminating from an incomprehensable device operating at frequencys absent from any literary narative, a high whine wavering beween revelation and impending doom, more in line with some mythical description of the advent of deamons and spirits than anything a civilised and literate culture would ever allude to. Cervantes and Hobbs stand as proxy's for two possible paths, Hobbs bieng the overwheming choice, all of the impossible to reconcile inconsistansies, simply ommited from our narative, and twisted into a booming(pun.acknowedged) busniess of exporting our conradictions.
- krapp 1y agocuil story, bro.
- southernplaces7 1y agoI don't see it. For one thing, the classic creative pieces of literary fiction continue to sell and be read (and we don't even know how many other people read pirated or freely available copies of them every day), while more new fiction than ever in human history is being published constantly. About the vast majority of that new fiction, we really have no easy way to tell which of it will one day be considered literary fiction too. Many of the books and other pieces of creative fiction we consider "greats" and literary today, were at some point just, fiction. Tehir future reputation wasn't yet known. Not quite literary fiction, but Shakespeare's plays were their era's versions of Hollywood films for the masses, but look at them now. Similar applies to many books.
- curtisszmania 1y ago[dead]
- resource_waste 1y ago"Poets lie too much" What is the goal of fiction? Escapism. What does it matter if its deep or shallow? The deep ones arent entertaining enough? If you are expecting a character to enlighten you on a new problem, you are being corrupted by lies. From Nietzsche to Plato, its agreed, fiction corrupts. Using it for anything outside entertainment is horrifying.
- SpicyLemonZest 1y agoBook sales figures are so private that I don't know how to validate this, but my intuition is that this is just the mirror of the rise of genre fiction. It was never unpopular in the first place, and there's little if anything left of the 1960s-era consensus that genre fiction is fundamentally lesser. I read a lot, and it's just never occurred to me that I have to find literary fiction if I want something deep or thought-provoking.
- bonoboTP 1y agoThe medium changes. People communicate differently now. The other day I was thinking about how absurd it seems from today that in the 19th century culturally cherished people wrote poems on the political situation (at least in Central Europe, think 1848, coffeehouse culture etc.), with rhymes, correct syllable count etc. Not just politics, but anything relevant, like love (romanticism) etc. Totally unironically, as a serious form of the social conversation. The closest we may have to that today is hip hop.