The Cultural Decline of Literary Fiction

oyyy.substack.com

3 points·libraryofbabel··2 comments

I 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?

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.

For me as an avid reader, a big problem is a lack of sources for literary recommendations.

Mainstream sources like the New York Times recommend almost solely based on ideological points (female author, ethnic background, etc) and I have no trouble with the topics but the problem is that I always come out dissatisfied with the recs, so I stopped listening.

For community sources like Internet forums, it’s all much more about genre,so it’s that and classics for me.

this is a mostly an Anglo problem - in my native language I have no problem finding literary sources.

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