Just in my experience, I can find plenty of good literature published recently (in fact the upcoming months seem to be particularly fruitful with new Pynchon, Vollman, and DeWitt novels), on a strict statistical basis im sure its harder than it has been in the past to publish these kinds of novels and for new authors to establish themselves but I dont quite buy the nadir narrative. What I do think skews this a little bit is that lit criticism has atrophied so theres less tastemaking and thus weaker canonization (for example we have gone from strong literary magazines in the 20th century to creepypasta youtubers hawking Cormac McCarthy). In short I dont think its an issue of quality available but its much harder now to seperate the wheat from all the pulpy colleen hoover trash.

I think the overall material conditions of society have worsened (for everybody). If you look at early works from authors like John Fante (Ask the Dust) and John Barth (The Floating Opera) their semi-autobiographical protagonists are living out of cheap motels. That would be a fantasy for young ambitious intelligent potential novelist these days. In the Bay Area there are no SROs left even in San Francisco and the house across the street from my apartment building (2 bedrooms, not large) is on the market for $1.2 million. How is anybody, let alone an aspiring writer supposed to afford rent/mortgage while trying to write an even halfway decent novel.

In the sense that truly great works are being throttled by the modern, corporatized publishing industry, yes. They're are still being published at the same rate, but there are more bad books than ever. The good stuff is being drowned in a tidal wave of shit. We always hear two things: nobody reads anymore, and publishers only sell what people want to read. I don't see how those two things can both be true. Why the hell would anyone trust the tastemakers when the tastemakers have brought us here? I'd very much like smaller publishers to take risks on genuinely great yet commercially viable literature instead of over/underwritten MFA autofiction. The market is there. They just need to find it.

xdye

2 days ago

Thanks for the thoughts. Some of my generally-non-reader friends got really into some fantasy web novel called "Shadow Slave", which apparently has several thousand chapters. I have no idea whether that story is any good, but I think the fact that they're willing to read thousands of chapters of this thing serves as evidence of abandoned untapped markets of potential readers out there, particularly men. And I'd wager that this demographic's interest is not limited to fantasy slop, if we can accept that there's artistic merit to at least some of the video games/anime/movies they're generally preferring, even if midbrow. How many of the most promoted authors these days are drawing inspiration from Beowulf? Key point being here that these guys are finding fiction that speaks to them outside of the traditional publishing system, and I'm curious about how web publishing can be used to circumvent the failures of the current publishing industry.

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