DISQUS

Lawrence_Tate · 1 year ago

This post is somewhat misleading in grouping Hitch with a bunch of novelists young enough to be his kids or damn near it. He's published no fiction (labeled as such, anyway) that I know of. It is true that c. 1990 he was at work on a "Washington novel" and may have had a deal for it. But legend has it he lost the MS - in a Glover Park bar. (This is a pretty damn inside gag, I know, but Osnos can explain it to y'all in LA at the end of the month.)

corsairsanglot · 1 year ago

What? These are all straw men that surely no one takes seriously. No one actually reads Keith Gessen, right? He is just a joke we are all enjoying, right?

If we are looking at youngish male writers that people actually read, what about David Mitchell, David Foster Wallace, Irvine Welsh, Neal Stephenson, and Michael Chabon?

I think the problem is that once a good male writer becomes popular, he is no longer "literary." Different weight classes. Norman Mailer always boxed bantam and it will be funny when his relevance and ambit of influence in the next century is eclipsed by Stephen King.

Whose books would you rather read? Thackeray or Charles Dickens?

Cearnaigh1 · 1 year ago

Why can't more men write? Gee, goshdarn it, I just don't know? What is it about men?
More male bashing by a business largely run by women these days. Why can't men write? Because women refuse to publish genuinely, openly male authors anymore. Can't have that. And why? Look at the pictures on this website to your right, all women for the most part. Writer's conferences? A gaggle of women and the slender of wrist who can pass. Now we get to the next question? Why don't more men read, anymore? They are not squishy and introspective enough? Where then did F. Scott, Joyce and Hem come from, were these not men? (are we not men?) Third parter? Who is to blame for the fact the publishing industry is in a nosedive? Well, we've shut out, effectively alienated 50 percent of the market, at least. That was smart. We'll show them won't we girls! Got Alanis? Crank up the volume!
Who's to blame? Look in the mirror ladies, how much chick lit rott does the public need to swallow before it's enough already? Do we sacrifice the industry just to show men how much we hate them?
Nice

jrrrr · 1 year ago

"And while an insistence on the part of publishers that their debut authors be not only precocious and interestingly-backstoried but unusually capable of gazing soulfully into Marion Ettlinger's (or whoever's) lens is of course not entirely new, MAN has it gotten more pronounced in the last 10 or 15 years."

Looks like you've answered your own question...when women got the power they did the same thing with it the guys did...created a double standard.