My collaborators at Dhimmi Monde often complain that the books I review are too obscure. To which I respond: so what? Dhimmi Monde exists solely to review small press books. Isn’t obscurity kind of the point?

I will admit, however, that obscurity comes in vastly different shades. For perspective, the last book we featured on Dhimmi Monde has over 25,000 ratings on Goodreads. The book before that has around 800 ratings. But the book before that—my most recent review—has only three:

Why, my collaborators moan; why review books nobody has ever heard of?

A sensible answer might be that I’m trying to stake an early claim on an unknown masterpiece. But that’s not why. I’m hardly romantic about indie fiction. There are too many small presses out there posturing as cultural Zapatistas, protectors of the sacred flame of Literature against the stultifying Big Five Cartel—when, in reality, most indie fiction is as mediocre as anything else, and the only difference between these guerrilla presses and a Big Five imprint is the much smaller budget and the much larger chip on the shoulder.

The reason I gravitate toward little-known titles is to find something that is manifestly not a masterpiece. Or rather, I’m searching for the kind of extremely parochial masterpiece that is impossible to define but is probably familiar to anyone who has ever belonged to a small artistic community centered upon music, poetry, visual art, comics, comedy, or even film—creative mediums that encourage a degree of experimentation, amateurism, performance, ephemerality, sheer output, and, most importantly, mutual patronage that would be absurd to imagine among a community of novelists. Novels require too much time to read; reading requires too much isolation; and the very notion of isolated readers hinges too much upon the imprimatur of publication to foster the long-form fiction equivalent of, say, a local music scene: an incubator for the kind of raw and highly context-dependent genius that emerges when people share imperfect art for an audience of their tangible friends and rivals.

If I’m struggling to describe my idiosyncratic and ultimately not very important indie fiction ideals, I can at least give an example. One that I recently encountered is 3 by Kathy Joyce, which is the full title of a collection of three linked stories by Kathy Joyce. I wouldn’t exactly call this book obscure. It has impressive blurbs, including from Ivy Wolk and the guy who wrote last year’s infamous Harper’s article about “gooning.” Shortly after reading it I saw NYC’s #1 Gen Z autagonistophilic gamine, , brandishing it in an Instagram post about her campaign with a chic clothing brand:

But I wouldn’t call the book popular, either. As of this writing it has received only twenty ratings on Goodreads. I first stumbled onto it through an excerpt in the Evergreen Review, and I have never expended so much effort tracking down a book for Dhimmi Monde. The website of the publisher, Ristretto Books, lists no contact information. The website’s “Shop” page links to the Instagram profile of , which ignored my DMs. Eventually I DMed Kathy directly to ask whether her book might be stocked somewhere in NYC. She told me to try Books, a closet-sized “books and fine objects” shop in Greenpoint. I went on the Fourth of July. It was during a heat wave and I arrived off the train soaked in sweat. After searching an un-alphabetized wall of fiction in dim light for nearly an hour I discovered a single copy of 3 by Kathy Joyce.

I kind of liked that nobody seemed to care whether or not I read the book. It felt ambitiously unambitious: a book that exists not for the entire world but for a discrete milieu, in which everyone already knows that, obviously, you can find 3 by Kathy Joyce at Clown Show Prison Books. And it is precisely this tension between the mainstream and the underground that makes Joyce’s collection interesting, particularly in the first story, “Baseball.”

“Baseball” is the deadpan account of a gothic girl who has recently attended her first New York Yankees game. She doesn’t fit in; she’s a goth among jocks and preps, she knows nothing about baseball or sports culture. Yet her outsider status allows her to experience the game with a novelty that actual baseball fans no longer feel, propelling her into a rabid para-fandom:

When the Yankees lose I become suicidal. It’s extremely upsetting to me. I hate the other teams too. In the beginning I was fascinated with baseball as a whole and I was relatively happy for all of the players. I really loved Shohei Ohtani. Now when I see the Dodgers I just scream. And I hate it the most when anyone that’s not on the Yankees hits a home run.

The narrator goes on to extol the “magic” of mundane player behaviors such as chewing sunflower seeds and fidgeting with a helmet. She recounts ritualistically binge eating bananas—which she hates—to give the Yankees good luck. Her manic tone culminates in an elaborate erotic fantasy of almost having a threesome on the Yankee Stadium pitcher’s mound with Anthony Volpe and Aaron Judge.

This story ought to resonate with any intelligent person who has ever allowed themselves a guilty pleasure. Whether it’s a Gender Studies degree-holder who watches The Bachelor ironically, or a dues-paying DSA member who cites Gramsci while justifying their online sports gambling habit, we all develop strategies to resolve the perennially urgent paradox of authentic experience in a mass culture. Yes, a goth can become a fan of America’s national pastime—can become, in fact, the most diehard fan of its most illustrious franchise—but only by relating to the game in a certain way, a way that “normie” fans would find totally incomprehensible. As a case in point, I sent the story to one of my own normie friends, a committed Yankees fan whose favorite author is Ken Follett. He appreciated the narrator’s support for the Yankees, though he clearly sensed something was off:

Ultimately, I don’t think many Dhimmi Monde readers will like 3 by Kathy Joyce. It’s too silly and ironic. In one story, the goth narrator is high on heroin and having sex in the middle of a Starbucks on Christmas Day when a barista interrupts, shouting, “I am non-binary and I am woke, and I am going to call the police.” This type of writing is designed to make people laugh at Nightclub 101, not to produce the next Outline trilogy.

And yet within this modest purpose there is a glimmer of genius, the kernel of a great literary novelist. You’d have to be a complete normie not to see it.

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At the start of Sara Mesa’s Un Amor, Natalia arrives in La Escapa, a remote village in a remote region of Spain, from a faraway city. Although she intends to complete a work of translation, her project quickly takes a backseat to a more pressing problem: how to get along in a community that seems to operate on a set of strange and unspoken codes. Her landlord, for instance, dismisses her request that he fix the house’s leaky roof and instead rails against women and their outrageous demands. Everyone seems to want something from her; they just won’t say what. Only one man, known locally as the German, says exactly what he means. Noticing the leaks, he tells her: “I can fix your roof, if you’ll let me enter you a little while.” Nat considers the offer, asks some clarifying questions, and finally responds: “Thanks, but no.”

In one version of its history, the novel begins with rules. It cannot be incidental that Samuel Richardson, whose Pamela and Clarissa did so much to establish the foundations of literary realism, published guides to virtuous conduct before turning to fiction. He thought of the novel in expressly didactic terms, as a handbook for upright behavior in the increasingly complex social world of the eighteenth century, where licentiousness and pulchritude leered around every corner. The novelists who followed Richardson may have not have been so eager to instruct, but it’s easy to believe Jane Austen took quite seriously the rituals of courtship and marriage described in her novels, if only as safeguards against the threats posed by scoundrels like Pride and Prejudice’s Mr. Wickham.

The “novel of manners” can and has been decried as the superego of the novel tradition, a catalogue of the all ways Europeans and their colonial progeny have avoided talking about sex. By the time of Henry James and Edith Wharton, novels of manners mirrored Gilded Age society in obscuring the facts of life under innumerable layers of politesse, implication, and performance. Thus, in his The Ambassadors, James need only have his protagonist glimpse his son-in-law in a rowboat with the wrong woman to evoke the necessary air of scandal, while Wharton’s Age of Innocence famously depicts the double bind of the individual who would seek their freedom from such restraints—the rules tie people together, and the individual who would flout them does so at their own peril.

Until the German bulldozes right through them, no one explains the social codes of La Escapa to Nat. She has to decipher them on their own—although, as it turns out, they’re not that hard to figure out. The village women she meets are full of vague allusions, muffled warnings. The men, even the kinds ones, seem always on the verge of saying something that they stifle at the last second. She passes by an abandoned house with GOD’S PUNISHMENT and SHAME graffitied on the walls, soon learning that it was once home to a couple the villagers came to believe were brother and sister living in incest. From these clues and others, Nat realizes that the village not only expects her to choose a sexual partner from among the men but that her choice will implicitly be one of exchange and patronage. The man she chooses will be a protector and guide to country life. And there are consequences for choosing poorly.

Mesa has a fondness for writing novels of manners in which the “manners” in question are obscured, implicit, or otherwise uncertain. One of her earliest fictions, Four by Four, published in Spanish in 2012, concerns a substitute teacher’s fumbling attempts to understand the rules of power that govern an English-style boarding school in Spain (which the denizens call a “colich”). The school, like La Escapa, is an isolated environment cut off from the outside world, one where a particularly pernicious “hidden curriculum” can be established and reproduced without fear of interference. We find a similarly enclosed utopia in Among the Hedges, where a thirteen-year-old truant schoolgirl forms a kind of friendship with a much older, unemployed man in a sheltered corner of a sprawling city park.

These spaces are not utopian in the sense of their being idealized “no places” but in the sense of their being set apart, fragile, and ultimately existing as exceptions to the dominant order: a boarding school represents a very narrow slice of society; the privacy of a hedge permits a friendship that could not flourish anywhere else; and the country manners of La Escapa represent a backward and atavistic mode of living—one where women must seek the protection of a male guardian—that urban modernity has been continuously if unevenly turning to route for four hundred years. These spaces might be better called “heterotopias,” following Michel Foucault, who described them as both reflecting and countervailing the wider society that contains them, offering a point from which it might be possible to glimpse that wider society a bit more clearly.1

The name “La Escapa,” then, accumulates more than a little irony. As it turns out, the village is less a retreat from wider dynamics of sex and power than a mirror-world where those rules can be seen for what they are. If the remote countryside is a place where women are expected to be more outwardly dependent on men, where the norms and subtleties of modern urban existence have penetrated only so far, the German is just following the local custom in offering his “patronage” to Natalia. But by stating this directly—by hinging his help on the conditional and oddly technical phrase, “if you’ll let me enter you for a while”—he exposes what the wider world has buried under layers of implication and allusion: the fact that sex can be and often is rendered transactional, and women are frequently forced to confront that fact as part of their daily existence.

If this makes Un Amor sound like a #metoo novel, I will note that I have only described its first third.2 “Thanks, but no” might be Nat’s initial quite mannered response, but it is not her final answer to the German. What unfolds after she reconsiders his offer earns the novel its alluringly brief title, wisely left in the original by the translator and press, and places it alongside other “post-Me Too” fictions that explore the messiness of female desire. As Nat unexpectedly finds herself in the throes of passion, she discovers the transgressive power that psychoanalysts and queer theorists have long argued fundamentally defines the erotic: “Hierarchies have changed. Everything is in disarray.”

Indeed, Nat’s experience here recalls that there is another version of the novel’s history, one that begins with transgression. Much like Richardson, Daniel Defoe also produced manuals for virtuous conduct, but unlike his po-faced contemporary, Defoe seems to have been always aware of the rich irony. With one hand he wrote pamphlets preaching high moral standards, and with the other he wrote novels full of characters that violated them at every opportunity. His preface to Moll Flanders winkingly recommends the text to those who “know how to read it,” suggesting that if readers find her crimes more exciting than her repentance, they must reckon with their own consciences. That statement echoes in the great transgressors to come, from Oscar Wilde’s own famous preface (“It is the spectator, not life, that art really mirrors”) to Georges Bataille’s insistence only literature “could reveal the process of breaking the law...independently of the necessity to create order.”

But to Mesa’s credit, Un Amor takes this history no more seriously than it does the first. Indeed, this is the rare contemporary novel that recognizes these histories—of rule-making and transgression—are one and the same.

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In my first year at the high school where I currently teach, I would eat lunch with a fellow new hire every sixth period. Let’s call him Jonas, since that’s his name. From the first week to his last at the school (four months later), he would spend most of lunch complaining about the job—overreaching administration, irritating colleagues, shiftless students. I liked Jonas, and it was nice to commiserate with a comrade wading through the same pressures and annoyances. But I also recognized that this was the best gig I’d yet had; compared to my previous school, it was better in just about every dimension. More often than not, I felt satisfied that, as far as work goes, there were innumerably worse places to be. After a few weeks of lunch with Jonas, I found myself no longer commiserating so much as feeling forcibly interpellated into the subject of Alienated and Exploited Worker. I didn’t hate my job, but every meal felt like I was being convinced that I should.2 When I returned to the classroom seventh period, I always did so with a bit less energy, a low-level negative affect more manufactured than based in the reality of the work.

This is to say that there is perhaps nothing so unpleasant as listening to others’ complaints. As a form of discourse, it casts the speaker in the role of the undeserving victim, and it is the worst kind of victim: one who neither quietly accepts their oppression nor acts to resolve it. Instead, they complain. At another person.

This is unpleasant in a different way from hearing another describe their dreams. That’s simply tedious. Complaint is (also) contagious, pernicious. In modern parlance, it’s negative energy, bad vibes. As a result, complaint has become increasingly siloed and bureaucratized away from collective social life. You pay your therapist to listen to your bitching because your friends are tired of hearing about it. You post in the comments, you yell at the customer service representative. While it would not be wrong to theorize this as society’s containment of negative affect that might otherwise be directed against the political sources of that affect, it’s hard not to be grateful that someone else is getting paid to deal with it.

And yet there is a lively artistic tradition of complaint. From Notes from Underground to Portnoy’s Complaint to Thomas Bernhard’s oeuvre of petty grievance to the shtick of Larry David, we love complainers. Or: we love a certain kind of complainer. The common denominator here is, most obviously, comedy, with the source of humor being as much the complainer as the complaint. In all of these texts, the complaint is simultaneously earnest and ironized by the ridiculousness of its speaker. Like the confession, the complaint as a form allows for virtually anything to be said behind the guise of fiction; moreover, we are free to think that the complainer is an asshole even if he does have a point.

Katharina Volckmer’s novel Calls May Be Recorded is a meta-complaint, a grievance against a socioeconomic system that forces its protagonist to listen to others’ grievances in order to eat. Volckmer, who grew up in Germany before moving to London, wears her influences lightly. Her first novel, The Appointment, took the form of a ranting monologue, consciously inspired by Bernhard3 and Roth. While Calls May Be Recorded is written in the third-person, it is tightly focalized on its protagonist, and bears an epigraph from Correction: “Instead of committing suicide, people go to work.”

The novel’s Jimmie has plenty of legitimate gripes, including many complaints that are, one might say, culturally legitimated. He is fat; he is queer; he works a menial job, alienated from his passion; he is an immigrant; his mom sucks. The novel takes place over the course of a single shift at Vanilla Travels Ltd., a call center on the outskirts of London where Jimmie works as the designated Italophone customer resolution specialist. Volckmer’s salient interest is in work’s assault on the body, as though Foucault had written one of his institutional anatomies about the modern office:

Jimmie knew that they had a zero tolerance policy for all human urges and that according to their official handbook it was best to not have a body at all, to simply exist as an immaterial being that worked hard and didn’t suffer from any kind of pain or longing.

He no longer knew where his body ended and where the world began, because the sound of the telephone had started to follow him around like an army of possessive thoughts. His job had invaded his body, and it became impossible for him to tell where the part of himself he was supposed to own began and when he was merely brushing against the cage he was forced to work in.

This kind of sober Verso-speak might suggest a novel as bloodless and theoretical as its setting, but the office’s sterility is brought into relief through Jimmie’s bodily and imaginative excesses. Like Roth and Bernhard, Volckmer has a penchant for provocation. The novel’s opening image is of Jimmie shitting his pants on his own doorstep after a day of work; there are likewise descriptions of a bathroom stall blowjob, a cat being beaten to death, necrophilia. To Volckmer’s credit, Jimmie is not a victim-as-saint but, more realistically, rather irritating, whiny, and self-sabotaging. You find yourself nodding at his lament that the workplace dematerializes employees, and then demurring that, well, it’s probably better that my extremely horny coworker isn’t allowed to jack off in the cubicle next to mine. As with the great literary complainers before him, the purity of Jimmie’s complaints has to be read against the messiness of the subjects giving voice to them.

One of the Bad Takes of the Week going around LitStack recently was a piece in The Spectator that confidently asserted that the American canon is humorless. It’s a stupid argument phrased especially stupidly. Most great novels are funny; it is considerably more difficult to think of great novels that are unrelentingly solemn. Bracketing off the obviously comic novelists like Twain and Roth and Everett doesn’t help much. As I Lay Dying ends with the most bleakly hilarious punchline in literature. The Norton/Trueblood sequence in Invisible Man is a tour de force of dark humor. The Bluest Eye, a novel about incest and Jim Crow, includes scenes like Mrs. MacTeer monologuing about the nerve of a foster child drinking all their milk, whom she has as much business feeding “as a cat has with side pockets.” A rule if not a law, I generally find my admiration for a novel to be in rough correspondence with how funny it is.4

It is even more so the case, then, that a novel like Calls May Be Recorded is going to be about as good as it is funny. It’s often funny, but less so than Bernhard or Roth. The most conspicuous moments of comedy are the phone calls Jimmie fields. One caller is a novelist who has mistakenly booked a writer’s retreat at a surfers’ lodge he believed to be a cottage: “have you ever heard of a serious work of art to have emerged from a surfers’ lodge?” Another is a cougar dismayed that her resort’s poolboys and masseuses offer her no sexual advances. Some are amusing, others are tired, grasping. The provocations run the same way. The pants shitting is bold and pulled off well — and probably responsible above all for the book’s remarkably low Goodreads rating — but other moments of button-pushing feel no more mature than Jimmie. The novel is at its best when the provocation is Jimmie himself, the comedy deriving from the bathetic interplay between the horrific web and the unsympathetic fly; at its worst, the novel can be said to have reached conceptual perfection by convincing the reader to listen to a stranger complain, and pay for the pleasure.

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I work in an office with 500 intelligent people who are tasked with improving the quality of life in New York City. Throughout the day my coworkers discuss many topics: transportation infrastructure, climate resiliency, renewable energy, the City budget, Donald Trump, the Knicks, matcha lattes, and weekend plans. But not once during my several years at this organization—and if you spend much time reading literary discourse on Substack, you may want to brace yourself for a shock—has anyone ever said anything to me about literature. I have never walked through the staff kitchen and overheard colleagues discussing AI publishing scandals, or the alleged decline of male readers, or even Rachel Cusk. Those of us who love literature may feel these issues would interest at least a few of these 500 well-educated and socially conscious New Yorkers, but, as the narrator of Judson Merrill’s Paranoid Storytelling concedes on the opening page: “books don’t matter in this way anymore.” Even the narrator’s own book, the book-within-a-book we are presumably reading, “is not going to be read by many people at all.”

And yet, Merrill’s narrator believes his book could transform the world. “Stories,” he writes, “are a matter of life and death,” and on the very same page where he concedes that books no longer matter he suggests that his book—the book-within-a-book we are presumably reading—could be the lever that finally repairs our hyper-polarized society, or else finally rips it to shreds.

This is the kind of cognitive dissonance most of us have to embrace if we want to be writers in 2026. We all keenly sense that the social significance of books is dwindling; nevertheless, we must insist there is something special about books, something that would make them worth reading and writing even if the market that supports them disappeared. We may not believe books still wield enough power to transform the entire world, but they must contain some non-fungible kernel of moral, cognitive, or pragmatic value. Typically I would call this special “something” the residue of a starry-eyed romanticism, but in Paranoid Storytelling it is not romantic. It’s scientific.

Paranoid Storytelling is a meta-fictionalized investigative report about the disappearance of Dr. Rala Veruza, a heterodox neurobiologist who founded the up-and-coming field of “cultural immunology.” Dr. Veruza’s central thesis is that human societies form discrete “superorganisms” sustained by language and narrative. The United States, for instance, is a single superorganism with a nervous system fueled by all the stories that Americans believe. Like every living creature, a superorganism can become sick and die, and it is the task of cultural immunology to distinguish healthy from pathological narrative structures. Dr. Veruza is preparing to present her new theory of a superorganic virus—an acute neurological disorder that she calls “hyper-unresolved style,” or, more colloquially, paranoid storytelling—when she suddenly vanishes without a trace. The book chronicles the narrator’s search for Dr. Veruza, who may have simply chosen to drop off the grid, or may have been snatched away by an all-powerful tech conglomerate desperate to suppress her research.

In our current historical moment, when droves of real-life literature scholars with real-life PhDs cannot find a job, it may strain our credulity to imagine a world where narrative expertise is so potent it can get you kidnapped by Mark Zuckerberg. But as someone who studied English literature in an American university not too long ago, I found Dr. Veruza’s situation oddly familiar. The notion that human reality is fundamentally determined by narrative and language, and that experts in narrative and language therefore enjoy privileged insight into human reality—or that, to quote a common mistranslation of Jacques Derrida, “there is nothing outside the text,” which implies that everything, full stop, can be interpreted textually—will resonate with anyone who has taken an undergraduate seminar on Anglo-American literary theory. Indeed, Merrill namedrops Derrida, along with Michel Foucault, Marshall McLuhan, Thomas Kuhn, and a handful of other scholars who bestowed supreme confidence and authority upon the infinite purview of textual analysis. And while it’s unlikely that Judith Butler will ever be kidnapped by the Miss Universe Organization, or that Jean-François Lyotard was secretly assassinated by the publishers of the World Book Encyclopedia, we know that at the very least the FBI had a file on Foucault.

The only hitch is that all these real-life textual experts appear, upon inspection, to suffer from precisely the “hyper-unresolved” illness that Dr. Veruza goes to such heroic lengths to diagnose. Dr. Veruza’s abridged definition of paranoid storytelling is “a search for and belief in complete resolution, paired with a constant deferral of resolution.” It’s a viral style of thinking that transforms everything it touches into a conspiracy, a conundrum that is always on the verge of making perfect sense if we could only just dig a little bit deeper. The kind of paranoid storytellers Dr. Veruza has in mind include January 6ers and anti-vaxxers, but a nearly identical label has long been applied to those theory-inflected humanities scholars who practice what is sometimes called the “hermeneutics of suspicion” or, more disparagingly, “paranoid reading,” analyzing the broad spectrum of cultural phenomena—from a Jane Austen novel to a New York City highway to the entire discipline of physics—through a matrix of race, class, disability, gender, and sexuality. For conservatives like the Heritage Foundation and Liza Libes, there is no meaningful difference between a literature professor who thinks Howards End is about class consciousness and a QAnon zealot who thinks there is a child sex trafficking ring in the basement of Comet Pizza. Some would even argue it was the Marxist theorists who taught right-wing nutjobs how to be paranoid with authority.

Whether or not we actually deem literature scholars and January 6ers to be equivalent, there is one large, undeniable difference: the J6ers are the ones in power. They’re in the White House, where they are free to cut whatever paltry NEH grants and tenure lines had been left for humanities professors to fight over. So Merrill’s novel about a scholar of storytelling, or someone’s book about this scholar, upending the entire world: a very paranoid story, indeed.

And yet: over the past twelve months we reviewed twenty-seven small-press books, gained far more subscribers than we ever anticipated, attended some readings, met some writers and publishers, and learned a lot about the indie press ecosystem. We have also started to wrap our heads around the literary community on Substack, to appreciate its distinct corners and characters. We are grateful to everyone who has read our reviews, and we look forward to another season.

To mark this first anniversary, we asked a handful of the Substack writers we’ve come to admire over the past year to contribute brief book reviews for a compilation we’re calling the Mini Monde. Each writer was invited to review whatever they wanted, however they wanted. We only asked that they review a book published with a small/indie press and that they keep the review short (the extremely modest compensation we offered decreased at a rate of five cents per word). Please enjoy this mélange of stellar tributes to Dhimmi Monde’s founding ethos: small reviews of small-press books.

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Mini Monde:

Drew Buxton – Daytona Teddy Riggs (Hub City Press, 2026)

reviewed by :

In Daytona Teddy Riggs, Drew Buxton takes us inside the mind of that most American of archetypes: The ambitious oaf. Daytona is a former football star from Corpus Christi who wants to become the strongest man in the world. “I could play in the NFL if I wanted to, but it’s not my calling,” he informs us, in the eternal register of washed-up hometown heroes. His story is a sundrenched Gulf Coast picaresque. Our hero gets into numbskulled fights, gets banned from gyms, spends time in jail, drags his lifted pickup through the sand, and falls in love with a female bodybuilder with a high tolerance for galoot antics.

Buxton has taken on his own vein-popping writerly challenge: Narrating from Daytona’s penumbraed point of view. If the inner journey of a hapless strongman can sometimes feel grueling, the novel nonetheless earns its laughs with believable pathos. Despite all the forces arrayed against myself and Daytona, I didn’t put this novel down for long until I was finished. As our hero says near the end, as he bears up under many literal and figurative burdens, “They’re telling me to put it down, put it down…. I won’t put it down.”

Clare Carlisle – Transcendence for Beginners (New York Review of Books, 2026)

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I read Clare Carlisle’s Transcendence for Beginners because of the title. I would like to experience transcendence—who wouldn’t? And the second part of the title, which seemed to invoke the Zen Buddhist idea of “beginner’s mind”—approaching activities and encounters with openness and naivety—appealed to me, too. This book, however, is not a how-to guide, at least not in the traditional sense. Instead, Carlisle, who is a professor of philosophy (lest you think the book sounds like some sort of frivolous New Age woo), writes movingly about her own life and those of her spiritual heroes—Spinoza, Kierkegaard, and George Eliot, as well as lesser-known figures, such as the Indian sage Ramana Maharshi and the painter Celia Paul. Carlisle sees these lives as ways to approach the fundamental philosophical questions: How should I live? What is the good life? Who am I? She doesn’t answer these questions but explores them in a wonderfully speculative and discursive style, moving freely from rigorous scholarship to idle daydreams, maintaining an expansive sensibility throughout the work. I didn’t find transcendence in Carlisle’s book, but I may have taken the first step.

Catherine Dousteyssier-Khoze – Beauty of the Death Cap (Snuggly Books, 2018, trans. Tina Kover)

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This can’t be the best novel that features death cap mushrooms, as that slot is permanently occupied by Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived In The Castle. And the ending is a little silly, so it might not make the number two slot. It’s got to be top five, though. Maybe even top three.

Will Heinrich – From Darkness to Darkness (Thousand Horsemen Press, 2026)

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There’s a bit of Edgar Allan Poe marginalia that goes like this: if you want to “revolutionize” human thought and feeling, all you have to do is write a short book called “My Heart Laid Bare.” The tough part isn’t publishing it; everyone likes to get attention for being wretched. No, the tough part is writing it at all. Looking inside yourself and acknowledging that you feel lonely among those you most love, that your moments of most transcendent happiness occur in solitude. This novel is very good on the machinations of art-world nonsense (Heinrich is an art critic for the Times), but it is even better on a specific kind of domestic wretchedness that I have rarely, if ever, seen stated so plainly.

Joon Oluchi Lee – Tricyclist (Nightboat, 2026)

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Like any virus, HIV has altered our queer DNA; and the brief era between HAART and PrEP was the time of monsters. This is the setting for Joon Oluchi Lee’s Tricyclist, and its protagonist, Howie Song, is voluptuously, stickily, sweatily in flux. Fucking with and without condoms, shimmering between genders, even considering bottom surgery just “so I could properly wear some tight jeans,” Howie offers an inventory of anxious sex in the Bay Area oughts. He notices a man at the end of youth, when “the bloom is high and rich, dangling off the nodes of big bones, like he could become anything with the whim of the wind.” Another’s appearance merits nearly a page of anthropological detail: “His head hair was cut into a tidy mohawk. Small metal spheres and spikes sprung out of his septum.” Between the fashion and the orgies, Tricyclist approaches a nouveau roman pitch of hungry abstraction. Yet at the end of this litany of body parts and fluids, a friend tells Howie, as if in warning, “I like feeling alone and clean.” It’s a voice that gloomily belongs to our own sterilized era, not the hazy lost world of this adventurous, ravenous novel.

Keith Ridgway – Dooneen (New Directions, 2026)

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This book casts off most conventions of character, story, pacing, and narration, but finds no other tools it can use to test its convictions about the meaning of love and the brutality of the state. It merely valorizes these convictions in a fabulous tale whose tellers try to compensate, when words fail them, by adding more words.

Scott Spires – Social Distancing (Alternative Book Press, 2024)

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By Milan Kundera’s popular formulation, a novel shouldn’t be a bicycle race but a feast of many courses. Scott Spires’ Social Distancing (Alternative Books Press, 2024), narrated by protagonist Frank Traubert, a former professor of Germanic languages turned climate refugee, called to mind for me this descriptor. The book’s signal events might be a dog kidnapping, an unforeseeable automotive accident, and the opening of a new restaurant featuring “Great Lakes Cuisine”; more meaningfully, in small-town “Roverton” on the Wisconsin side of Lake Michigan populated by “old-timers “and “nukes,” the book is full of uncanny conversations between brewers, restauranters, academics, musicians, fathers, sons, and estranged spouses. The greatest pleasure it affords is Frank’s bringing his expertise—his erudite and esoteric knowledges of language, history, and situations—into alignment and comparison with the present. In a representative span of five pages, one is apt to see allusions to a doctor of Swedish descent who became a great chronicler of Finnish stories, a Viennese composer whose untimely death capped the end of a musical era, Thomas Pynchon and his novel Gravity’s Rainbow, and Nietzsche. The book is thick with antecedents: not only the small-town American novels and “essayistic fictions of Central Europe” mentioned on the back cover, but also that Kafka-into-Heller tradition taking on bureaucratic absurdity (there’s a Dean Dean at Frank’s former school who hearkens back to Heller’s Major Major Major). With some of the narrative work being done by way of dreams and some stretches during which Frank carries on conversations with his dog, Bruce, who speaks plain English back to him, we also veer into the borderlands of the surreal, in a vein similar to some work done by Murakami. There were points during which I wondered if some of the dialogue might not have been better as exposition (Spires’ expositional stretches were the novel’s strongest suit), and stretches during which I wondered how he would bring all of his disparate threads together, but in the end, the book landed. When it was finished and I was looking back on it, I couldn’t help but think of another Kundera quote, this one from his collection of essays The Curtain: that there are some [historical] situations in which nothing can take the place of a novel. In his twin searches for refuge and meaning in the second decade of the twenty-first century, anchored and oriented as he is by his background with languages, cultures, and histories, Spires’ Frank Traubert is well-situated to convey our shared and usually unspoken unease—and he doesn’t do a terrible job of offering suggestions as to what we ought to do about it, either.

Juan Pablo Villalobos – The Past Pursues Us Like Detectives, Debt Collectors, Thieves (And Other Stories, 2026, trans. Daniel Hahn)

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By way of a noirish plot and an honest and sympathetic narrative voice, The Past Pursues Us unfurls an angry and penetrating portrait of Lagos de Moreno, a growing town, polluted, unsafe for many, that runs on gossip and manners, and a limited attention span. The result is by turns suspenseful, absorbing, trippy, funny, and movingly sad. A homecoming novel about how to climb out of a hole you’ve fallen into when the hole is the present; when you have no sibling or friend to pull you out, and no one to tell you, when you emerge, whether your face is bleeding, you’re absolutely fine, or you need to go to the hospital; if the pill you took was for sleep, anxiety, or drowsiness. A novel about friends and family, loans and favors, and payback. Above all lies, lies, and more lies.

Harron Walker – Veronica Place (Tiger Bee Press, 2026)

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I laughed out loud reading Veronica Place, “the way a woman might laugh,” to quote the author, “when she’s wearing every necklace she owns — and perhaps a few rings as well.” A funny book? you may be thinking. Surely this must have come from the mind of a man! But no. (And that’s why you can never assume.) In Veronica Place, woman writer Harron Walker tells the story of Anne Instagram, a divorcée on the run from her gender-appropriately angry ex-husband, Man. It has murder, mystery, and poolside martinis. It features a character named Jennifer Furniture. It’s 70 pages and $15. You’d be a fool to miss this herstoric literary event.

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The other week I was distractedly ruminating on how to frame this review while parsing David Atwell’s critical biography of J.M. Coetzee, where, as luck would have it, I came across an anecdote helpful for my purpose. Apparently at one point in the drafting of his second novel, Coetzee was overcome by an acute sense of exasperation not only with the novel he was writing but with the very idea of writing novels. He writes in his journal of his desire for a fictional form that could express “apathy toward the task of writing,” a sense of weariness and incommensurability that it takes no great leap to imagine sprang from the repressive climate of apartheid-era South Africa. However, his solution to this dilemma, while not quite unprecedented, speaks to all those writers grappling with a feeling of overwhelming cultural stasis: “The possibility of rewriting another novel,” he writes, “or of making that rewriting into the subject of your own writing.”

Coetzee was discovering in his own context what John Barth, his erstwhile colleague at the University at Buffalo, had claimed over a decade before could be identified as the great artistic innovation of post-WWII literature: the deliberate and self-conscious copying, repeating, or plagiarizing of older works, as witnessed in the work of Jorge Luis Borges. According to Barth, Borges saw a way through the ubiquitous sense of exhaustion that had overtaken Western culture from theology to architecture, and his way through was paradoxically also a way back: like Andy Warhol’s paintings of Campbell’s soup cans, or his own tale of a nineteenth-century poet who rewrites the sixteenth-century Don Quixote, Borges sought to uncover new meaning in old materials. It was a practice Coetzee would follow, fashioning original novels from canonical texts from Robinson Crusoe to Dostoevsky’s Demons.

Of course, as with any aesthetic innovation, radical “rewritings” of this sort have not stayed radical. Where they may have stunned in Barth’s 1960s or Coetzee’s 1980s, after half a century they’re stock-in-trade of the era and/or style that’s come to be known as postmodernism. And while that doesn’t mean writers have stopped “rewriting,” it does mean it’s become one tool among others, as reliable and familiar as free verse or stream-of-consciousness. We can see it in the recent spate of millennial “remakes” of cranky European fiction or in the slightly more venerable tradition of “retellings” of canonical works from subaltern perspectives. Moreover, the concept has seeped into the general water supply. Just as we’re not likely to be scandalized by formerly outré theories of the death of the author or il n’y a pas de hors-texte in this era of endlessly fungible IP and industrial-sized plagiarism, it’s hardly breaking new ground to consider that every telling is in some sense a retelling.

This is all to say that, while I don’t know if Ross Barkan thinks of Colossus as a rewriting of Philip Roth’s The Human Stain (my hunch would be that he does not—he’s named Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe novels as his primary inspiration), I also don’t think it matters very much. The heuristic is useful. And not only because the novels share essentially the same concept (a protagonist passing from one ethnic identity into another), the same structure (a midway bifurcation between those old and new identities), and the same thematic ground (self-making, the meaning of America). But because there’s something to be learned from placing two novels side-by-side and forcing a close comparison.

In much the same way that we might ask what Ulysses accomplishes by rewriting The Odyssey in twentieth-century Dublin, we can ask what Colossus does by recomposing Roth’s tragic tale of a Black boxer who passes as a Jewish professor of Classics into the story of an Orthodox Jewish kid who becomes a Midwestern evangelical pastor. For instance, although there’s only twenty-five years between the two books, the cultural landscape has changed irrevocably. We can be confident it meant a very different thing to write about “passing” at the end of the century—before the uprisings of BLM and the codification of “woke,” before Gaza and the sea change in public opinion around Israel, before Republicans transformed from Sunday school scolds into the openly venal bloodsuckers of the Trump era—than it does in 2026. So why revisit that moment? What sort of dilemma is this “rewriting” meant to solve?

No doubt the method I’m advertising here has its limits, and it wouldn’t be wrong to call it unfair, even grossly so, but it is especially helpful, too, for reading a novel that is both deeply nostalgic and eager to be original, and indeed, that seeks its originality through its nostalgia. Barkan has written many times on the sense of stuckness he senses in American literary culture, and of the need for writers to put aside their political moralizing and regain the boldness that defined the arts at midcentury. His evocations of Ford and Roth are not meant to be mere glances backward; taken alongside Colossus, they are part of an attempt to refit our own literary moment—one defined, like it or not, by “wan husks of autofiction”—with the muscular realism of an earlier era, to revitalize contemporary letters through a sheer act of will.

In this sense, “rewriting The Human Stain” means more than lifting a plot and structure from an earlier novel. It means invoking the spirit of the last Great American Narcissist at his apex, when Roth achieved a kind of artistic culmination in the story of Coleman Silk, the Black man whose lifelong passing as Jewish distilled so much of the tension that had defined Roth’s authorial career: “The drama that underlies America’s story, the high drama that is upping and leaving—the energy and cruelty that rapturous drive demands.” Of course that drama is circular and not without its culminating ironies—Silk loses his job over the use of an anti-Black slur; he is murdered by an antisemite—but it leaves Roth’s narrator Zuckerman in awe of a man who was able to “forge a distinct historical destiny.”

Colossus asks what such a man might look like in 2026. We meet Teddy Starr as the loquacious pastor of a rural Michigan church, where his ministry is complemented by a swelling real-estate portfolio of trailer parks and tract homes, and his family life by a fun side thing with a parishioner. Barkan forgoes a Zuckerman-style observer and instead borrows from Ford in having Starr speak directly to the reader in the first-person present-tense. It’s a formal choice central to the novel’s thematic aims. Take this passage for example:

In the meantime, a sermon comes to me. Tomorrow’s is already planned, but there’s always tinkering to be done, themes to be intertwined or disregarded. Preaching is not so different than writing or politicking. Your words begin as a bridge to reality and become, with enough effort and execution, reality itself. God creates, but you are in His shadow, imbued with his universe-shaping wisdom and grace.

Seductive and intimate, Starr’s voice sits somewhere between Shakespearean villain and front-facing camera confessional. The way he whispers into our ear makes for not a few sticky, delightful moments like this one, where he is not only lying but telling us how he’s lying and that he’s going to get away with it. The choice to write a novel from the perspective of an Other, even a political enemy, the way Barkan does here, is a risky choice, and in some ways, his effort to inhabit the skin of this MAGA-loving pastor from flyover country goes farther than Roth ever did in making use of fiction’s imaginative potential for understanding those dissimilar from ourselves.1 Thus the novel’s voice is most persuasive and alive in moments when Starr is fully immersed in the suburban hell he’s created for himself, such as when he catches his son holding hands with another boy at a flapjack festival, and less so when he’s using words like “psychogeography” or providing an historical overview of landlordism like he’s a member of Central Brooklyn DSA. Yes, Starr is not a native to the world of prayer meetings and grange fairs, but he grew up in a frum household in South Williamsburg. So why is he talking like he went to Vassar?

Unfortunately, these are more than mere technical hiccups. In having Starr speak in his own voice, Colossus takes on the admirable task of showing us his self-making from the inside; it promises us a front-row seat to his inner life, even if the truth of that life, as we might expect from a con man and dissembler, can only be glimpsed in gaps and elisions. We should get more from Starr than what Roth’s Zuckerman offers us at the end of The Human Stain, a series of rhetorical questions about the meaning of Coleman Silk’s self-making: “Was it the social obstruction that he wished to sidestep? Was he merely being another American and, in the great frontier tradition, accepting the democratic invitation to throw your origins overboard if to do so contributes to the pursuit of happiness?” Colossus owes us more than a similar set of imponderables. Starr should give us some answers.

The answer he wants to give is a reiteration of what Roth called the “high drama of the American story,” or what Ralph Ellison called “uncodified Americanness,” the myth that individual self-making is not only possible here but practically demanded by a country fundamentally hostile to all attachments of blood and kinship. Young Starr, then called Reuvain, discovers this on the day he speaks to a girl for the first time and then accidentally pushes his father down the stairs: “Here’s an obvious secret about belief: if you think it enough, it will be true…If I believed something else—if I willed another person in the stead of who I might be—another outcome would be produced. Personhood is not fixed.”

But Barkan glides over the most troubling parts of Starr’s past, not coincidentally the parts that might prove most dangerous to the narrator’s self-presentation. For instance, we are given no hint as to why he flees Brooklyn to become, of all things, an evangelical Christian pastor. That is a choice much less structurally determined than Silk’s; at midcentury, a precocious Black student with an interest in Latin and Greek would of necessity need to pass as white in order to become a professor. No such barriers would hamper a Jewish boy in the early 2000s. Barkan would like us to believe that Starr became Starr through a supreme act of self-creation, but he’s silent on what “being Starr” actually means. Is it an escape from the shtetl of Orthodoxy? A jump into a purer form of whiteness? We have no way to know.

Finally, there is something about Starr’s converting to evangelicalism specifically that, I think, points to both the novel’s laudable ambition and its ultimate shortcoming. At the heart of the evangelical experience, and therefore at the heart of so much of the politics of the Right over the last forty years, is the question of a discrete inward experience, one that, had Barkan chosen to represent it, would have affected his narrative in numerous and aesthetically beneficial ways—what about Starr’s personal relationship with Jesus? Because in a novel so completely monopolized by an unreliable narrator, the nature of Starr’s belief—for instance, whether he truly believes he’s been called by God—not only offers some insight into just how deep his self-presentation goes; it gives us a clue to what he’s not saying. Is he a pastor out of conviction, chicanery, or some combination of the two? Is a simple con man or something darker, a kind of midwestern MAGA Mistah Kurtz?

I highlight this missed opportunity because I admire Colossus as an attempt to do something bold and necessary in the world of contemporary literature—to further explore fiction’s ability to occupy the skin of another, even of the Other. As I see it, nostalgia has little to do with this undertaking. We have no need for more Roths, Fords, Mailers, or Updikes, writers who sang their selves endlessly and iteratively. Then again, maybe backward can still be a step forward. In the era of “reverse passing,” where white fabulists like Rachel Dolezal attract attention by adopting minoritized identities, maybe The Human Stain offers a blueprint that should have been followed even more closely. Maybe Teddy Starr should have been Black.

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A few months back, posted the above note about the market for very short stand-alone books. As a vocal fan of little books, I certainly recognized the situation he was pointing out. Of the type of book he described here, I could point to maybe five or so written by Anglophone (let alone American) authors from the last decade. Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These is the obvious one; Helen DeWitt’s The English Understand Wool and Sarah Manguso’s 300 Arguments are a couple more. At this point I have to start looking at some of the data I keep; we can add Andrea Long Chu’s Females, Jessica Au’s Cold Enough for Snow, Zadie Smith’s Intimations, Ben Lerner’s The Hatred of Poetry. There are undoubtedly several more, especially on tiny presses, but such exceptions only prove the rule. Pamphlet culture is long dead; were an American Karl Marx to publish The Communist Manifesto today, it’d include 200 pages of filler from his Neue Rheinische Zeitung journalism.

Why is this the case? It is, from a certain distance, a bit counter-intuitive. As everyone will tell you, our attention spans are getting shorter; we consume much of our media and information in portions of 200 characters or 8 seconds; my high school students recently asked me to fast forward through the opening credits of a movie because they were getting bored.1 Shouldn’t the novella, or better yet, the novelette, be all the rage? Add cataloguing culture to the mix—shorter books equals more books to log online—and you’d have reason to believe César Aira would be a bestseller. But culture is strange, perhaps even dialectical. Movies have gotten longer in recent years. Episodes of TV, unfettered from network cable, are no longer 22 minutes. And from what I can tell, books have not gotten shorter in the twenty-first century, with some evidence suggesting they’ve gotten longer.2 Nor is the short story experiencing any notable popular renaissance (au contraire). In some cases, thin is in; in others, fat is where it’s at.3

While many people have complained about bloated run times at the cinema (are we sure that Smile 2 needs more time to tell its story than Citizen Kane?), it would seem that studios and publishers are simply listening to the market. From a crude value proposition, a ticket to The Odyssey will run you just as much as one to Minions & Monsters, at half the per-minute cost. Much of our leisure time activities are priced by the minute—from SkyZone to pickleball court rentals—and so it’s not insane for producers to suppose or consumers to feel that longer movies, bigger books are better deals.

Is there a distinction between SkyZone and art? Marvel is often cited as a driver of running time inflation, and Martin Scorsese famously made a bunch of people mad by comparing MCU films to theme parks. Bracketing off the fact that I’m 35 and my neck cowers at the thought of a roller coaster, I’d probably be pissed if I paid $15 for a roller coaster that lasted like thirty seconds. On the continuum from bounce houses to Stan Brakhage, you might have to put The Avengers closer to the left. And as for books—I haven’t read a page of the series, but is it possible to argue that the value of Dungeon Crawler Carl resembles that of an escape room more so than that of Virginia Woolf?

Despite the superior insight of publishing, I’m reluctant to admit that tiny books are doomed to fail. Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s We Should All Be Feminists, and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen all became quite ubiquitous in large part because of their humble lengths. I kind of doubt that the woman who read Citizen during a Trump rally would have found The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois quite so wieldy. I’ve recommended my sister a lot of books over the years and one of the few she’s actually taken up is Small Things Like These, no doubt and understandably because it’s a relatively minor time commitment. I, for one, have purchased and read some bad books that I wouldn’t have otherwise were they twice the length. I am the market inefficiency—capitalize on my weaknesses!

As Michel’s note implied, the main exception to the soft ban on tiny books in American publishing is works in translation. The aforementioned Aira, Alejandro Zambra, Edouard Louis, Valeria Luiselli, Annie Ernaux, Laszlo Krasznahorkai, and many other living and dead writers have had several wispy volumes published in recent years. Zambra and Louis, for two, have had several such books published by conglomerate presses, but more often such works come out on small presses like New Directions (Aira and Krasznahorkai), Coffee House (Luiselli), or Seven Stories (Ernaux). Such presses are not quite as beholden to the market. But why translations? Evidently, there is more of a space in other countries for books of such brevity. Perhaps Argentinians lose their shit for 96-page postmodern autofictions about Carlos Fuentes. Whatever the case, they are circulating, available for import. However, a lot of these authors publish works of more conventional length. As often happens, the tiny books come on the heels of major successes that are longer, sometimes considerably so. Before the translation of Krasznahorkai’s Chasing Homer (96 pages), there was Satantango (274 pages); before Roberto Bolaño’s By Night in Chile (112 pages), there was The Savage Detectives (577 pages). Similarly, Marlen Haushofer’s The Fifth Year (80 pages; first published in 1952) comes on the heels of The Wall (240 pages), first translated to English in 1990 but reprinted to considerable fanfare in 2022. The order of translation rarely follows that of original publication, and may, in some cases, roughly follow an order of critical reputation. Thus, as more of an author’s books are translated, we might suspect some barrel scraping. After Portnoy’s Complaint and The Ghost Writer are published in Estonian, after The Counterlife and Goodbye Columbus, eventually the urbanites of Tallinn will hear about an exciting new Philip Roth translation—The Humbling—and anticipate an obscure minor masterpiece.

There is, I think, reason to fear some of this phenomenon with the translation of The Fifth Year. Haushofer, an Austrian whose publishing career lasted only from 1952 to 1970, was not especially prolific. Four of her five full-length novels were translated by 2013, and New Directions’ immediate follow-up to The Wall was a first translation of her novella Killing Stella. With The Fifth Year—translated by Shaun Whiteside, who translated The Wall and Stella—we are creeping toward the last of her available fiction. Moreover, The Fifth Year is her first book, and so the whole thing smells a bit like a curio, perhaps a little apprentice work.

That’s not the case. This being my first Haushofer, I have no frame of reference, but it does feel a bit minor, slight, presaging. Becca Rothfeld’s recent review of four of her books reinforces this impression, discussing The Fifth Year mostly in the context of later works that develop its ideas in greater depth. But a book’s a book and not a foretoken; it probably ought to stand alone to be worthy of much interest. Even in the absence of this context, and in spite of its slightness, The Fifth Year is catching. It is the story of one full year in the life of Marili, a four-year-old girl living on an Austrian farm with her grandparents. It opens with the Proustian image of Marili lying in her bed, deep in thought, and The Fifth Year has some resemblance to the early pages of Swann’s Way. If the primary psychosexual conflict in Proust is the mother-son dyad, in The Fifth Year we get an Electra lite dynamic between Marili and her grandfather. One of the most interesting subtextual threads of the novel is Marili’s awakening identity as a girl. While she loves and respects her saturnine grandmother, she adores her more permissive, boisterous grandfather. In one passage, she rejects her grandmother’s life of domestic passivity and insists instead that she would “rather be a man and talk as loudly as Grandfather, one day I’d also like to have a beard.” Yet we are immediately told that Marili didn’t truly believe this, that “Deep in her heart she knew for certain that she would never have a beard like Grandfather’s — never. There was no point in worrying about it.”

Haushofer shows how gender, power, and size become bound together in Marili’s understanding of the world. She not only admires her strong, exceptional Grandfather, who alone is allowed to wear shoes in the house and make a mess of the floor, who is contrasted with the stooping, frail Grandmother, but also the “hapless giant Goliath” cruelly defeated by David. While it may seem the story of a fall, Haushofer complicates the inevitability of this trajectory. In a later scene, Marili trounces a cruel, older boy who threatens to drown a litter of kittens; occupying the role of David, she recognizes the pride in her Grandfather’s voice when he calls her “an awful witch.” The relations among size, power, and gender are perhaps not so determinant.

Aside from Proust and Carroll (like Alice’s, Marili’s experience of the world is quite preoccupied with scale), the narrative calls to mind a work in the tiny book hall of fame, Claire Keegan’s Foster. While focalized through Marili, the secondary plot that we infer from Marili’s experiences is the prolonged grieving of her grandparents for their five dead children. Marili’s father is never mentioned, but her mother seems to have been the last in a string of deaths from war and disease. For her Grandmother especially, Marili is a kind of supplement for these dead children, a substitute for but also a reminder of their absence. Thus is explained much of Grandmother’s melancholy and anxiety, but it doesn’t make womanhood or motherhood any more attractive. (Grandfather is also sometimes sad but remains a good hang.) There is a foreboding throughout much of the novel, in part due to the shadow of so many early deaths, but that foreboding is equally concerned with life, that Marili may not die but instead become her grandmother. It’s a bit more understated than Foster, but both pull off a kind of dual narrative combining the naive primary story and that of the wearier adults’ lives in the background. The Fifth Year is short, and perhaps a minor work, but certainly warrants its translation and publication on its own terms.

On the other hand, it is perhaps a problem that the tiny books that do get published are often priced similarly to their higher-BMI brethren. The paperback of The Fifth Year is listed at 80 pages, but let’s just say the font size is doing a lot of work there, and it’s really more like 50 pages of standard text. New Directions lists the novel for $15. By comparison, New Directions is also publishing The Hothouse, a newly translated novel from Wolfgang Koeppen, that runs 240 pages of much smaller font; it sells for $18. The cover of The Fifth Year is very pretty, and cost of production is complicated a bit by having to pay for both the rights and the translation, but I’m not sure it makes a ton of sense for the two books to cost so similarly. If I’m being honest, I’d feel much more comfortable recommending it to a friend for eight dollars than fifteen. Does this mean that I am, in the last instance, treating this aesthetic object as I might a bounce house? Reducing the careful representation of an Austrian girl’s ineffable childhood impressions to the same plane as a session at an axe-throwing lodge? Kind of. Certain experiences are, I think, great enough to transcend such calculus. I’d have no gripes paying whatever price for The Crying of Lot 49 or The Death of Ivan Illyich. Ditto Brief Encounter, Rushmore, Badlands. And people pay exorbitant costs for brief experiences all the time. When literary works are a notch or two below such heights, the vulgar tyrants time and money lurk in the wings. Honestly, even were The Fifth Year a bad novel, I’d feel a bit cheated by its length at that price. As the opening credit sadist once invoked, we often find ourselves with the paradoxical complaint: “Boy the food at this place is really terrible; and in such small portions!”

Editor’s Note: Dhimmi Monde is eleven months old, and soon it will be our one year anniversary. To celebrate, we are giving away some extremely limited edition merchandise:

For a chance to win, tell us about a small/indie press book you’d like to see on Dhimmi Monde by commenting on the post below:

Some sentences come easily, others take weeks. Like the sentence you just read, for instance: I wrote it in about ten uninterrupted seconds. Now contrast that with the following sentence, which I wrote for a review in Dhimmi Monde a few months ago:

The publishing industry is shrinking, the percentage of Americans who read novels is shrinking, and, now, literature itself is shrinking.

That little sentence took much longer. From the outset I knew what I wanted to say—that reading and publishing are in decline—but I didn’t feel confident saying it. Are they in decline, really? It certainly feels correct, but I could imagine endless caveats and nuance. So I started skimming articles and hunting down citations. After a few hours divided over two days I arrived at a claim that was, if not categorically true, then, at the very least, defensible. I wrote the sentence, inserted some hyperlinks, and then there I was: two days gone, a whole twenty words further along in my book review.

If you’re a writer, then you know this pain. It’s the pain of tweaking a five-word clause ad nauseum only to end up exactly where you began, or conducting weeks of research to support a paragraph that doesn’t even make it into the final draft. It’s a pain that has become especially acute in the era of generative artificial intelligence, when it is now possible to shunt such unglamorous tasks onto computers. I could have easily fed Claude a prompt, copied the response into a footnote, and moved on with my day. Perhaps I should have. Would anybody know the difference?

That question isn’t rhetorical. I really am curious whether anyone would know the difference. I insert hyperlinks into my writing for all the same reasons every other writer cites their sources: to earn the reader’s trust, to give due credit, and to facilitate independent verification. But if I’m being honest, sometimes I just want people to know I put time and effort into my work. Citations are my way of saying: take a look at all this shit I had to read just to write this 800-word book review.

It’s meager compensation for my labor. And now, apparently, even that is being taken from me. As software continues to generate a larger and larger percentage of all text on the internet, the value of human-generated writing does not therefore increase as some kind of artisanal, heirloom alternative. Rather, all writing suffers under a growing shroud of suspicion and doubt. The result is a depressing witch hunt.

For example, yesterday I read an excellent essay by Alexander Fayne where, in a single sentence, he universalizes a mid-twentieth-century poet’s sense of impending doom by invoking “what Eric Hobsbawm called ‘the expectation of apocalypse.’” The Hobsbawm line condenses a complex point brilliantly; but did Fayne have to sit down and read Hobsbawm’s entire 1,000-page historical trilogy just to add these four words to his essay? Or did he already recall the line from something he read years ago? Or did he find it cited in a recent article about climate change? Or did a friend recommend it?

Or did he ask ChatGPT?

Of course I don’t actually think Fayne asked ChatGPT. The point is that I would be hard-pressed to prove it, just as you would be hard-pressed to prove ChatGPT didn’t compose the sentence you’re reading right now. Tools that purport to detect AI-generated writing—such as Pangram, which recently partnered with Substack—may help. But somehow I feel they treat the symptom and abet the disease, fueling a culture of distrust that condemns all writing as AI slop until proven innocent.

This is why I was intrigued by Fulla Abdul-Jabbar’s Who Loves The Sun, a mixed-genre memoir that takes an unusual approach to citation while drawing upon Abdul-Jabbar’s background as a professional biochemist. As she explains in the opening pages, the book emerged from her unlikely fascination with scientific posters, those ugly 3’x4’ slabs of text and image that young researchers erect at academic conferences to advertise work-in-progress.

What follows is a tableau of poster-related vignettes: a failed first attempt to write an abstract for a scientific poster; an alienating trip to a design conference at the MIT Media Lab; a cherished poster about Akhenaten, the ancient Egyptian pharaoh, created for an elementary school assignment; a presentation about posters delivered at an academic symposium convened to imitate and ironize academic symposia; and a think-aloud account of reading a poster about lung cancer prevention.

Together these threads appear to be twisting toward a denouement, a moment when Abdul-Jabbar will step back and reveal the incisive something that these experiences taught her about science, art, language, and communication. But that moment never arrives. Instead, with no announcement or fanfare, the topic simply changes. The second half of Who Loves the Sun unfurls in a stream of impressionistic fragments about stasis, change, memory, and loss, with hardly a mention of posters.

In a final section titled “Notes on Source Notes,” Abdul-Jabbar concedes her defeat. She explains that in creating the book she had set out to do something “research-based.” She had planned to connect with scientists and graphic designers, to attend poster sessions, to collect specimens and create models and deliver presentations. “I ended up doing a lot of these things,” she writes. “And then not using most of it.” At some point the “very hard work” she had invested into gathering legitimate sources became displaced, which made it difficult to explain how those sources related to the final product. Nevertheless she lists them for us. Some examples include:

Thomas H. Maugh II, “Poster Sessions: A New Look at Scientific Meetings,” Science 28 (1974): 1361.

Dieter Schmidmaier, Poster Sessions in Library Science: Guidelines (The Hague: International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions, 1984).

Stephen Block, “Do’s and Don’ts of Poster Presentation,” Biophysical Journal 71, (1996): 3527.

A typical bibliography documents the external sources referenced within a text. Yet none of the above sources are referenced in—or appear even obliquely to inform—Who Loves the Sun. What Abdul-Jabbar’s bibliography documents instead is a kind of failure of reference, the unbridgeable gap between the work she did and the object she created. As she herself puts it: “this bibliography is a trashcan full of what these words used to be.”

I find this instructive. The more we integrate AI into our writing, the more it can seem that all writing simply is an output generated from a discrete set of inputs. We feed a prompt to an LLM and it spits out a response; we feed sources to a human and it spits out an essay.

Abdul-Jabar’s anti-bibliography is a good reminder of the flaws in this logic. We can never really know what went into creating a text, because we cannot know, from reading, how long it took to write a book or what kind of external aid was involved, and also—and more fundamentally—because not every input can be traced to a written output. The majority of writing is wasted effort: abandoned drafts, unused research, discarded feedback, ambient thoughts that lead nowhere. This work almost never shows up on the page, but it is not for that reason any less work.

Toward the end of her “Notes on Source Notes,” just after she describes her bibliography as a “trashcan,” Abdul-Jabbar continues to puzzle over what her sources mean for her book. “A source,” she writes, “is something from which comes something. A point of origin.” This final word, origin, reminded me of Edward Said’s 1975 study, Beginnings: Intention and Method, in which he contrasts the passive, hermetic concept of origins with the active, secular concept of beginnings. By using scientific posters as a jumping-off point to grasp much larger ideas about knowledge and communication, Abdul-Jabbar seemed to deploy what Said, by way of Erich Auerbach, touts as an Ansatzpunkt, a delimited point of departure that gathers the chaos of history onto a human scale while affirming, through an act of trust that can never be guaranteed in advance, that such an endeavor can and will lead somewhere meaningful.

I thought it might help my review of Who Loves the Sun if I revisited Beginnings, which I hadn’t touched in many years. So I dug out my copy and began re-reading. The prose is dense, and it consumed all my scant free time for a whole week. After about two hundred pages I stopped. I didn’t find anything worth using in my review.

Sometimes in the spring I’ll drag my AP Literature students through a lesson on ekphrasis. “Drag” because, as I tell them beforehand, the term won’t be on the exam, and there’s nothing second-semester seniors hate more than learning for its own sake. Nevertheless, I’ll put Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus on the projector and we’ll read Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” together, and despite their inevitable sluggishness, I always sort of look forward to it, believing that, if I do things right, there’ll be this split half-second where I’ll feel like a genius anyway.

It comes when I get students to recognize that Auden’s deliberately demotic language mirrors Brueghel’s unusual framing: that, in a way, the not-very-poetic line about a dog “going on with its doggy life” forms a sort of parallel to the humdrum ploughman in the center of the canvas. The dog displaces the saint; the peasant elbows out the hero, and neither the poem nor the painting offer their ostensible subjects—the suffering of martyrs and legends—the reverence they’re typically afforded in Western art. Instead, the old values are being subverted.

My students tend to get that. And the moment they do, when I can see them nodding along, their eyes narrowed in concentration, one hand delicately holding the chin like Steve Jobs, I’ll have reached the zenith. That’s the closest I’ll get to the sun.

Because, of course, I want to take them further. I’d love them to discuss—ideally, in a completely organic way with minimal intervention from me—how Brueghel prefigures the conceptual foundation of all modern art in refusing to foreground the transcendent at the expense of the ordinary and mundane (a truth independently verified by Flaubert, Baudelaire, Proust, Joyce, et al). Even better, it’d be great if just one of them was familiar with Gyorgy Lukacs’ Theory of the Novel, specifically his claim that the novel, as the epic of a “world abandoned by God,” seeks its form in the “heaviness” of life: “the absence of present meaning, a hopeless entanglement in senseless casual connections, a withered sterile existence too close to earth and too far from heaven.” (At the very least, they should recall John Berger’s remark that, if one wants to understand Rembrandt, one must leave the museum and go to the hospital.)

But, admittedly, I may be asking too much of them. It’s one thing to sit here and write something abstract like “Auden and Brueghel reimagine art as a space of tension between the exceptional and the everyday,” and another to communicate it to sweaty seventeen-year-olds in a classroom that smells like lunchmeat and body spray. I may be moved by Auden’s reading of Brueghel—as I am by the insistence throughout his work that the pain and silliness and boredom of everyday life cannot be brushed aside by religious or artistic transcendence—but I find that those things that stir the soul rarely make for very good pedagogy.

Maybe it’s appropriate, then, that A. Natasha Joukovsky’s Medium Rare fits these imponderable questions about art and life into the digestible form of a comic novel. One of the great tools of that form is bathos, which often involves a sudden plunging from the elevated and lofty into the ludicrous and comic, and there’s certainly something bathetic about rewriting Greek myth into the story of a know-nothing lobbyist who happens to fill out a perfect March Madness bracket (with all the hubris, infidelity, and desperate grasping after celebrity that comes with it). And just as Auden and Brueghel deftly push the miraculous to the margins, Joukovsky’s Phil Fayeton, the “rare medium” whose miraculous prediction makes him a billionaire, is not really at the center of the novel (in fact, here’s all you really need to know about this middle-class Icarus: he fills out a bracket, he gets rich, he’s disgraced via an affair with a courtside reporter named “Sunny”).

The novel’s true focus is Phil’s long-suffering wife Raleigh, who is the human equivalent of the fat-assed plough horse in Brueghel’s painting. Because while the miracle happens to Phil, the narrator—who dubs herself Cassandra and assumes the persona of that doomsaying prophet—comes to focus on his very pregnant spouse, with whom she forms a surprisingly substantiative relationship. And it’s through Raleigh that Joukovsky’s novel, otherwise a satirical romp through sports culture and D.C. politics, becomes a sidelong meditation on the immanence of everyday life.

A few weeks ago, in his review of Peter Shull’s Why Teach?, referenced Lawrence Buell’s concept of the “observer-hero narrative,” in which a first-person narrator relates their encounters with a second, more idealized individual. These hero figures tend to be more romantic than their observer counterparts, and therefore, if they are not necessarily wealthier (like Gatsby) or more powerful (like Ahab), they at least appear more active and capable—doers not dreamers. It’s rarer, I think, to have an observer reporting on the lives of those beneath them,1 and rarer still to have an upper-class woman develop a fascination with a woman from a slightly lower class than her own, especially one who, like Raleigh, has no exceptional qualities beyond those in her role as wife and mother.

Initially, at least, Cassandra seems drawn to Raleigh as a déclassé version of herself. Though they were members of the same sorority at the University of Virginia, Cassandra hails from the Upper East Side, majored in art history, and attended Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government; whereas Raleigh paid in-state tuition for the nursing program at UVA and wears a lot of makeup.2 Medium Rare is most pleasurable in the moments when Cassandra’s detached tone buckles with condescension, as when she describes Raleigh’s college clique as “a glossy-haired Christian hydra, all immaculate fingernails and unrelenting kindness.” More delicious yet is the opening detail that Raleigh has decorated her living room with “a synthetically weathered home decor sign reading ‘Love Is Never Having to Say You’re Sorry,’” the notoriously stupid catchphrase from the vapid 1970 film Love Story.

I expect one reason we rarely get upper-class narrators commenting on the lives of lower-class characters is because it’s a difficult to task for a writer to keep mild condescension from tipping over into outright disdain (what was the watchword during Woke 1.0? “Never punch down”) or, on the other hand, to keep their story from morphing into the sort of romanticization that imbues poverty with the significance of a spiritual quest. In this former frontier country, where even billionaires want to be seen as working men, the upper- and professional-classes often nurture a fondness for lives they perceive to be simpler than their own.

But Cassandra, in my reading, avoids those extremes, finding in Raleigh nothing like folksy wisdom or downhome truth-telling. Instead, as Phil soars into unexpected celebrity and wealth, his wife becomes the epitome of everything he wants to escape—the average, ordinary, and everyday; and what Cassandra admires in her are precisely the qualities needed to make daily life—which is the terrain of stuff like boredom and compromise—endurable.

For instance, despite her disappointment in the oversized sign, she chooses to make the best of it. As Cassandra says,

“…she possessed the rare corresponding strength to mold her own mind, shaping and polishing her thoughts until the polite mirrored the true. She’d never admit to her disappointment, but it also wouldn’t eat at her—not the way it would have many women; not the way it would have me. Privately, subtly, Raleigh would manage to reframe the narrative, imbuing the synthetically weathered sign with hope and appreciation in a manner that somehow recalled neither cloying Pollyanna nor the Goopy “gratitude” of late capitalism. It was a useful temperament in a nurse: this staid, deliberate brand of positivity.”

If this sounds not unlike repression, Raleigh’s ability to “reframe the narrative” is also, as modern cognitive-behavioral psychology tells us, a vital skill for managing the innumerable disappointments, failures, and worries one faces in the course of a day. Even her appreciation for Love Story’s facile catchphrase has a fundamentally practical component: in the context of a trusting relationship, where good intentions should be assumed by both partners, “sorry” should ultimately be a superfluous sentiment. She makes a solid point. As Cassandra asks herself, “Was this the full-glam face of philosophical fucking enlightenment? Why had the sheer visibility of her efforts always struck me as incompatible with such a concept?”

It’s not unusual for a contemporary novel to arrive at a sentiment like this one, affirming the miracle of the everyday. Part of Cassandra’s awe for Raleigh comes from their shared experience of motherhood, and feminine solidarity may be the one place where Joukovsky’s otherwise cutting satire pulls away, as if to suggest that, paradoxically, the shared experience of ordinariness may be the closest to transcendence most people can ever hope to get. But my hunch is there’s more to be said about Cassandra’s interest in Raleigh, which never feels quite so disinterested. The narrator, after all, speaks openly and with pride about wanting to write a novel, and it remains an open question, as far as I’m concerned, whether that goal is an ethically trustworthy one or not.

Because, in the end, isn’t artistic ambition of the kind that produces a novel necessarily opposed to ordinariness? Doesn’t it command some kind of belief in transcendence, or, in the very least, exceptionality of an aesthetic kind (“Look, my novel may not touch God, but I would like to show the fucking philistines around me that I’m a little bit different…”)? Can you really be an artist on the side of total immanence?3

Needless to say, these are not questions I raise with my students. It’s not that they would go over their heads, more that there’s only so much time in the day and there are many more practical concerns we have to address. Even if you include those ecstatic moments where everything clicks, which are nothing but exceedingly rare, teaching is a slog. The year is long and by the end both teachers and students have had well enough of each other. This past year, I kept a paperback copy of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essays & Lectures on my desk, and anytime I felt in need of a lift, I’d flip it open and read some absolute bullshit like, “We shall one day see that the most private is the most public energy, that quality atones for quantity, and grandeur of character acts in the dark and succors them who never saw it.”

And I would nod along, eyes narrowing in concentration, with one hand rising to my chin…

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It is perhaps unfair that I read Vigdis Hjorth’s Repetition in the midst of my slow study of Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way. Many people object to the book review that uses one book—let alone a canonical fixture—as a blacklight to expose the defects of another. But of course it’s no In Search of Lost Time—what were you expecting? Have you considered that maybe Hjorth was trying to *gasp* do something different? But this is to deny the reality of how we read and think about what we read in favor of an ideal. What we have previously read affects our impressions of what we read later; the books we read in proximity to each other become associated, however contingently, in our minds. (Also, I simply find concrete comparison to be a much more substantive form of examination than pretending as though each book is a monad.)

Repetition is structured by a prototypically Proustian recollection. The unnamed narrator, a middle-aged Norwegian novelist who seems designed to encourage identification with the author, is at an orchestral performance when she witnesses a minor quarrel between a teenage girl and her parents. The incident triggers “the memory,” the elusive hole at the novel’s center around which it will whorl without articulating for nearly all of its pages. It is actually a bit more complex than that—the memory the novel focuses on is itself significant foremost for its connection to the recovery of an earlier memory later in her life. The recovery of this primary memory is described in rather more violent terms than Proust’s: “the images came flooding in, unbearable images shot like electric shocks through my brain, lightning-clear and with the force of several thousand volts, and everything fell into place, my mind imploded and I have never been the same since.”

One thing I value about Proust is the utter contingency of so many of the narrator’s recollections, their refusal to derive their value from explanation or material significance. This can occasionally be a bit tedious (I am relatively immune to the lyrical evocation of flowers), but is wonderfully moving when it captures the impossibly subtle, spontaneous non-events that mysteriously structure our selves. The form of Proust’s novel is not, for me at least, conducive to compulsive reading. It is not “unputdownable,” the highest praise of blurbs; I generally put it down every 15 or 20 pages. Those pages demand more concentration and inspire more thought than those of most other writers, and I am enjoying making my way through the book with a balance between diligence and leisure. In contrast, I read the 133 pages of Repetition in two or three days. There is a somewhat hypnotic quality to Hjorth’s prose which—brace yourself now if you get your rocks off from the symmetry between form and theme—is conspicuously repetitive, folding back in on itself in a way that recalls the writing of her compatriot Dag Solstad, or Thomas Bernhard. Additionally, Hjorth’s sentences are often long, paratactic series of clauses whose breathless lack of conjunctions encourage a kind of readerly rapidity. A typical sentence:

He wanted to make out and I made out with him, I wanted to do everything he wanted to do, the word no did not exist in my vocabulary, in my body, we danced and we made out until I had to leave to catch the bus, and fortunately Helle and Unni were willing to leave at the same time as me, we stood in the hall and we made out by way of goodbye with the boys who might now be our boyfriends until we find we had to run for the bus.

The most direct way to make this sentence “grammatical” would be to replace several of these commas with periods. This would, however, produce a choppier effect, a sense of grammatical simplicity and a stop-and-start rhythm. Hjorth’s simultaneous insistence on the long sentence (and, often, paragraph) and eschewal of conjunctions can make a sentence feel like a runaway train, moving the reader through many separate clauses, incidents, and descriptions without pause, or the need to slow down and parse. This is, of course, quite different from Proust’s long sentences, which are hypotactic to the extreme, often demanding multiple readings because of their conjunctive complexity. Hjorth’s is one relatively novel way to make writing unputdownable.

Having sufficiently justified why I read more pages over the past few days of a novel I didn’t especially like than one I insist that I do, my misgivings about Repetition are not really at the level of the sentence (I like Solstad and Bernhard). Repetition is a trauma plot novel in its purest form. It has a few tricks up its sleeve to defamiliarize the trope, but nonetheless the entire propulsive force of the book is toward the inevitable recovery of a childhood trauma that has unconsciously organized the narrator’s entire identity. There are political critiques of the trauma plot (an overweening belief that the personal is political) as well as ethical ones (an exhibitionist and aestheticizing reduction of tragedy to generic conventions). My own distaste is primarily aesthetic—I tend to value narratives that resist the scientific, etiological worldview of the psychologist and, even as I’m susceptible to their seductions, usually find myself disappointed by epiphanic reveals of singular traumatic ground zeroes. I also find stories that foreground passive victimhood dramatically inert; there are many more varied ways to be active than submissive.1

Now, this blending of two of contemporary literary culture’s predominant forms—autofiction and the trauma plot—makes critique difficult, demanding nuanced distinctions. If I question whether Repetition has a sufficiently complex protagonist—one whose self is not wholly defined through a formative trauma—or whether this kind of story has perhaps oversaturated the literary marketplace, it can sound like I am patronizing Hjorth the person, devaluing the significance of trauma, especially the Big One that is sexual violence.2 There is a recurrent game between novelists and critics (to the extent critics who are not themselves novelists still exist) in which novelists conspicuously encourage identification between their protagonist and themselves, and critics subsequently write reviews that take the author as their subject as much as their work. While I’ve grown a bit tired of novelists’ incredulous irritation at suggestions of autobiography when they make formal choices obviously meant to encourage such identification, critics should avoid falling into such a trap and evaluate a novel as a consciously formed work of fiction.

I’m going to pose an incredibly reductive three-pronged model of literary stimulus. There is writing in terms of an imagined audience, which we might call rhetorical. There is writing in terms of a literary ideal, which we might call aesthetic. And then there is writing whose primary warrant is self-expression. Most art is a complex interaction of these distinct ends, and they tend to usefully check and balance one another. Entirely rhetorical writing, unchecked by the aesthetic or the personal, becomes pandering, soulless, lowest common denominator slop. Entirely aesthetic writing is in danger of an impersonal, private perfection. Pure self-expression resists the category of fiction itself, refusing the standards of form or the necessity of a reader. Hjorth’s narrator describes herself as “someone for whom writing is a means of self-expression,” and the trauma plot is overwhelmingly defended on the grounds of the inherent value of externalization, verbalization.3 I, for one, have no interest in reading a novel whose first justification is the psychological relief it gave its author. And it is here where the aesthetic ideal is useful—how to choose among an assortment of novels centered on trauma? It is not enough that this really happened to me or even this is happening all around us. After the initial shock of recognition has worn off on readers, the burden is on the author to find fresh modes of (self-)expression, forms of writing about trauma that transcend (or at least suspend the familiarity of) familiar categories. A bit of metafictional tongue-in-cheek (repetition is the point!) is not quite enough in this case. For now, for me, the childhood trauma held in abeyance until the climax is a dead end, even should the novel call itself Dead End.

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A few weeks ago I saw this funny note going viral on Substack:

It’s funny because we know that vape shops are the antithesis of culture. A vape shop “that also does printing” is even worse. We’d expect the kiosk to be staffed by a stoned 35-year-old, or by a high school dropout who spends all day checking the price of Dogecoin; by someone, in short, who is ill-equipped to evaluate literature.

Yet we’re never told why the kiosk clerk found the story’s opening paragraph boring. I’m conditioned to assume it’s because he’s a philistine—that, for instance, he thinks every story should open with a dramatic hook: a gunfight, an alien invasion, a pair of melon-sized tits slapping together in a loose bikini top.

But for all we know his critique was more refined. Maybe he found the prose turgid, or the premise derivative. Maybe he sensed it was a cheap Knausgård ripoff, yet another pellet atop a growing pile of self-satisfied autofiction. Or maybe in between selling vapes and printing documents the clerk had been studying postcolonial theory, and he felt the story was pandering to all the hackneyed nativist tropes that plague contemporary speculative fiction, permitting readers to avoid rather than confront the violence of history.

It’s a ridiculous notion. But is it?

Fifty years ago Ralph Ellison posed a similar thought experiment, not about a vape shop clerk but about its Depression-era equivalent: “the little man at Chehaw Station,” a menial laborer who warmed the stove in a lonely railroad stop outside Tuskegee, Alabama—and who also happened to be a classical music connoisseur. Common sense says that such a person is impossible; a rural 1930s stove warmer simply should not be conversant in Bach and Schoenberg. For Ellison, this impossibility became a key for unlocking the greatest mysteries of American culture. By frustrating our attempts to map identity onto rigid hierarchies of status and class, the “little man” offered a fleeting image of America in its complex wholeness: “a vortex of discordant ways of living and tastes, values and traditions; a whirlpool of odds and ends in which the past courses in uneasy juxtaposition with those bright, futuristic principles and promises to which we, as a nation, are politically committed.”

Although I roll my eyes whenever Ellison waxes poetic about America, he definitely hits upon one of our deepest cultural fantasies. I see the evidence on Substack all the time: we, the discerning readers of the world, do not want MFA novels or industry-planted tinsel. We do not want writers who were nurtured in gatekept institutions and win prizes for stories set over and over again in New York City. But we don’t want books by uncultured morons, either. We want someone like Ellison’s “little man,” whose razor-sharp sense of culture was honed outside the culture machine. We want a well-read barbarian, someone who has studied George Eliot and Paul Valéry and James Baldwin, not in a seminar at Columbia but in the back room of a vape shop. This, we imagine, is how a writer develops a truly authentic relationship with literature, an insurgent relationship that can comprehend—but is in no way beholden to or seeking to gain from—the prestigious institutions that uphold literary standards at the expense of literature itself.

This is why I suspect many readers will enjoy Sophie Strohmeier’s novella, All Girls Be Mine Alone, which I would call an accomplished work of literary fiction if it weren’t ever so slightly weird, so uncannily un-literary. It’s about girls coming of age while they train for careers in opera, and here I should underscore everything that the term “opera” typically connotes: sophisticated taste, classical education, old money, Bourdieusian distinction; precisely the kind of gatekept terrain we have all learned to detest. This is the world to which Strohmeier’s characters aspire. Opera is their whole life. They don’t daydream about movie stars or obsess over pop music like other young girls; they daydream about the Marschallin from Der Rosenkavalier and obsess over the tenor part in Mozart’s Tuba mirum. Despite a few references to text messages and David Lynch, I often felt the novella was set during a prior era, basking in an infinite fermata amid opera’s Golden Age.

But All Girls Be Mine Alone isn’t just a story about opera. It’s also about queer desire. And ghosts. And golems, and basilisks. And it’s not really one story but two or three, with preposterous transitions that made me question whether Strohmeier is a bold stylist or just insane. It’s pleasantly light-decadent but also crude, as if Strohmeier set out to rewrite Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark and ended up writing queer young-adult fantasy softcore erotica by accident.

All this makes the predominance of opera feel particularly apt. Because while opera is the pinnacle of elite culture, it is also the pinnacle of elite culture’s twenty-first-century decline. Too expensive, too exclusive, and too tradition-bound, what was once “the prince of entertainments” has since become, as Daniel Snowman writes in Gilded Stage: A Social History of Opera, “merely one small player having to jostle for recognition in a cultural world increasingly crowded with alternatives, a minority interest comme les autres.” Just ask Timothée Chalamet.

And so I would say All Girls Be Mine Alone is an homage not to opera but to the ruins of opera, an irreverent elegy to the very possibility of elite culture. Strohmeier creates a playground in the abandoned kingdom where opera once reigned, recklessly appropriating its delicate artifacts in a way that only someone who truly loves opera can.

Because Strohmeier’s girls do love opera. They even take on janitorial duties at the theater, mopping floors and emptying buckets so that when they’re done they can catch snippets of the nightly performances for free. It was this gesture in particular that first reminded me of Ellison’s little man at Chehaw Station. At the conclusion of his essay Ellison recalls how once, many years ago, he wandered into the basement of a tenement building in New York City’s San Juan Hill, where from behind a closed door he overheard a violent argument. The combatants were speaking in “a southern idiomatic vernacular such as was spoken by formally uneducated Afro-American workingmen,” and in this vernacular they were debating the superiority of two Metropolitan Opera sopranos, comparing their acting abilities, vocal range, physicality—topics to which their profane language suggested they “should have been oblivious.” Unable to stem his curiosity, Ellison knocked on the door and then entered to find four “huge black men” in faded blue overalls, coal-heavers working in the tenement’s furnace room. When he asked them where they had learned so much about grand opera, they told him they learned it at the Met. When he asked again, incredulous, “where?,” they replied:

At the Metropolitan Opera, like I told you. Strip us fellows down and give us some costumes and we make about the finest bunch of damn Egyptians you ever seen. Hell, we been down there wearing leopard skins and carrying spears or waving things like palm leafs and ostrich-tail fans for years!

Ellison left feeling bemused by the contradiction: “workingmen and opera buffs.”

A few years later that same tenement building would become classified as a slum by Robert Moses and, infamously, razed to the ground. In its place now stands Lincoln Center, the current home of the Metropolitan Opera.

Three years ago, in response to financial pressure from the COVID-19 pandemic, the Met began aggressively drawing money from its endowment, a loss totaling over $120 million, approximately one third of its original value. Two months ago a controversial $200 million deal with the Saudi Arabian government that would have revived the ailing company fell apart, reportedly due to the Iran war and the blockaded Strait of Hormuz. They’ll need a backup plan, quick, because early next year the Met has a $62 million line of credit coming due.

Now might be a good time for some of the staff to start looking for a new gig. I hear the vape shop is hiring.

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By now you’ve probably heard about “The Serpent in the Grove,” the Commonwealth Prize-winning short story published by Granta that was in all likelihood written by AI. The story has become a sensation not only for how it slipped by the gatekeepers of an elite literary institution (who are themselves being accused of using AI for, at the very least, blurbing the story), but also for the befuddling and often absurd nature of its language. One passage in particular has quickly become infamous:

They called her Zoongie. Maybe it was a name; maybe rain took a shape and decided to keep it. She had the kind of walking that made benches become men. Hair tumbling wild, a dress that caught and released light, laughter with iron under it. Eyes that skimmed and did not land, as if what she wanted was elsewhere and she had to pass through men to get there.

It’s hard to write sentences like these. Sentences that strain for meaning without ever really getting there. It’s like trying to sing just slightly flat on purpose; if you aim to be just a half a key off, you’ll probably just end up barreling out notes all over the scale. In other words, there’s a logic to the prose, only a logic that is different from ours, as if it was written following rules of metaphor and meaning somewhat perpendicular to those we typically follow. Rules that don’t quite make sense to us—but might, you know, make sense to a machine.

At the same time, several commentators have noted that the prose bears an uneasy resemblance to the language of more established postcolonial writers. It turns out that celebrated diaspora novelists from Arundhuti Roy to Ocean Vuong also love warped metaphors and semi-nonsensical imagery. In fact, as one Substacker mentioned, there’s a long history of non-European writers defending their right to not be immediately intelligible to white and European readers. Notably, the Martinican theorist Édouard Glissant elucidated what he called the “right to opacity”: the need to allow minority speakers of a language to produce poems, novels, and speech that are not reducible to the rules, standards, and meaning systems of imperial Western languages like French and English.

From a certain angle, then, “The Serpent in the Grove” marks an unfortunate but also completely predictable confluence of machine-produced language and decolonial literature—unfortunate because, as Karen Hao makes explicit in Empire of AI, the companies behind LLM chatbots are thoroughly imperial projects, mobilizing vast resources for the purpose of capital accumulation, and predictable because, as identity-based fiction has moved from the margins to the center of US literary culture over the last twenty years, a distinct poco/diaspora “style” has emerged in prize-winning fiction that has in turn been fed into LLMs.

This puts postcolonial and minority writers in a tough position. Although it would be unforgivably reductive to take Roy, Vuong, and the recent winners of the Commonwealth Prize as the principal inheritors of Glissant, their success makes it hard to imagine how any writer could maintain a position outside of or opposed to what Glissant called the “transparency” of Western universalism, which might once have been represented by the imposition of standard French across La Francophonie but at this late hour has become isomorphic with the penetration of techno-capital into every sphere of life. After all, what could possible be more transparent than the automatic reading of all texts by an oligarchically-managed, resource-sucking plagiarism machine?

For better or worse, one thing that LLMs seem poised to destroy is the idea of a book written for a specific audience, the kind of book that once demanded a certain level of prerequisite knowledge to comprehend. Now all books are in a sense “readable.” Not only can you have a plot summary in minutes, LLMs can present you with a working aesthetic theory of a text just as fast.

I couldn’t help but think of all this as I read Giada Scodellaro’s Ruins, Child, which also exhibits a kind of off-center logic, a deliberate form of difficulty designed to resist immediate comprehension and swift interpretation. That is not to say, of course, that I think Scodellaro’s novel was written by AI—it’s too idiosyncratic and fragmented. At this point, LLMs have probably not been trained on enough Fiction Collective 2 to reproduce its experimental form and narrative, which loosely centers on a group of children(?) in a former housing project turned post-apocalyptic(?) commune watching a film made by six(?) Black women who live(d) in the same apartment.

And while Scodellaro is herself a Black woman born in Italy and raised in the Bronx, her style doesn’t really exhibit any of the traits of the minority writer “house style”—or, at least, not in the prize-winning manner of Ocean Vuong. This gives the novel a different kind of “opacity,” with a logic that feels off-beat in a manner slightly different from most identity-based fiction:

“The volume of the television is up so loud it can be heard crystal clear in the backroom. Mhmmm, they say, yes, they say. It’s known that no basement apartment can really withstand or exist anymore, not like when I was a young thing, not even a first floor spot, or they exist, but they’re occupied illegally, the government tells us, okay, and everyone that can manage lives up high, the woman says.

And then Pearl asks her, Von, Vonny, can plants be architecture? Can they exist in reverence the way the old castles still stand, broken? Or when we plant the cypress trees in a line, don’t they provide good shade?

The woman says yes, yes. Sure. Sanaa Lathan says, no.”

There’s not much I can offer in the way of context for this passage, except that it seems to be a scene from the film heard by children listening from the backroom of the apartment. The women speaking are all on the film, including Von (or Vonetta!, often just called the woman, who is both very old and pregnant) and the actress Sanaa Lathan (of Love & Basketball fame).

To the point, while there do seem to be a few aspects of typical identity-based fiction here, these all appear distorted, fragmented, and spliced: the women seem invested in collective memory, or what Toni Morrison called “rememory,” but that’s complicated by the conceit of a film that is watched, rewatched, and subject to misinterpretation; there’s interest in the specific connection between non-Western communities and the natural world, but the setting is undeniably urban; there’s lots of quasi-theoretical talk about identity, but there’s not a ton of answers or half-baked aphorisms.

And this, I find, is how experimental fiction tends to work. Like many, many works of avant-garde prose before it, Ruins, Child uses the form of the novel—setting, characters, plot—to establish an alternative logic from that of standard realist fiction. In this sense, when characters don’t develop like they’re supposed to, we’re meant to ask, well, why not? And when tedious repetition replaces plotting, we’re supposed to think about what the writer might be trying to say by denying use the pleasures of a neat plot. Likewise, when Scodellaro makes use of tropes typically found in minority writing but doesn’t allow them to cohere like they do in Vuong, Roy, or “The Serpent in the Grove,” they’re meant to be stumbling blocks, stones given for bread—things that are meant to get us to think.

But the problem is, it’s extremely difficult to theorize what alternative aesthetic logic a novel like Ruins, Child is trying to establish based off a single reading. It needs time, concentration, and really, it needs work. If you’re not able or willing to put that work into reading it, what you’ll end up with is just a bunch of questions. For instance:

• What does Scodellaro want to say about collective memory?

• What does she want to say about objectification?

• Why is the actress Sanaa Lathan a character?

• Why is the poet Dionne Brand a character?

• Why does Vonetta! have an exclamation point in her name?

• Why does the novel eventually break down into a kind of free verse poetry?

• Who the hell is this book for?

It’s this last question that seems the most pertinent. Who is this novel’s imagined audience? Who might be willing to put in the interpretive work of making the novel’s difficult aesthetic legible without feeding it into the interpretation machine? Because, yes, an LLM could probably provide you with a few surface-level talking points, but a novel like this one almost demands not just time and effort but a particularly invested interpretive community—not for nothing is this a novel about people sitting around discussing a film.

The modernist avant-gardes of the early 20th century provided a relatively uniform answer to this question: the difficult work of art is addressed to the future, to a “coming community” that it will in some have played a role in creating. In his 1936 memoir of traveling through the USSR, the French novelist André Gide articulates this idea in an exchange with a Soviet painter who, repeating the official Stalinist position, tells him, “What we want nowadays are works everyone can understand and understand immediately…Art should be popular or be nothing.” Gide—the student of Mallarmé, the friend of Oscar Wilde—is horrified by this. He tells the painter: “A work of art is not merely addressed to the present. The only really valuable works are those messages which are often not understood till later, and a work which exclusively and too perfectly responds to an immediate need runs the risk of soon appearing totally insignificant.”

For Gide and other modernists, this futural audience was embodied in the present by the artist and their coterie. The avant-garde, as scholar Timothy Yu puts it, “is an aesthetic and a social grouping defined as much by its formation of a distinctive kind of community as by its revolutionary aesthetics.” Black and postcolonial avant-gardes have often embraced experimental forms for a similar purpose, envisioning a coming community freed from historically constricted notions of race and identity.

What kind of community does Ruins, Child envision? Does it imagine a future group of refugees passing it around in the ruins like samizdat or perhaps the first mimeographed copies of the Combahee River Collective Statement? Maybe Scolladero already has a circle of likeminded artists who see themselves as the vanguard of the society of the future? And, projecting my own desires here, wouldn’t we want that to be the case? Don’t we want work that goes on in the margins, out of the smothering daylight, undetected until its too late and our way of seeing the world has already been utterly transformed?

Alas, I suspect the answer to all of these questions is a bit more banal. The frustrating part of this entire discussion is the inconvenient fact that for a very long time now, the future and coming communities of most avant-gardes have resided in one place—academia. Since the US university system exploded after WWII, no institution has been better equipped to reproduce a small coterie of aesthetically-minded individuals than the graduate seminar. A university is the place you will most likely learn to appreciate difficult aesthetics, where you will read Glissant, study the Black avant-garde, and meet others who want to change the world the way you do.

No surprise that Ruins, Child comes equipped with a helpful “Notes” section that lists the various artworks and theoretical sources Scodellaro incorporated into the texts—this was a novel written for the seminar table.

Of course, one could argue (and many have) that the university is itself a “transparent” force of Western hegemony, designed to absorb the art and folkways of minority communities and reproduce them as sterile “knowledge.” But if that’s the case, I wouldn’t worry about it too much. Even the professors seem to think the university’s on the way out, while others have made the case that its been in ruins for a very long time now. If that’s the case, then where will books like Ruins, Child be read, cherished, and interpreted? The future is anyone’s guess.

It may seem that there are many various paths to becoming an English teacher, but most of them tend to share a certain underlying structure. I was born the last of six to an engineer and a special education teacher in a small town south of Buffalo. I attended a tiny, underfunded Catholic school that employed mostly well-meaning teachers of highly variable levels of competence and interest. I did not have any transformative educational experiences, nor did I particularly care for literature until my senior year, when I read No Country for Old Men and The Last Tycoon and The Catcher in the Rye as part of a required at-home reading program.

When I arrived at a public liberal arts college near Rochester for undergraduate, I harbored dreams of being a filmmaker despite never having shot more than a clip of video on a Motorola Razr. A confluence of factors—a girlfriend, a tendency toward indecision, there being no filmmaking program at my university—directed me toward a compromise: I would major in psychology and minor in film studies, making a respectable salary as an industrial/organizational psychologist that I could then parlay into my real passion—cinephilia. The next couple of years eroded this resolution. I found the business classes compulsory to an I/O focus vulgar and anti-intellectual, I developed anxiety and depression, and I was bathed in the existential dread of having committed my only life to a predominantly practical end. In the Fall of my senior year, I hurriedly researched English graduate school programs. I’d spent much of my free time the previous few years studying literature outside of class, and I’m not sure I even realized there were doctorate programs dedicated to film studies. I informed my advisor of my desire to switch my major to English and apply for PhD programs, but it was impossible to fulfill the major within a single year and still finish the few classes necessary to my psychology major. I was stubborn, though, and was able to attain a minor in English and a senior thesis to build out some bonafides for my résumé. I applied to about a dozen state university PhD programs and got into a few, mostly after being waitlisted. I chose Penn State University in large part because it offered the most sizable stipend—around $15,000 annually for six years, and no tuition costs.1

By 2012, anyone who decided to attend a doctorate program in English at a state university in the absence of a trust fund (which neither I nor any of my peers had, to my knowledge) was committing to a quixotic venture. The advisor of my undergraduate thesis, who got his PhD at Maryland in 2002 and received a tenure-track offer the following year, had discouraged my graduate school ambitions with admirable candor. Not only were there few salaried positions left, there were virtually zero for a white American studying modern anglophone literature. He more or less warned me that if I ended up using my degree at all, it would be as a high school teacher.

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t still nurture some feelings of exceptionalism—even if there’s only one job in post-45 American literature when I reach the market in six years, my passion and talent and work ethic will make me the strongest candidate for the position—but I also prepared myself psychologically for the prospect that there would be no academic job at the end of the journey. I asked myself whether six years dedicated primarily to the life of the mind, with a couple sections of writing seminar teaching responsibilities to earn that sweet stipend, would be worth it even if I ended up in a career I could have begun four or even six years earlier, with only a bachelor’s degree. I decided it was.

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My senior advisor was right; so was I. Despite publishing several scholarly articles—more than some of my undergraduate professors had in the last decade2—I spent two post-doctoral years on the job market without even an interview. This included post-docs, non-tenure-track positions, visiting professorships, digital humanities posts. At 30 years old and yet to gross more than $25,000 in a tax year, I reluctantly accepted the end of that dream. I supposed I’d have to be an overqualified high school teacher. I had perhaps arrogantly presumed that although it was a diluted version of the life of the mind I’d aspired to, there would at least be a nigh infinite number of jobs available.

What I soon discovered was that the highest degree in English literature and eight years of teaching undergraduate English does not qualify you to teach adolescents. Pennsylvania required an 18-month certification program that would cost tens of thousands of dollars. Most other states were variations of the same. I was certain there must be an alternative path to accreditation for those holding an advanced degree in their teaching subject, but, despite the supply of teachers being so bad that Florida passed a law allowing retired veterans and police officers to teach without certification, there was simply no way around the red tape. Having spent nearly three decades of my life in school and with a net worth in the five digits, there was no way I was going to be forced to pay to learn how to practice something I’d been successfully doing for the past eight years.

It is perhaps a symptom of a broken system that someone with a doctorate in English and years of teaching experience was compelled to apply to teach in private schools because the public schools wouldn’t have him. Although I was pretty sure that many private schools would pay better than publics, a large part of my turn away from business and the corporate world was the intention of a more civically and democratically meaningful career. I didn’t imagine myself in inner-city Philadelphia, but nor had I planned to share my abilities exclusively with the children of the elite. Although the private school job market was much tougher for someone without high school classroom experience than I expected, I received a couple job offers and accepted a position at a school in Miami, where I would make a modest salary that was also several times more than I’d ever made in my life. It was one more compromise.

I’m a little bit suspicious of recognition and identification as primary virtues of art. It reminds me in an oblique way of when I came across video games like American Truck Simulator and amusedly wondered who these could be made for. The answer was harrowing: it turns out that a substantial number of long haul truckers spend their hard-earned hours away from the wheel playing truck simulator video games, hauling cargo across I-70 in their Western Star 57X. This isn’t to say that I only seek out alterity in art, just that too much identification can feel either embarrassing or masturbatory, collapsing the distance necessary to aesthetic perception.

Peter Shull’s Why Teach? is a novel that strains my comfort with such proximity. It tells the story of a twenty-something Kansan who loves literature, who had an existential crisis in college and romantically abandoned his law school ambitions, who became a high school teacher somewhat inadvertently, who experiences teaching literature as a distressingly compromised and thankless vocation despite its ostensible virtues being that it is less compromised and more meaningful than most other careers. Although there are many differences between my story and narrator William Able’s—his family is wealthy and he is thus more directly forsaking a life of comfort for one of meaning; he teaches a diverse student body at a public high school—the resemblance is unmistakable, and I imagine many other English teachers will agree. There is much to admire in Shull’s almost single-minded effort to dramatize this plot, to give it more dignified form than it tends to receive on television and in movies, which usually feature a scene in which the teacher breaks through to his black and brown students by freestyling about Shakespeare.

Indeed, most narrative representations of high school teaching suck.3 Shull reveals in his acknowledgments that Why Teach? was inspired most directly by (college) campus novels such as Wonder Boys and Straight Man. Successful narratives of this type considerably outweigh those of the K-12 genre, for some obvious reasons. The college professor has considerably more time for, and expectation of, an independent life of the mind as expressed in scholarship, often to the point that the professor, both actual and fictional, is a scholar first and a teacher second. This allows for more freedom to explore ideas, and often to directly represent the tension between sophisticated intellectual activity (represented by scholarship and lectures) and the world of practicality (represented by indifferent students, overreaching administrators, and the world outside the campus). Further, the professor is of a social and (generally) economic class above the K-12 teacher, and thus can, say, be whisked off to another country for an academic conference or made to confront the material decadence of contemporary bourgeois life—generally a more agreeable fictional subject than lower middle-class despair. Finally, and perhaps most plainly, since the mid-20th century the higher education system has become the primary subsidizer of fiction writers, and thus published writers spend considerably more of their time around colleges than high schools. In other words, there are many more notable novels about professorial life because professorial life much more readily facilitates the writing of fiction than does the teacher lifestyle; moreover, the life of the professor is a more appealingly ideal balance between autonomy and necessity than that of the teacher, whose existence perhaps too closely resembles that of the working class, albeit without even the allure of authenticity. This is, I think, the central challenge and the primary appeal of Why Teach?, its effort to plumb the specific attractions and anxieties of a career that doesn’t fit easily into the PMC or the blue-collar molds.

It is interesting to learn from the acknowledgments section that the novel was originally written in third-person but, upon editorial advice, revised to first. My biggest problem of the novel is the lack of authorial distance from the narrator. This is of course not to say that the novel is autobiographical and William Able a stand-in for Shull; my point is rather that there is little sense of irony, dramatic or otherwise. Able is almost perversely lacking in perversity; on the rare occasion he has an ungenerous thought or commits a callous action, he almost immediately recognizes it and walks us through his requisite guilt. Shull tries to manufacture some warts—Able comes from a privileged class background; he’s perhaps a little ignorant about the demographic homogeneity of the canon—but these are not exactly character flaws.

I sought out Why Teach? largely on the strength of Shull’s more recent story “Prague,” which I raved about elsewhere. It is not always productive to pit an author’s work against each other, but I think the comparison is revealing. The narrator of “Prague” is an undergraduate English major, his personality and voice not markedly different from William Able’s. What sets the two works apart is that the narrator of “Prague” is not the protagonist, really; as in Lord Jim and The Great Gatsby, the fairly unremarkable narrator is compelling primarily in his relation to the hero, a precocious, eccentric writer named Leo Brenning. There is no Leo Brenning in Why Teach?, no character as memorable or vividly drawn as Brenning, and no obsession to provide a necessary degree of perversity to the narrator. This is not to say that the observer-hero narrative is the only solution, but in “Prague” it’s employed masterfully in Shull’s hands. In that sense, the ultimate impression left by Why Teach? is excitement by how rapidly Shull has advanced as a storyteller.

Perhaps the most peculiar and, in my mind, disappointing fact of the novel is that it is essentially historical. Set at some point not long after the 2008 financial crisis, it is a Bush-era novel in terms of public education policy. Of course, the legacy of the No Child Left Behind Act persists: Able’s battles with standardized testing and “data-driven accountability” will be recognized even by private school teachers. On the other hand, many aspects of Able’s high school, his students, and the curricular conflicts now seem quaint.

Shull’s Able is, in terms of literature, rather conservative. This is rather credible, I suppose, for a twenty-something Kansan, and as someone with a provincial background I say that without condescension.4 The Great Books Able is bent on protecting are rather unimaginative, the books that American high schools have been teaching for decades out of custom more than intention. Huck Finn, The Scarlet Letter, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Great Gatsby, Of Mice and Men, Death of a Salesman, Romeo and Juliet. I like all of these books (two of which I have not myself read since middle school), but their predictability also suggests a remarkable lack of experience or, worse, curiosity. Although Able is ostensibly defending the novel (and the play) — the teaching of the “whole book” as opposed to decontextualized excerpts of prose — it is a rather cribbed, musty conception of the form.

In one scene, Able looks back fondly on a group project he participated in as a freshman, creating scenes from The Odyssey out of cardstock, tissue paper, paint. He offers this as an educational experience outside of the capture of efficiency-driven best practices, one that a superintendent would surely seek to eliminate:

What standards and benchmarks might Mrs. Hirsche have ticked off on her clipboard had she walked into that class? Students Work in Collaborative Teams? Students Appreciate Mythological Context? I doubted Mrs. Hirsche or any of our administrators would have smiled on Mrs. Unger’s use of class time that day, but to me, now, it seemed that we had Made Art, and, perhaps even more importantly, Made Friends.

Able’s complaint would be addressed, to an extent, by the Obama era and the embrace of social-emotional learning (SEL); as you might know, this has not been a panacea. Not only does SEL demonstrate that seemingly ineffable experiences such as “make friends” can be reduced to measurable educational standards, it also threatens to de-intellectualize the classroom in politically suspicious ways. As Daniel Gonzalez asks in his excellent “The Work of Feelings in Public Schools,”

If the first principle of curriculum meetings is to find ways to use texts as vehicles for belonging and social emotional skills, one has to ask: does this curriculum serve students who seek a quality public education?…Public schools that design curriculum to focus on belonging and social emotional skills are training students for low-wage jobs—and non-ironically calling this training equity and inclusion.

Similarly, the Trump-era culture wars are necessarily excised from consideration by the novel’s choice of setting. At one point in the past decade, Able might have been defending To Kill a Mockingbird not against the whole book police but parents and colleagues questioning the precedence of a white woman’s take on Jim Crow over that of a black author. At another point in the recent years, Able might have had to wrench To Kill a Mockingbird loose from the hands of the PTA president demanding a purge of the school’s woke curriculum. Instead, we get only a brief exchange with Lauren West, a fresh-faced colleague who blithely pwns Able with a feminist, anti-racist critique of the canon. (It doesn’t help that Able can’t recall Lorraine Hansberry’s last name or that of her canonical play). That West has allied herself somewhat with the curriculum-destroying Head of Literacy dismays Able, but the poultry raised by the conversation never come home to roost.

With a novel of this kind—that is, the kind that foregrounds its central question as its title—you already know it will conclude with some kind of re-commitment to teaching; what’s in doubt is how that conclusion will be reached. For Able, the various forces that compel him to delay law school and stick it out one more year, at least, are myriad and amorphous: a revulsion of the empty, meretricious values dominant among the upper class; the small differences one can make in a young person’s life; pure, unmitigated spite. Well, shit—it feels like I’m actually driving this big rig!

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It’s been a rough year for the novel. Actually, it’s been a rough 100 years for the novel. José Ortega y Gasset declared that the novel had “certainly entered its last phase” back in 1925, and since then it has been pronounced dead so many times that “Death of the Novel” has its own Wikipedia page. So yes, there are good reasons to feel pessimistic:

• The U.S. market was flooded with 4 million new books in 2025, which is “too many goddamn books.”

• AI slop experienced its Big 5 golden spike with Hachette’s Shy Girl debacle, further eroding an already fragile compact between fiction’s producers and consumers.

• The armature that supports critical, expansive, and enthusiastic consumption of novels endured several major blows, including the blindly data-driven closure of the Washington Post’s book section.

• Meanwhile we are all constantly reminded that the economic conditions needed to support daring, dedicated novelists do not exist.

But as Frank Kermode once wrote, “the special fate of the novel, considered as a genre, is to be always dying.” That was in 1965. Whether the novel is or is not currently on its deathbed, the idea that it’s on its deathbed has been around so long it has come to shape our sense of what a novel is.

Personally, I like that the novel is perpetually dying. It makes me feel important. When I crack open a book on the subway I’m not just killing time during my morning commute; I’m defending a venerable institution that has been under attack for over a century. I’m not a romantic, I don’t think literature “shows us what it is or might be to be human,” or, at least, I don’t think literature does this any better than astrophysics or childrearing or the countless other activities that make up human culture. And yet I have a romantic investment in the novel’s underdog status. The novel is neglected, struggling, past its prime, held at gunpoint by AI and systemic financialization—which is basically how I would describe myself. It’s fun to imagine that, simply by sitting on the couch and reading Howards End, I am turning the gun back against the miserable Zeitgeist that’s been relegating the novel, and me, to the dustbin of history.

It was this indulgent romantic whimsy that drew me to Lara Mimosa Montes’s The Time of the Novel. I didn’t know anything about the book or its author. I only knew the title, which sounded mythic, like “the time of the plague” or “the time of the apostles,” a period of tectonic upheaval that rips the smooth arc of history from its course. It reminded me of a post by Henry Begler I read a few weeks ago, in which he describes re-encountering George Orwell’s classic 1940 essay, “Inside the Whale.” One thing Begler noticed was just how much higher the stakes of literature seemed during World War II than they do today. Orwell wasn’t whining about how MFA programs or “woke” were killing the novel. He was describing an actual global war between fascism and liberalism, a war in which novelists still seemed to matter.

These are the kind of stakes I envision when I hear the phrase the time of the novel. It’s Abraham Lincoln telling Harriet Beecher Stowe that Uncle Tom’s Cabin started the Civil War. It’s Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o writing Devil on the Cross on toilet paper inside his prison cell. It’s Émile Zola, romancier célèbre, electrifying all of French society with a word: J’accuse. This is what allows me to tell myself that reading Lord Jim on a picnic blanket is functionally equivalent to blowing up a data center. Because I am in the time of the novel, when the fate of all humankind hangs in the balance.

So I was surprised to discover that The Time of the Novel was actually quite mundane. It’s about a woman who, in a kind of metafictional pun, makes a sudden and emphatic decision “to become a narrator.” She quits her job, stops paying her phone bill, and begins processing all her experiences through a narrative lens. She refers to her stint within this “mysterious interval as THE TIME OF THE NOVEL.”

As it turns out, the life of a narrator can be pretty dull. Spoiler alert: this book, which is about novels and narrators, has no plot. It unfolds instead in a string of inconclusive musings on the link between life and fiction, examining how simple details—a piece of broken glass, a bar of soap—become transfigured upon the plane of narration, and vice versa. Here’s an example from a party, where the narrator observes some “flowers placed in front of the window”:

They were beginning to blossom. By writing this, I would like to contradict the possibility that I don’t know how to observe the world in its less dramatic moments. I know how to describe extreme states, but the trees, less so. Do I have to learn how to observe the world in this way to enter fiction, or do I need to traffic in narrative to change the way that I experience it?

It’s thought-provoking stuff, but it lacks the mythic heft I associate with the time of the novel. Is this it: flowers on a windowsill? Is this the weapon we’re bringing to the war against AI, corporate conglomeration, and the defunding of the humanities?

It helps if we keep in mind that, the past century notwithstanding, the novel was not always dying. A mere few hundred years ago it was still in the process of being born. In his foundational 1957 study, The Rise of the Novel, Ian Watt argued that the primary shift introduced by the earliest English novelists—Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding—was their totalizing emphasis on individual experience. More than any previous literary form, the novel became accountable to life as it is lived by particular people in particular situations. This opened new dimensions within the “temporal process” of narration, including the infinitesimal time-scale of daily life and its ceaseless flow of thoughts and sensations.

As I followed Montes’s narrator in her quixotic—literally—journey to become a narrator, I began to consider this other, primordial “time of the novel.” It’s a modest time: the time we allow for ourselves to notice flowers in the window, or to savor a madeleine. Narrative is a channel through which these modest experiences flow into language; the novel wrenched this channel open, and Montes’s narrator tries to expand it wider and wider until the entire stream gradient collapses. This isn’t as exciting as the Lady Chatterley trial or Teddy Roosevelt picking up The Jungle from his nightstand, but it is a process that, since the seventeenth century, has made the novel into the tragic gem we all now love to mourn.

It’s a good reminder. When the time of the novel does finally come to an end someday, it won’t be the end of humanity’s struggle to wrest a realm of freedom from the realm of necessity. It will be the end of something far more pedestrian, perhaps even a bit boring; something unctuous, like a stick of butter, spread so far and so thin no one will notice when it disappears.

Nothing in contemporary fiction irritates me more than cleverness. I dislike excessive punning, verbal games, Joycean compound adjectives (e.g. “scrotumtightening”). I get tripped up by Faulknerian maximalism with its run-ons, neologisms, and verbifications (“the Chevy highwayed by the suburban strip malls and Wendymcdonaldskings”), and I have little patience for winking allusions to high culture, too-cute allusions to cool culture (“Dave’s band sounded like if The Slits studied under Maurice Merleau-Ponty”), and attempts to display an encyclopedic command of every notable name, meme, or phenomenon in contemporary life (e.g., Honor Levy’s “Love Story”).

I am, I should say, more than willing to admit this is my problem. Cleverness, as I mean it, refers to something broader and more elusive than a particular tone or a given set of techniques, even the techniques I listed above. What I really have in mind is a particular feeling—one that is irritatingly and inescapably subjective—but that we all encounter at one point in our reading lives. It’s the feeling that a given piece of fiction has abandoned any other goal besides that of demonstrating the writer’s wit and intelligence. I often think of it as the sense one is being baited into a game of intellects, or being goaded into asking yourself, even against your will, “Does this person think they’re smarter than me?”1

Saul Leslie’s A Working Title I Want To Change flirts with cleverness of this kind, albeit so much that I began to think cleverness was less an aspect of the novel’s style as it was one of its central preoccupations. Here’s what I mean: Leslie’s narrator delights in puns, wordplay, and literary allusions. He’s so obviously intelligent, educated, and fond of showing it off that he would typically be the kind of speaker I find completely insufferable—except for one thing: as a twenty-something Brit who has come to London to take an MA in Literature but instead spends the vast majority of his time working at Tesco, he’s trapped in a precarious economic situation that is fundamentally hostile to his self-conception as a student of literature.2

His cleverness, therefore, comes across as a kind of symptom. He lives and works at the intersection of two non-coincident discourses, the literary and the corporate, and his narrative is a kind of attempt to resolve the ways they contradict. For example, his first day at Tesco includes instruction regarding two important phrases that sound confusingly similar: “CAGE” (a rolling cart used for transporting merchandise) and “CAYG” (an acronym for “clean as you go,” a best practice for employees). Unsurprisingly, confusion arises almost immediately when another employee passes by and whispers “cage” in his direction, and the narrator wonders which “cage” they might have meant:

“There’s the slimmest of fat-free slimming wafer-thin chances that this senior colleague...is referring to John Cage, the avant-garde composer. Perhaps this senior Tesco member despises the tinny pop tunes that swell and surge over supermarket speakers. Perhaps they’re asking that the instore playlist include pioneers of musical indeterminacy and electroacoustics. ‘4,33’, on repeat, forever. Perhaps they value silence not as privation but as an affirmed presence...”

The prose here is a museum-worthy specimen of cleverness as I’ve defined it: there are puns (“fat-free slimming wafer-thin chances”), high-brow allusions (i.e. John Cage), and cheekily sudden shifts in register (“Perhaps they value silence…”). But the narrator’s language is also a record of someone trying and failing to reconcile the disparate parts of themselves, the person they are (a part-time employee of a giant corporation) with the one they would like to be ( an artist, an intellectual). For anyone who has worked a shitty day job while dreaming of higher things, the sense of dislocation will be familiar. I, too, remember reading a copy of Dostoevsky during my shifts at Old Navy, something I did partly because my job took too much time from my day and partly because I wanted to remind myself that I was more than just someone who worked a dead-end retail job—I was someone who read literature.

It’s to keep that other part of himself alive that Leslie’s narrator insists “writing and retail…are contrary pursuits, different industries.” After all, what hath grad school to do with Tesco? And for a while, this seems true enough: his literary knowledge can feed that sense of his “true” self, even as the thorough alienation he experiences at Tesco is made explicit via one of the novel’s cleverest and most effective bits—due to management’s continued failure to provide him with a new nametag, the narrator begins each shift by picking an old tag from a bin. The subsequent sections of the novel thus follow “Kevin,” “Michael,” and even “Judith.”

But his sense of alienation cannot be confined to work hours, and at a pub night with his MA cohort, he is forced to confront the fact that his anticipated degree is as much an economic instrument as his paycheck: “here is the first generation of graduates whose purpose for pursuing higher education is not to accrue learning [but] to validate an economic investment made by a parental patron.” Following their ineffectual protests over tuition hikes, his fellow students have been reduced to the status of customers, and not even that—dependent on their parents’ money, they’re more like kids tugging their parents toward the toy aisle. And the worst thing is they remain aware of this condition without being able to change it:

“Here we all sit around, sipping Sam Smith, watching the evening snow gather its greatness beyond the cross-hatched windows. We’re all aware of a vague disappointment, to which our MA syllabus hasn’t provided a solution, for which our reading lists haven’t given us a vocabulary. So we internalise this problem, absorbing it as grey matter, and instead spend our conversational efforts trying to perform phrases which fifty-fifty between sincerity and politeness. If one of us could diagnose it, we might say, words at once not untrue and not unkind.”

The words in italics come from the final lines of a Philip Larkin poem, and the narrator imagines the likely conversation that would follow if he had spoken them out loud to his classmates: their attempts to be kind and sincere with one another would give way to a debate over the extent of Larkin’s latent fascism and, subsequently, the morality of evoking the poet’s words. The narrator’s point here is not, as far as I can tell, to make a tired remark about the rise of wokeness but rather to point out literature’s imbrication in the very same system of alienation that he so desperately wishes to escape: “Shit shit shit. Can’t get away from problematics,” he thinks. “Now it’s our own literary intuition. No one can be trusted.”

The logical conclusion Leslie’s narrator must confront is that literature and retail are not contrary pursuits at all. In fact, although they make up different industries, they’re part of the same system, which can only mean that all his attempts to claim distinction from the system through literary cleverness are pointless. His realization evokes a popular way of narrating the history of twentieth-century literary culture as a story of increased capture by what Marxists call the “productive forces,” the aspects of human intellect and technology enlisted in the creation of wealth. Whereas the modernist avant-gardes of the 1910s and ‘20s—the Surrealists, Dadaists, Futurists, et al.—saw experiments with language as a means of escaping capitalism, movements from mid-century on have all grappled with the fact that, since capital has grown increasingly accommodating to language, art, and culture, radical language may not be the “way out” it was once believed to be.3

At this point in A Working Title, I felt inspired to theorize “cleverness” itself as a symptom of capitalism’s pressure on writers. Maybe it’s a crude way writers demonstrate value on the literary marketplace (a way of saying, “I am clever, funny, and well-read!”). Maybe consumers of that novel can in turn claim some of that value as cultural capital (in other words, “I am clever and funny for reading this!”). Maybe, I thought, cleverness is a version of Sartrean mauvaise foi in which writers are compelled to overperform “literariness” as a means of denying their own objective position within the commercial marketplace, and the reason I hated it was because I—true Marxist critic that I am—had recognized it for the comprador-bourgeois technique it is!

But I honestly don’t think any of that’s true. In the same way that saying “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism” can paper over the innumerable ethical complexities of life in a consumer economy, it would be absurd to think that capitalism infects all our uses of language equally, or that it’s pointless to exercise judgment because all value is determined by the market—as if there were no difference between Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet and the copy on a bottle of Dr. Bronner’s. No, your verbal acrobatics are probably not going to instantiate a virtual space of pure freedom beyond the marketplace, but that’s always been a lot to ask of something like a novel. And I doubt an MA in Literature will reveal your unalienated, authentic self, but it would be a better bet for doing so than working in retail.4

As Leslie’s narrator says, there’s no getting away from problematics. The title of this essay must be retracted. Cleverness, like most things “under capitalism,” is not one thing or another, certainly neither capitalist nor anti-capitalist. It could be hack imitation of modernism or a genuinely exciting literary performance. And in A Working Title I Want To Change, at least, it’s often both.

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I chose to write about Bruce Holsinger’s Culpability as a bit of a provocation, a lens through which to explore the concept of the independent book press and thus the premise of Dhimmi Monde. I had been adding, at random, a bunch of recent books published by small and independent presses to a list on Goodreads when I noticed something odd. One book on the list had 50,000 ratings, more than double almost every other title.1

Clicking to the page of Culpability, I was bemused by the familiar label on its cover: Oprah’s Book Club. I then checked the publisher, Spiegel & Grau, and did a little research. I had thought, in the back of my mind, that Spiegel & Grau was an imprint of a Big 5 press rather than an autonomous press of its own, and so figured that whatever information I had got about the novel being an “indie” was incorrect.

This confusion proved warranted—Cindy Spiegel and Shirley Grau were the founding editors of Riverhead Books, the very successful Penguin imprint, before getting their own eponymous imprint with Doubleday (2007) and then Random House (2008). The Penguin Random House merger (2013) brought them back, in a fashion, to their old stomping grounds, but was also cited as the eventual cause of their shuttering in 2019.

A year later, Spiegel and Grau re-established their imprint as an independent publishing house. Their financial backing comes from the likes of William Randolph Hearst III and Laurene Powell Jobs, individuals whose wealth is founded in large part on the conglomeration of mass media. The press describes itself as an “independent multi-platform publisher,” eschewing the words “literary” or “book.” They continue:

At Spiegel & Grau we take a holistic approach to content. A book might find new life in film or television; or a podcast might later become a book. Books are at the center of our business, but through strategic and collaborative partnerships and with the experienced guidance of our multi-media team, we are able to amplify writers’ and creators’ voices across a range of platforms that best suit a story’s message, enlarging the very definition and scope of publishing.

This, then, is how the ideas of “independent press” and “Oprah’s Book Club” can be reconciled. It therefore begs the question of the usefulness of “independent” as a descriptor. Like the word “organic” in the marketing of food, it connotes more than it denotes. Just as the former evokes vague ideas of healthy and ethical choices, “independent” seems to promise originality, smallness, and aesthetic and economic radicalism. Spiegel & Grau betray the insufficiency of not only “independent” but also “small”—independent from whom, small compared to what?

Spiegel & Grau is independent of the Big 5 publishers that move increasingly in the direction of monopoly, but what practical difference should we expect when their funding is still derived from billionaires and their business strategies identical to those of Netflix? Likewise, while they don’t call themselves “small,” I’m not sure that would be a misnomer—they certainly publish many fewer books than Penguin Random House and surely have a much smaller staff.

I don’t think this means that “independent” and “small” are entirely useless terms for distinguishing HarperCollins from Dalkey Archive, but we should at least pause before supposing that these words carry any aesthetic or hardly any economic significance in themselves. Expecting a book from an independent press to be inherently different from (let alone better than) one from a mass publisher might be no different than assuming your organic cucumber to be tastier and more nutritious than its non-organic sibling. And as with organic food, you may find that the origins of each are more similar than the names imply.

If a subservience to the market is to blame for the resemblance of some independent presses to conglomerate publishers, then by narrowing our sights to the non-profit press we can rest easy that their books will exist beyond ethical or artistic compromise. Nah, I’m just kidding. In his Big Fiction, demonstrates that while not beholden to the market in the same way as for-profit presses, non-profit presses often find themselves duty-bound to the missions of the foundations that support their operations. In the 1990s, the dominant foundational ethic was multiculturalism, and at least to the extent that authors were writing with non-profit publication in mind, they were potentially nudged toward the representation of cultural identity. Yet even if we, with figures like Tyler Austin Harper, were to decry the non-profit sector’s liberal mandates, the logic of difference in a closed field would remain. To the extent that an author is writing with non-profit publication in mind, they are writing against, or at least in distinction from, the aesthetic and sociopolitical values of the conglomerate presses. If we take the stereotypical image of a novel being edited for big press publication by the sanding down of its edges, the concealment of its tattoos, the equally true (or untrue) image of a novel being edited for non-profit publication would be the artificial sharpening of its edges, the addition of a clip-on nose-ring.

As enjoyable as it would be to conclude with a call for Dhimmi Monde to disband and veer either right (it’s all compromised, so let’s just learn to love our conglomerate overlords) or left (it’s all compromised, so let’s just trade in the book review for the Molotov cocktail), I don’t think it’s quite as hopeless as the above seems. For one, while Sinykin’s publishing-centered history of post-1945 literature is invaluable in many ways, it inevitably overstates the impact of the publishing matrix at the level of the individual work of literary fiction. While there are no doubt cases in which novelists have shaped their writing in response to the relative expectations of a conglomerate press or an independent press, Sinykin’s book tends to take for granted that most writers sit down and decide whether they are going to write a Riverhead novel or a Coffee House novel or an FSG novel. This clashes with much of my own reading. Literary agents do not treat manuscripts in this way, either; they do not immediately decide “this is an indie novel” or “this is a Big 5 novel” and submit only to editors of one or the other. There are many other forces shaping the individual literary work—even the author herself!

Second, autonomy from the market (and, obversely, autonomy from the foundation), is relative, not absolute. While there is no perfect catch-all (indie, small, non-profit) to which we can pledge our support, we can draw distinctions between Spiegel & Grau and, say, Semiotext(e). We cannot assume the aesthetic or political radicalism of a non-profit novel, nor can we assume the aesthetic or political traditionalism of a work from a for-profit or conglomerate press. We must, alas, read each novel on its own terms and treat its contextual conditions of being as possibly but not necessarily determining forces. Time and again it’s the same disappointing discovery: we must read.

While the curious publishing context of Culpability was the first thing to reel me in, I was further intrigued by the author’s biography and the novel’s premise. I left academia around 2020, and so did not recognize Bruce Holsinger as the scholar who had replaced Rita Felski as the editor of New Literary History in 2018. At the risk of getting too inside-baseball here, New Literary History is the leading academic journal of literary theory. The history of academic literary theorists writing novels is not star-studded. Harold Bloom wrote a novel he was so embarrassed by that he paid the publisher not to reprint it. I haven’t read any of the novels written by Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton, or Frank Lentricchia, but neither have you. Holsinger is a medievalist, and his first couple of books were historical thrillers that you might expect from someone working in that field. While those seem to have been reasonably successful for an academic, Holsinger found a much larger audience with The Gifted School (2019), a book club-y novel about privilege in suburbia that capitalized on the zeitgeist of the college admissions scandals. Since then, Holsinger has found himself a niche, abandoning the 14th century for the bleeding edge of the present and SEO-friendly premises.

Culpability is tailored to the big questions, fears, and buzzwords of the moment. It’s about artificial intelligence, privilege, billionaire tech companies, effective altruism, and chatbots. You will be astonished that there is no mention of pickleball. My tone is cynical, but I am as attracted to the zeitgeist novel as anyone, and truth be told I read eagerly through much of the novel. It starts shakily—first, with an excerpt from a book on AI ethics written by the narrator’s philosopher wife, Lorelei Shaw:

And this, I propose, is the inhuman soul of the algorithm. It may think for us, it may work for us, it may organize our lives for us. But the algorithm will never bleed for us. The algorithm will never suffer for us. The algorithm will never mourn for us.
In this refusal lies the essence of its moral being.

This isn’t especially original as theory, but maybe Shaw is a little bit of a hack or it’s an older, gen pop book. We then get the facile comparison of an algorithm to a family: “Like an algorithm, a family is endlessly complex yet adaptable and resilient, parents and children working together as parts of an intricate, coordinated whole.” Sure, but the claim that “a family is like an algorithm,” which repeats throughout the story, is really just a meme. Love is like an algorithm. A book is like an algorithm. The comparison is meaningless, asserting nothing more than a vague sense of complexity.

The Big Event of the novel happens almost immediately and so can be revealed without much compunction about spoilers. The narrator (Noah), a reasonably successful corporate lawyer, is sitting in the passenger seat as his 17-year-old son (Charlie) drives the family (including the aforementioned Lorelei Shaw and two daughters) to a lacrosse tournament. Except Charlie isn’t really driving—their car has an autonomous driving mode that allows the pilot to simply monitor rather than direct. Both Noah and Lorelei are absorbed in work when the elder daughter shouts, an apparently distracted Charlie grabs the wheel and swerves, and they collide with another car, killing an elderly couple.

The title should prime the reader for a novel that will explore the relative responsibility for the accident, and what is by far the book’s strongest achievement is its close scrutiny of the ways in which the tragedy unsettles the family’s complacent sense of impunity. When Charlie comes under investigation for involuntary manslaughter, the family’s tight web of solidarity quickly begins to loosen. This becomes most involving as Noah slowly recognizes that his son is a douchebag. Whereas Noah is a kind of J.D Vance lower middle-class striver who has married upward into the aristocratic Shaw family, Charlie (recalling Ethan Couch) is an overly coddled private school jock who seems not exactly unfazed by having killed two people but, we’ll say, insufficiently bothered. Noah is devoted to his son, a “cool dad” who buys him White Claws and describes his athletic body in somewhat discomfiting terms, but notices that “Charlie…treats his good fortune with an air of cheery practicality, as if escaping unscathed from a fatal head-on collision is an assumed entitlement. Of course Charlie is fine. Of course his charmed life will continue to unfold as planned.” At the novel’s relatively early peak, it becomes apparent that Charlie’s best legal defense is for Noah to receive the blame for inattentive parental oversight; in a delicious bit of dark humor, Noah reluctantly agrees to bankroll an expensive attorney for his shitty son who, we have come to learn by this point, was texting just prior to the accident.

Holsinger writes Noah’s encroaching ambivalence about his family engagingly, and I’m convinced that were the novel to limit its scope to a family legal drama, or commit more fully to its black humor, it would be a really good novel. But it wouldn’t be an Oprah’s Book Club pick. One marker of the middlebrow is a certain glibness about ideas, as though written with the eventual Book Club Discussion Questions in mind. Thus, in a novel about ethics, we get detailed explanations of what are probably the two most famous ethical thought experiments—the trolley car problem and Singer’s drowning child—both of which I taught my tenth graders last year. In a pastiche of an Isaac Chotiner New Yorker interview, we get an overview of effective altruism. If fiction is going to compete with television, it should probably expect more of and offer more to its audience than an NBC sitcom.

But the real culprit for the novel’s errors is its desire to be an AI novel. In addition to the autonomous vehicle and Lorelei Shaw’s work as an AI ethicist, Holsinger includes extensive transcripts of the younger daughter’s texts with a ChatBot, an AI-controlled thermostat that malfunctions, a tech billionaire deeply invested in AI, and passing reference to deepfakes. This is designed to spark polite discussion over mimosas2, not to be seriously reckoned with in a 300-page novel. The last third of the novel is very bad, almost entirely a consequence of the many layers of AI talking points that have been constructed on top of the domestic drama. Like many novels, Culpability coasts for a long time by holding in abeyance information that, when finally revealed, proves incredibly stupid and unsatisfying. Such novels rely on the goodwill and faith of the reader, trusting that the set-up, incomplete and largely promissory on its own, will be justified by the prestige.3 By the end, I felt contempt.4

I generally try not to allow disappointing endings to retroactively color an entire work—as I’ve said, I read much of the novel compulsively and relished some of the domestic turmoil. But I can’t help but think about the extent to which Holsinger’s decisions were influenced by a desire for maximum appeal, the possibility of being part of an advertisement for Starbucks’ Salted Caramel Mocha Strato^™ Frappuccino^® Drink, the potential for cross-platform adaptation. I suspect that however we define “independent” or “small” press, what we really expect from such books is a commitment to the internal integrity of the story, regardless of the commercial incentives. If Culpability is an indie novel, we must consider rethinking our terminology.

Greta Schledorn’s debut novel, Now More Than Ever, contains at least 140 instances of the phrase “I want.” Here are seven of them:

I hate New York and I want to leave. And I want to die. And I want every man I’ve ever slept with to walk into traffic. I don’t want to go outside and I don’t want to stare at any more screens. I want to stare at the ocean without blinking. I want to watch a wave after a wave after a wave.

In a book of 178 pocket-sized pages, many of them half-blank, that’s a lot of wanting. A wave after a wave after a wave of wanting.

Sitting with this narrator as she continued on to affirm that what she really wants is to fall in love, to be left alone, to “get fucking railed”; that, in fact, she already has everything she wants; and that, actually, people aren’t supposed to get what they want, they’re supposed to want it—I began to suspect she didn’t know what she wanted at all. Perhaps this whole fixation on wanting was really a symptom of some deeper issue.

There is a French thinker who has already theorized this problem of misplaced desire. Or rather, there are many French thinkers who have theorized this problem, but the most fashionable is currently René Girard, a literature scholar whose foundational concept of “mimetic desire” has become a popular tool for diagnosing people like Schledorn’s narrator. According to Girard, we humans enter this world with no spontaneous desires of our own. We literally do not know what to want, so we mimic others. This is how each of us learns to desire, by wanting what other people want—which triggers an inevitable maelstrom of contradictions, rivalries, and violence.

So when Schledorn’s narrator recounts drinking a Celsius on the way to a pilates class and then pauses to reflect: “pilates, where all the girls look like different versions of each other but not of me,” we could say she is tangled in the thicket of mimetic desire. Everybody wants a pilates body but nobody wants to be a “pilates girl”; this paradox of wanting what everyone else wants in a world where everyone wants to be an individual is one of Girard’s favorite subjects.

Girard uses the concept of mimetic desire to build some provocative arguments about human nature, challenging the very psychosocial foundations of Euro-Atlantic modernity. The concept itself, however, is relatively mundane. In an era of TikTok influencers, “like” buttons, and recommendation algorithms, it’s not very hard to imagine that people want what other people want. “We live the lives we live because other people live the lives they live,” Schledorn’s narrator muses at one point; “everybody knows this.” Her impossible catalog of wants is simply what happens when mimetic desire becomes ordinary, when “everybody knows” that what you want has no authentic value, so you’re forced to seek satisfaction in wanting itself. It’s a strategy more and more of us will come to know in a world where, as another writer put it, “we are all Girardians now.”

That writer who declared us “all Girardians now” happens to be Matthew Gasda, whose improbably successful 2022 play, Dimes Square, helped define the niche yet over-publicized cultural scene of the same name. I don’t know if Schledorn would call herself a Dimes Square novelist, but Now More Than Ever is definitely a Dimes Square novel. The narrator visits a long list of bars and restaurants below East 14th Street, including Bar Belly and Treasure Club, directly around the corner from the eponymous Dimes. She drinks, does cocaine, goes on dates, has sex, and stays out until sunrise; she reads high-brow books, watches low-brow TV, works a corporate writing job, and vacillates sentence-by-sentence between hopeless anxiety and supreme confidence about the status of her life.

At this point I should clarify that I’m predisposed to dislike pretty much everything about this whole situation. I’m predisposed to dislike Dimes Square, both the actual historical phenomenon and its afterlife as a rhetorical hydra that everybody can’t seem to resist decapitating. I’m predisposed to dislike René Girard, whose current renaissance cannot be disentangled from his enthusiastic uptake among powerful right-wing celebrities such as J.D. Vance and Peter Thiel. And I’m predisposed to dislike Schledorn’s narrator, who is only just smart enough to cover the tracks of her vanity and vapidity. Sure, she binge-watches Love Island and Vanderpump Rules, but she also reads Samuel Beckett and Knut Hamsun. She dollops out observations like little pearls of eccentric wisdom, but she always acknowledges that her thoughts don’t make her better than other people—a kind of self-aware humility that suggests she is, in fact, better than other people. I just can’t work myself up to care about a hedonistic anti-socialite’s journey to redeem her ennui by dint of sheer wanting.

And yet I cannot say I disliked the experience. In a perverse Girardian twist of fate, what I felt was something more like jealousy. Ticking through the irresponsible bohemian exploits of Now More Than Ever—a book that could easily be read in a single sitting—in 10-minute bursts while I commuted to work on a cramped subway train; while I waited for the tub to fill with hot water for my daughter’s bath; or while I sat in the Whole Foods cafe eating lukewarm macaroni and cheese, I found myself thinking, I want to do that. I want to traipse through trendy bars on the Lower East Side. I want to wake up hungover and go to Metrograph. I want to exchange wry chitchat with intelligent strangers downtown. I’ve felt this same ambivalent longing many times before, like when I encounter a recap of a Substack writers’ event and think, “oh my god this is so lame and cringe,” and yet here I am, reading every word. It should go without saying that anyone who dares to live a full life in public is lame and cringe—lame and cringe, because that life doesn’t involve me.

So I decided to visit this world I was missing out on. One frigid evening in January I convinced John, the co-founder of Dhimmi Monde, to join me downtown and run a gauntlet of bars referenced in Now More Than Ever. I took the 7 train to Grand Central, took the 6 to Astor Place, and met up with John on St. Marks. We went to Tile Bar. We went to International Bar. We walked into Pretty Ricky’s but there were no seats so we went to Pianos, where two guys told me the kebab plate I ordered was beautiful. We went to Funny Bar, which we discovered was more of a restaurant than a bar, so we continued south. We skipped Treasure Club and went to Bar Belly. We went to Clandestino’s. It was packed, but John got us a table immediately.

I became drunker than I had been in a very long time. At one point I opened my Substack app, selected a stranger’s post at random, and restacked it with the note, “This was so obviously written by ChatGPT.” The author messaged me to say I hurt his feelings. John called me a bad person and threatened to quit Dhimmi Monde. I deleted the post.

In the end I guess I got what I wanted. I got to see some of the places I had previously only read about, though from a kind of distance, the same way I’ve seen animals in a zoo or historic landmarks on vacation. I never got the feeling I was part of the world I was visiting. Instead I got something else, something that Schledorn herself got, and something that Honor Levy and Peter Vack got, and something that anybody who has ever drafted a party report or a reading recap has gotten: a story.

Though I admit, as someone once wrote, “it’s not a good story. It’s not funny or interesting. It’s just a bunch of stupid details.”

That person was Greta Schledorn.

A few years ago I came across the scholar Alan Jacobs’ personal three-strike system for deciding whether or not to read a given work of contemporary fiction. It’s a method designed to filter out what he calls the “intellectual monoculture,” or what others on Substack have dubbed the literary elite: the Ivy-educated, city-dwelling, MFA-holding establishment. Jacobs’ system gives a book one strike if the author has an MFA, two strikes if their protagonist is a writer/artist, and a full three strikes if the book or its author spends the majority of their time in that detested borough of Brooklyn.

Maybe it was because I was in a bit of a low at the time, but this prompted a rush of relief in me. Finally! I thought, someone else has said it. For years I had read contemporary novels set in New York and London, most of them involving erudite but shiftless protagonists dawdling away prestigious fellowships, with a mixture of fascination and disdain. I rolled my eyes at every Manhattan gallery opening or decamp to rural France, wishing that keeping up with “serious fiction” didn’t mean following the internal struggles of urban intellectuals whose lives could only look rather glamorous from my hopelessly provincial perch.1

Turns out I wasn’t alone in being over this stuff. After being crowned the literary movement of the century, dissected in endless articles and think-pieces, autofiction has become something of a byword. Even other urban elites have begun to turn on it. In a recent review of Rachel Cusk, New York Times critic Dwight Garner put it this way: “I wonder more about the steep solipsism of Cusk’s fiction, and of the so-called autofiction of many other gifted writers. How often can readers be made to care about the problems and prerogatives of the artist?”2 We could call it autofiction exhaustion, a simple boredom with the most talked-about literary trend of the century, perhaps coupled with an ethical-political concern that “literary fiction” has become merely the neurotic self-talk of the educated classes.

But if I were to be honest, my own reaction went beyond exhaustion. It went beyond ethics, too. I was sick of reading autofiction by successful, award-winning writers because, well, I was not a successful, award-winning writer. To be honest, I was not successful or award-winning in any capacity. I was—I am—a failure.

In one sense, you could say being a failure made me envious (it’s humbling to admit that one’s aspirations were once so threadbare as to amount to living in Brooklyn and publishing in n+1—the first steps, as everyone knows, to a truly autofiction-worthy life), but “envy” doesn’t full capture the diffuse mix of pride and resentment, disgust and pleasure, that composed my personal experience of being a failure.

Hannah Regel says something similar about the failed artists that populate her novel The Last Sane Woman: “Envy implies a blind desire, whereas what’s happening is simply more conflicted...[envy] has a direction to it. It’s like, ‘I want this.’ What’s happening between these people, it’s more chaotic than that. It doesn’t have a direction.” The novel records this strange, multivalent feeling as it affects Nicola, a struggling potter in contemporary Britain, who comes to a feminist archive because she “want[s] to read about the trouble a person might have with making things. About what might stop a person from making things, making art, I mean.”

Nicola is very specific about the things part—she wants to read about someone who makes objects. Her own pottery practice has collapsed post-grad, and her search for someone who is undergoing a similar artistic crisis seems less motivated by a desire to begin again than by a need to see her own misery reflected back to her. As the novel progresses, she finds just such a mirror in the letters of an unknown female potter, Donna, who committed suicide in the late 1980s. It turns out that Donna has resentments of her own, which she expresses in letters to her homemaker friend Susan. As Donna navigates the austerity-choked institutions of Thatcher’s Britain and Susan retreats into home life, Nicola swims through a sea of sad passions, driven by her sinking relationship, encounters with more successful peers, and increasing obsession with Donna’s letters to do anything and everything except make new work.

Nicola’s behavior will be familiar to anyone who has ever been in love with their own misery. At one point, she goes so far as to imagine the pleasures of being trepanned. But mostly she escapes into her phone, finding the occasional reason to reaffirm that she might be special. Other times she ruminates on why she is not likely to be one of the chosen:

“It wasn’t fair! Some people got to walk through life with their frailty enshrined behind a steel wall. The steel wall of the sublime—their trouble with living having gained an ethereal elegance. Untouchable! How she envied them. Her inability to cultivate a convincing aura of tragedy had constituted, for Nicola, one of the great unfairnesses of her life...the figures that populated Nicola’s ideal image of herself were people like Lena Zavaroni, and now, thanks to Marcella Goodwoman, the potter. People to whom no one would ever dream of uttering the word Tough, a scene as unthinkable as telling Christ to get down from the cross. Oh, to join those ranks!”

If this is envy, it is envy richer than ganache. Nicola’s self-pity feeds on her self-awareness. She has an acute sense of her weakness’ weakness (she understands that she suffers but not well enough to be a martyr), which speaks to years of cultivated attention to her own misery. She’s lost sight of why she wanted to make art in the first place, let alone what success would look like. The only goal she has left is to be the right kind of failure, one of the ones that carry their suffering well.

The feeling Nicola expresses here bears some similarity to what Friedrich Nietzsche labeled ressentiment, which is distinguished from ordinary resentment by, among other things, the way it turns failure into a virtue. Ressentiment says that the powerful are not just lucky but wicked, having received their success at the expense of others, and it offers the defeated a suite of rich affective compensations: pride, self-justification, the sense of having been wronged. Thus, Nicola spends a good amount of her time flicking through social media, seeing what her peers are up to: ressentiment demands we keep a constant surveillance of others’ successes and failures, continuously weighing them against our own. This is the only way to make sure the moral scales are properly adjusted, to keep replenishing our cup of bitterness.

Crucially, The Last Sane Woman gets a successful purchase on ressentiment because it is not autofiction. Nicola bears some resemblance to her author, but the novel isn’t just focused on her—there’s Donna and Susan, too. It is this attention to three different lives separated by space and time that gives us from distance from the overwhelming present and permits us to imagine that ressentiment is not just a personal failing but, like failure itself, a structural feature of art-making in the present.3 For decades now, the institutions that have traditionally supported the arts (e.g. universities, newspapers, fellowships, etc.) have been steadily undermined.

The rise of digital media has forced writers specifically to grapple with constant precarity, rapid turnover, and a seemingly endless number of transitions, each of which, says Stephen Marche, “requires starting over, reevaluating, submitting, and above all, failing.” At the same time, social media doesn’t enable self-promotion so much as demand it. Writers and artists are now perpetually tied to their feeds, forced to forever scan the horizon for what’s coming next. Platforms like Substack promise to erase distinctions between elite and non-elite writers but only end up emphasizing the arbitrary nature of success.4

So what are we poor failures to do? The staunchly anti-dialectical Nietzsche could not acknowledge that there is another side of ressentiment—that failure can sometimes give rise to a host of worthy virtues: mercy, communion, solidarity. Regel similarly suggests the answer may lie with Susan, the housewife, who accepts her artistic limitations and learns to see art not as things but, in that classic Marxian formulation, as objectified social relations.

Maybe Regel is on to something—although, personally, I don’t take her too seriously. I have a hard time believing people who are more successful than me.

For the past couple months, I’ve been writing almost exclusively about short stories — reviewing them and considering some of the recent trends in the publishing and prestige of story collections. This is the first time I’ve written in long-form about a short story collection qua collection, and in doing so I can’t help but face up to my fundamental discomfort with the genre. I like wholes.1 Well-wrought urns, organic totalities, irreducible monads. Assessing and reviewing a short story is intuitive. The same for a novel, a film.2

All but the most tightly interconnected story collections feel like epistemic riddles when I attempt to pronounce on them. As a recent note by reinforced, most famous collections are largely gatherings of stories originally published elsewhere, often years apart. Is the value of a collection simply the aggregate value of the individual stories? Is the short story collection really more than an arbitrary joining of disparate parts into proximity, in rough imitation of the length of a novel? Do collections have any inherent reason to exist as such?

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Obviously there are many collections I love—take Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find, a collection I’d say hangs together in terms of themes, vision, and consistency of quality more than just about any collection of unconnected stories. I’ve read several of its stories multiple times, but I haven’t, and I’m not sure I ever will feel the need to, read the collection front to back again. If I were feeling a desire for a prolonged plunge into O’Connor’s short fiction, I’d just as soon read selectively across her Complete Stories. And in fact, if I were to open that volume and read only the stories from A Good Man Is Hard to Find, I’d find that they are ordered differently there.3

My point here is that story collections seem to lack the same ontological integrity as individual short stories or novels. The idea that the individual stories’ sequential order or contextualization within the whole contribute to some transcendent meaning is not a fiction very emphatically maintained by most people, and the editing history of many story collections reveals the often arbitrary nature of what is and is not included.4

This theoretical throat clearing is necessary, I think, to my being understood when I say that Thomas Morris’s Open Up cannot really be assessed as a whole. It has one, rather short, story I quite liked, another story I liked with a bit more reservation, two stories I found to be mediocre, and one story I found almost entirely tedious. I can (and will) relate the stories to one another, but ultimately I’d suggest you read the better ones and skip the weaker. In reviewing this collection, I am maintaining the fiction of its coherence only to then encourage you to ignore it.5

The collection opens with its shortest and best story, reminiscent of Tobias Wolff’s famous “Powder,” relating a brief episode involving a young boy and his estranged father. “Wales” is set during an actual 2016 friendly between the Wales and Northern Ireland football squads. The son, Gareth—who is plausibly named after the famed Welsh winger Gareth Bale—is taken to the match by his vaguely negligent dad. Tapping into a kind of sports-related magical thinking I can certainly relate to, Gareth is constantly reading the world for signs that Wales will win or lose, and reciprocally for how a Wales win or loss will determine the future:

If Wales win tonight, everything will turn out okay. His mother will find a wad of cash stuffed in the walls and they won’t need to move out. But if Wales lose, the repo man – with his bulging muscles – will return and take Gareth’s bike. Or the ceiling will cave in and fall down on him while he’s watching cartoons on the couch.

I was the kind of kid who, while watching basketball players shoot free throws, would try to locate a word that, when spoken, would cause them to miss. Perhaps if I whispered “eggplant” right before they released the ball, I would cast a spell. A common explanation for this behavior, I imagine, is that children lack much control and are still coming to terms with humans’ inability to reliably determine their own fate. Morris is up to something of this sort—the disarray and precarity of Gareth’s domestic life are such that he seeks cosmic intervention, clarity of cause and effect. Ultimately, the story is an assertion of youthful idealism, a refusal of sober disenchantment.

The following story, “Aberkariad,” benefits from its proximity to “Wales.” Although the stories couldn’t be more different in many ways, they are both essentially about ideals and necessary illusions. It took me about two pages into the story to recognize that the characters are not Welshmen from the boonies but something more familiar, domestic — seahorses. Following the kitchen sink realism of “Wales,” it’s a solid bit to introduce the narrator, his uncle, and his seemingly limitless, very Welshly-named brothers before casually mentioning one of the boys’ “newly emerged brood pouch.”

The set-up is not far from Pixar: the narrator is raised alongside his five brothers by his father — whose name, revealed late and offhandedly as Gareth, suggests another connection between this story and “Wales” — who insists that their mother, who left before they were born, is coming home soon. If you are familiar with seahorse mating patterns (or read Wikipedia as I did), you’ll know that the male seahorses carry their children to birth, at which time parental care ends. You may also have heard that seahorses are monogamous, but that appears to be more a romantic exception than a common truth. Morris plays with these facts and perceptions by making the father a tenderhearted wife guy and boy dad, stubbornly determined to break the cycle of paternal abandonment and polygamy. The narrator is slow to recognize his father’s delusions, and the story’s central question is whether his father’s lie of a devoted, soon-to-return mother was a gift or an injury.

There really are some Pixaresque elements here. Morris goes too far with the puns — “Your mother and I were head over tails in love!” — and certain plot elements feel more cinematic than literary. Still, the story defamiliarizes the abandonment plot in productive ways, and there is some fun with gender: male and female roles are not switched, but skewed by the exchange of reproductive functions.

The collection’s final and weakest three stories suggest some of the shortcomings of Jacob Savage’s infamous “The Vanishing White Male Novelist.” In that essay, Savage enumerates the many kinds of stories white millennial Americans are writing and dismisses them all for not dealing with white male identity in a direct or honest enough way. Because I had not read most of the “bad” (white millennial male) fiction Savage cites and have read and enjoyed some of the “good” (non-white millennial male) fiction he cites (Tony Tulathimutte, Tao Lin), it seemed plausible that Savage had identified a failure of nerve more than a failure of talent. Perhaps the experience of the contemporary WMM is so fecund that just about any description would seem a revelation.6

Morris’s protagonists across these stories are men between the ages of 20 and 30 who are each some combination of socially paralyzed, emotionally crippled, and pathologically passive. “Little Wizard” is Morris’s entry in the growing incel / male loneliness epidemic subgenre, and its resemblance of and deficiency compared with Tulathimutte’s “The Feminist” is instructive. Whereas Tulathimutte’s protagonist is plagued with “narrow shoulders,” Morris’s Big Mike is saddled with the bad luck to have topped out at 5’3”. Michael articulates the frustrations of dating at his height in a way that is both sympathetic and simply pathetic, complaining that even the women shorter than he is object to him because they “just like to feel protected.” As one does, he googles “‘short people discrimination’ and read a piece about unconscious bias. Being a short man in the workplace was basically worse than being a woman.” Michael’s built-up misogyny, expressed primarily toward his condescending boss Michelle, is checked by his best friend Rhian, who challenges his self-pity. Some of Morris’s illustrations of Michael’s habitual misogyny are overly familiar, as though Welsh social media were on a time lag:

So while it was true that he didn’t respect Michelle as a boss, and that he did think she was a bitch, none of that had anything to do with her being a woman. Some people were just bitches. Though, thinking about it, if she was a guy, he’d be calling her a dick instead, so there was a difference, but it was nothing to do with respect. It was just a different term, like the way you use ‘actor’ for a guy, and ‘actress’ for a woman.

Morris doesn’t withhold sympathy from Big Mike, but the latter’s rationalizations are unconvincing. Contra Jacob Savage, Morris lets us feel the grievances of the men who’ve been “left behind,” but it’s not especially interesting or enlightening.

Lest it seem that Morris merely stands at a condescending remove from Big Mike, the two subsequent stories suggest the sincerity of his interest in men who feel uncomfortable in their bodies, socially recessive. “Passenger” follows another anxious thirty-ish male — Geraint — who in this case has a girlfriend (Niamh), but is so cripplingly passive and self-hating that their relationship frays during their vacation in Croatia. It’s pretty miserable being in Geraint’s head. He expends most of his energy on wondering whether Niamh is having a good time, whether Niamh still loves him, whether passersby are thinking about how ugly or poor or awkward he is. The main culprit for Geraint’s anhedonia seems to be daddy issues, as he has Proustian flashbacks to his childhood and sees his father in every authority figure (particularly the various male drivers, hence the titular metaphor of being a passenger in one’s own life). I’ve experienced an approximation of Geraint’s condition at earlier points in my life, and can verify the accuracy of representation. However, Morris doesn’t do much more than accurate representation—there is little room for ironic perspective, and the story can be rather punishing in its repetition even as it drifts into the realm of the surreal. At a certain point, you begin sympathizing more with Niamh than Geraint, a notion Morris cannot much entertain as we remain trapped within the skulls of his sad, self-absorbed boys. The Millennial White Male Novelist has arrived, but he’s mostly just writing about indecision and solipsism, not unlike the Gen X WMNs who we’re told have not been reproduced.7

The collection reaches its low with “Birthday Teeth,” which is almost comically overstuffed with forms of anomie: psychic vampirism, derealization, internet addiction. As with every story except “Wales,” there is a therapeutic quality to the story. “Open Up” proves to be a fitting title for the collection because so many of these stories place the reader in the position of the therapist in session with a psychically constipated patient. I suppose this is true of a lot of fiction, but you are reminded during a story like “Birthday Teeth” that therapists are traditionally paid for their work.

In her recent critique of a minor-but-growing “flash fiction” industry, Alanna Schubach asks whether the genre really needs to exist. Why would we want to separate very short stories from the long, venerable history of the short story?

The answer, Schubach suggests, is a general crisis of attention. Flash fiction is quick to produce and quick to consume, which is convenient in a world where writers have little time for writing and readers have little patience for reading. Individual works of flash fiction can of course be perfectly apropos, masterfully pruning words to create an otherwise unattainable sense of immediacy or sublimity. But if style and craft were all that mattered, we would just call these texts short stories. The reason we increasingly find them cordoned under the label “flash fiction” is because they cater so willingly to conditions of distraction, dilettantism, and hurriedness.

This isn’t just a moral claim about how we’re becoming lazy or stupid. It’s a formal claim about the gradual disappearance of literature as we once knew it. Flash fiction is what happens when we treat literature as a problem to be managed through downsizing. The publishing industry is shrinking, the percentage of Americans who read novels is shrinking, and, now, literature itself is shrinking. We can imagine literary texts continuing to shrivel into ever smaller chunks until one day they vanish altogether.

This was the grim prospect I had in mind while reading Diana Oropeza’s flash fiction collection, An Incomplete Catalog of Disappearance. Across sixty works of prose, almost all of them shorter than one page, Oropeza explores her titular theme through various scenarios in which presence yields to absence: letters arrive for someone who no longer resides at the address; a boy suddenly gains and then just as suddenly loses the ability to play piano like a virtuoso; a retired dairy factory worker reminisces about the missing children printed onto milk cartons.

Given the book’s vanishing form and content, I couldn’t help but read each piece as a commentary on literature’s uncertain future. In a half-page titled “Bryan,” for instance, the narrator struggles with verb tenses while discussing a missing person:

When C disappeared, everyone said (would say?) the present tense is more optimistic, so I tried to keep it positive: she is missing, she is lost in the woods, we think, she isn’t the type to just disappear.

The narrator does sometimes employ the past tense, but not without reservations:

And when she was found, she was (...is?) dead. She was (...and/or is?) gone.

It’s like a micro-lesson in deconstruction. Language permits us to speak of people even when they’re not around. It makes them present, literally, re-presents them. But what happens when we speak of this absence itself, when we use language to make absence present? We see the whole paradigm collapse, until the narrator cannot proceed without relentless waffling and self-doubt.

Isn’t this also what flash fiction does? Represents something that isn’t there? Like a present tense statement about a friend lost in the woods, flash fiction carries literature forward after it is (...was?) already gone.

An Incomplete Catalog of Disappearance is full of clever pieces like this—though if I’m being honest, I’ve already forgotten most of them. This is another problem with flash fiction: the stories are so brief and require so little attention that they’re easy to forget.

But then, I could say the same about everything I read. Each year I dedicate hundreds of hours of intense focus to books I end up barely remembering. Novels I finished only a few months ago—novels I enjoyed, which I would list among my favorites of all time—I now recall as little more than a vague collection of moods and situations. The more books I read the more disturbing this becomes. Art, in Viktor Shklovsky’s influential estimation, is what awakens us to our own existence. Most of our lives are spent performing routines more or less unconsciously, which is to say, most of our lives never exist at all; literature ruptures these habitual modes of experience, reattuning us to the sensation of things and reinvigorating our consciousness of a life that can, at last, be fully lived. Yet when I try to picture the hours I spent last year reading Berlin Alexanderplatz or Lolly Willowes or The Catacombs, it’s like staring into a window clouded with steam. Does this mean all those hours didn’t really exist? When I sit down to read a novel, am I literally throwing my life away?

Yes. Or at least, “yes” felt like the correct answer while I was reading An Incomplete Catalog of Disappearance. Yes, things disappear. Yes, literature is transient, memory is provisional, we mortals are subject to loss and decay.

Some people try to resist. A quick search on Substack returns multiple widely shared how-to articles promising to help us “remember everything you read.” Related search results include even more widely shared how-to’s about “the secret to” reading more, reading faster, reading deeper, and reading better. It would appear many of us share an urgent desire to redeem our finite lives through culture, not “culture” in the historical sense of the self-development of humanity, but rather in the technocratic sense of a system of self-optimizing hacks: follow these simple steps and you too can read everything, understand all of it, and remember it forever.

Oropeza asks us instead to grow comfortable with letting go. She invites us to sit with disappearance for a while, to observe it from sixty different angles. Each story leads us one step further from a definitive statement on the matter, widening the penumbra around some dark core that would blind us if we stared at it for too long. An incomplete catalog of disappearance: that’s just what literature is. That’s what life is.

All this reminded me of something from Michel Houellebecq’s novel, Platform, which I read in a college course many years ago. I couldn’t recall the exact words, so I found an old copy and looked up the passage:

We remember our lives, Schopenhauer wrote somewhere, a little better than a novel we once read. That’s about right: a little, no more.

This disappointed me. In my memory the line had been much more profound. I decided to press further, to see where Schopenhauer’s thoughts were headed, so I searched Google for the original quotation. I couldn’t find it.