Where did all the white male authors go?

Everyone can sense a healthy cultural vibe shift in 2024, but the institutional damage done to publishing by the decade of the Great Awokening is far from over.

From the New York Times:

100 Notable Books of 2024

Here is the standout fiction and nonfiction of the year, selected by the staff of The New York Times Book Review.

The 100 are divided up into 54 Fiction or Poetry books and 46 Nonfiction books.

Only six of the 54 Fiction or Poetry books are by white males (using the Biden Administration’s new race categorization where Middle Eastern & North Africans are no longer white, but Armenians and Ashkenazi Jews are).

The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman - Arthurian Fantasy
Grossman, who is best known for his Magicians series, is at the top of his game with this take on the myth of King Arthur, which resoundingly earns its place among the best of Arthurian tales. The novel follows a knight who helps lead a ragtag band to rebuild Camelot in the wake of the king’s death.

Godwin by Joseph O’Neill - Literary Fiction
This globe-trotting novel by the author of “Netherland” chronicles the quest of a man named Mark Wolfe to find a mysterious soccer prodigy in West Africa and the unraveling of his workplace back in Pittsburgh. Mark shares narratorial duties with his colleague Lakesha Williams; their stories build into a study of greed and ambition that our critic called “populous, lively and intellectually challenging.”

Joy in Service on Rue Tagore by Paul Muldoon - Poetry
Muldoon’s latest poetry collection continues his longtime trick of marshaling obscure references into fluent, fun and rollicking lyrics that lull you in with their musicality, then punch you in the gut with their full force once you decipher their meanings.

Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst — Literary Fiction
Hollinghurst’s latest brings readers deep into the trials and tribulations of Dave Win, an English Burmese actor confronting confusing relationships, his emerging sexuality, racism and England’s changing political climate over the course of his life, all tied together by Hollinghurst’s keen eye and affecting prose.

Reboot by Justin Taylor - Literary Fiction
This satire of modern media and pop culture follows a former child actor who is trying to revive the TV show that made him famous. Taylor delves into the worlds of online fandom while exploring the inner life of a man seeking redemption — and something meaningful to do.

Wild Houses by Colin Barrett — Literary Fiction
After a poorly planned abduction upends the lives of several young characters in a rural Irish town, Barrett shifts gracefully between the kidnappee, who’s being held in a basement by two unstable brothers, and his intrepid girlfriend, who sets out to find him.

Three of the six white male authors are Irishmen, one’s a gay Englishman (Hollinghurst), and only two (Grossman and Taylor) are Americans.

46 Nonfiction books

Black author or black subject: 13 of 46

White male author and white male subject: 14 of 46

Of course, to be frank, there is vastly more white male authorial talent and white male subjects worth writing books about.

Here are the 14 that made the cut.

All the Worst Humans by Phil Elwood - Feel-Bad Memoir
This memoir by a former public relations operative for the wealthy and the corrupt is greasy fun — stocked with scoundrels, cocktails and guns, and showing off the charm and quick wit that catapulted Elwood to the top of the sleazy, amoral world of high-end spin.

The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt - The Kids Are Not All Right
In “The Coddling of the American Mind,” Haidt took a hard stand against helicopter parenting. In this pugnacious follow-up, he turns to what he sees as technology’s dangers for young people. Haidt, a digital absolutist, cedes no ground on the issue of social media.

Challenger by Adam Higginbotham - Narrative nonfiction
As recounted in this history of the 1986 space shuttle disaster, the tragedy was a preventable lesson in hubris and human error. Higginbotham is an intrepid journalist and skillful storyteller who takes care to humanize the players involved even as he focuses on the relentless string of snafus that plagued the mission.

Cocktails With George and Martha by Philip Gefter - Film History
Rarely seen diary entries from the screenwriter who adapted Edward Albee’s Broadway hit are a highlight of this unapologetically obsessive behind-the-scenes look at the classic film starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.

Cold Crematorium by József Debreczeni - WWII Memoir
In this transcendent Holocaust memoir by a journalist and poet internee, translated by Paul Olchváry, the details of the concentration camps and their horrors are rendered so precisely that any critical distance collapses. Debreczeni’s account was published in 1950 and lay obscure for decades because of Cold War politics.

Do Something by Guy Trebay - Glitzy Downtown Memoir
Trebay is a veteran of the style wars: Prior to joining this paper, he did stints as a handbag designer, a busboy at Max’s Kansas City, a model and a reporter at The Village Voice, chronicling a lost New York that was as gritty as it was glamorous. Trebay knew everyone; this memoir is indeed a who’s who of that vanished Gotham. But more than that, it’s a love letter to a city, a life and a family, and to beauty itself.

Every Valley by Charles King - Classical Music History
King uses Handel’s “Messiah,” possibly “the greatest piece of participatory art ever created,” as a hub whose spokes radiate outward to a host of key historical forces and personalities that characterize 18th-century Britain.

Language City by Ross Perlin - Linguistic Anthropology
In this history of New York, Perlin, a linguist, focuses on residents fighting to preserve their spoken heritages. The result is sweeping and intimate, simultaneously a call to arms and a tribute to a place that contains almost as many tongues as speakers.

The New York Game by Kevin Baker - Sports
What makes New York baseball unique, the novelist and historian argues in this insightful, beautifully crafted narrative — which concludes with the end of World War II — is its role as a chronicler of cultural change. Whatever baseball’s roots in cow pastures and small towns, it came of age as an urban game.

Reagan by Max Boot - Political Biography
Boot, a historian and foreign policy analyst, grew up idolizing Ronald Reagan. But in this measured, comprehensive biography of the 40th president, he explores the legacy of the Reagan years to ask whether they paved the way for Donald J. Trump, whose rise led Boot to abandon his embrace of the right.

The Return of Great Powers by Jim Sciutto - Current Events
Sciutto’s absorbing account of 21st-century brinkmanship takes readers from Ukraine in the days before Russia’s invasion to the Taiwan Strait, where Chinese jets flying overhead raise tensions across the region. The author also shows how the battles are waged not just on the ground and in the air, but also in undersea communication cables, across satellites in outer space and over the growing frontiers of artificial intelligence.

A Walk in the Park by Kevin Fedarko - Adventure Memoir
Two friends decide to walk the length of the Grand Canyon. What could go wrong? As this wildly entertaining book demonstrates, everything you can imagine, and then some. Fedarko takes us for a ride that’s often harrowing, frequently hilarious and full of wonderful nature writing.

When the Clock Broke by John Ganz - American History
For this account of America in the 1990s, Ganz ditches the familiar narrative about a decade of relative peace and prosperity for a disturbing tale of populists, nativists and demagogues who, acting on the margins of U.S. politics, helped shatter the post-Cold War consensus and usher in antidemocratic forces that plague the country today.

The Wide Wide Sea by Hampton Sides - Biography
Sides tracks Captain Cook’s third and final voyage across the globe, painting a vivid and propulsive portrait of an explorer reckoning with the fallout of what he and others had wrought in expanding the map of Europe’s power.

I’m not counting 1970s punk rock critic Luc Sante’s memoir under his new name of Lucy Sante as male, although that’s arguable. But surely nobody would put his memoir on their top 100 list if he didn’t announce he was now an elderly girl.