Publishing hired many black women executives after George Floyd's demise, because George cared about nothing more than Black Woman Joy in the book industry. Or something. Four years later, though ...
To be fair, I tried that once, and it's not going to happen again. The average quality of an unknown self-published author is two to three orders of magnitude below the average quality of something that came out of a publishing house.
That makes sense. With so much choice on Amazon one depends on curators and curators who only make money if you agree are bound to be better than those who don't.
When I was in high school I remember Schocken as a publisher of Jewish philosophy with books like Maimonides "Guide to the Perplexed" or Martin Buber's "I and Thou" or Gershom Scholem's "Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism" all of which I tried to puzzle my way through as a youth. When did that change?
Yeah. They also do all of Kafka’s stuff, and they looked great back in the day. I went to buy a copy of The Castle recently but couldn’t because the cover was so bad. Looked like something a high schooler came up with.
I've seen the argument high culture is actually a product of the overgrowth of an unsustainable, overconsuming culture, so actually the golden age is the beginning of the decline.
America in 500 years? If anyone is still bothering to study history at that point they’ll be paying particular attention to the time we’re in now to learn how America ended
"And as we can see, the American embrace of multiculturalism and diversity ultimately led to their decline and fall. What had once been the mightiest nation in the world descended into internecine conflict as the birth rate fell further and its various groups attacked each other. A nation needs a common culture, preferably one rooted in thousands of years of history and with a mix of desirable traits that balances relationships between people harmoniously. Mercifully, there were people from civilized nations able to lead the people into a proper government after the fall of the American government in the 2045 Otherkin-Femboy Riots."
Zu Ke Deng Chan, historian of the late American Empire, Far West Exclave of the Middle Kingdom, Year of the Metal Dragon [2240 AD]
You’re joking but there is already a book called America against America written by a Chinese man in the 90’s that basically says this. Also check out Fall of Empires by Glubb.
The joke was to make something that started sounding like standard criticisms on the right and gradually turned into Chinese triumphalism. But it probably should have been longer.
"Working in publishing is much like being an architect: it’s a highly genteel field that many people would like to get into". Being a full of s*** white Lefty is another field of this kind.
My wife's previous mother-in-law did much the same after she was widowed in the mid-1960s. She co-founded Grove Atlantic in the early 90s and was there until her death until 2020. Tragically, she would never know the wonders of having Roxane Gay's imprint at her publishing house...
The funny thing about being an architect is that it is an obvious white-collar profession but one that can be done solo, which is why it's good for TV parents who work at home, such as the dad on The Brady Bunch as well as the mom on Family Ties. George Costanza on Seinfeld always wanted to pretend to be an architect, which is made fun of when he is in charge of interviewing potential scholarship recipients in honor of his late fiancée Susan.
In other words, the profits come mainly from deliberately overpriced monopsony textbooks students are required to purchase as part of their required program to obtain the credential required by misguided decisions such as Griggs v. Duke Power.
Ergo, the publishing 'industry' [sic] subsists materially on rent extracted from young credential-aspirers by older credential-holders.
Said another way, they own a tollbooth in the noösphere. They are using those revenues for ... stupidity.
"Some agents and editors say that publishers’ appetite for books about race and racism has waned after sales for some of the titles they rushed to acquire failed to meet expectations."
Get me rewrite.
"Some agents and editors quietly say that publishers’ expectations of readers' appetites for books about race and racism were delusional from the start. It was obvious that sales for nearly all of the titles they rushed to acquire would fail to meet expectations."
-----
Edit: "*nearly* all"? Reporters Alexandra Alter and Elizabeth Harris should justify the adverb by naming a book title that did meet expectations.
> "... you need to live in an expensive metro area, usually New York in the case of publishing. You have to hone your tastes to be classy, which isn’t cheap, and you have to keep up with the latest trends in elite culture via travel, theater attendance, conferences, going to the hot new restaurants, and so forth, which isn’t cheap either."
Perhaps a simpler way to say this is that it is a cartel. Naturally, more people want to enjoy the benefits of the cartel than there are places within the cartel to benefit from, so there are arcane barriers to entry to keep the oversupply of aspirants away from the undersupply of benefices.
But unlike, say, OPEC, which produces something everyone post-19th century needs, no one actually needs what the publishing cartel produces*, so the cartelistas are free to do dumb stuff such as hiring hostile obesoids to be their new overlords. Fortunately for the cartelistas, their hired dominatrixes were not only hostile but also incompetent, so they did no lasting harm to the cartel. Unfortunately for the rest of us, they did no lasting harm to the cartel.
---------
* Except for the administratively-contrived demand for credentialist textbooks described above.
I’d be interested to see data on book-purchasing rates by race. Certainly the big book vendors and publishers have done market research sufficient to establish it, but despite than the periodic “no one reads anymore!” lamentations, I’ve never seen it broken out granularly.
The external locus of control problem with a certain demographic is redolent in the quote: “For a person of color in this industry, a lover of books, the fact that not one mainstream publisher has come up with a long-term plan to capture minority dollars is insane to me,” Lucas said. …
Well, Lisa, maybe they were paying you to come up with that scalable strategy?"
In my observations, those who operate with an internal locus of control are better set up for success than those with an external locus of control. Until blacks adopt the internal locus (many have it, but the narrative insists that they don't) they will lose the positions of power into which they were misplaced, without working towards it.
But putting these black women into high-ranking publishing positions under the precept that they will make money for publishing companies is foolish because there's a reading problem in about 12 percent of the 15% of the black population. And, as a white person, I am not interested in reading the umpteenth external locus of control novel written by a bitter, racist black person.
When a teaching assistant in the mid 90s. we were forced to include "underrepresented voices" on our syllabi. Since then, the quality of literature courses has declined since 90% of the reading carries the theme of the poor immigrant or "marginalized" person who feels out of place in the so-called "white" world, never mind the fact that the population of the US is diverse in most places. A friend whose son is in junior high was lamenting over the choice of readings -- all identity garbage.
Most people want to read literature with universal, enduring, classical themes. Not navel gazing race garbage.
And until the majority of the black population grows up with parents who read to them, there isn't going to be a market for black literature. As well, until blacks start writing about something other than being black, there isn't going to be much of a market for that, either. However, they go into universities to study racism, black history, and black literature, and then turn around and grind out more of it.
On another note, I attended a panel discussion at a literary foundation, on writing cover letters that will get you published, and the two white gay men, and the gay Indian woman, talked ad nauseam about being gay and/or not white, with the Indian woman claiming that the best cover letter she ever got began with: "I'm a big fat black dyke." When I posted in the chat that the quality of the writing supersedes the identity of the writer, she said, "You've been lied to all your life." Then, later, I discovered she had called me by name in a post on X, calling me a "racist colonizer" and claiming that I had "acted up" in her workshop.
There's more to that story, but suffice to say that publishing identities is the death knell of great literature; the slippery slope is real.
"Most people want to read literature with universal, enduring, classical themes. Not navel gazing race garbage."
I've been an avid reader my entire life, and studied English Lit in college, in the 1960s. I'm coming from that perspective...
In reading *fiction*, voice matters, and in some fashion the author, who projects his/her literary content, broadcasts his/her content in that voice. The readers are the receivers, and there must be a sort of "wavelength match" for the book to be read by the readers in the public market for reading material. Otherwise, under normal market conditions, it does not sell.
I'd suggest that the author's life experience informs voice, and it also contributes to selection of theme, to a degree. If an author is saturated in urban street life and knows little about social refinements, they'll have real trouble in reaching an audience among the refined--who likely read much more than the general bulk of the population. It can be done legitimately by setting up the story as what amounts to escapist fiction (almost all hard-boiled crime writers do/did) and finding a way to get the reader to connect with the main characters, who often supply the POV of the narrative.
Similarly, Henry James is off-putting for the same reason, but to a different audience.
In short, the reader, with normal motivations, must want to experience the theme and the characters involved. That we've recently endured a period where general audiences were led to read--or try to--narratives dealing with themes that did not resonate, built around characters for whom the reader could not feel a connection, is a result of the Floyd Effect.
Basically, the reading (and viewing, I suspect) public is fatigued by trying to like content that has no intrinsic appeal or connection to the readers' experiences or interests.
I think that race/ethnicity poses an initial barrier to general acceptance, unless the author makes racial/ethnic identity a non-topic. My exposure to "Portnoy's Complaint" while in college showed me that unless assigned, I would not have voluntarily chosen to read about a Jewish neurotic as readily as I would read most of Hemingway, but that if the writer either did not mention race/ethnicity, or they cleverly invented one that carried no baggage, as in "Catch-22", if the themes were universal enough to enable a ready connection, it would appeal to the general public.
Sometimes female writers' works are difficult to read for this same reason, with Flannery O'Connor and Patricia Highsmith both avoiding these difficulties by removing a sexualized POV and supplying universal themes.
This works against male authors, too, I suspect. All of Hemingway's female characters that I can recall have no depth or nuance, They are foils for the male characters. Maybe Flaubert succeeded with M. Bovary, but I still think her character was revealed from an anonymous masculine POV.
Also, one is wrong about themes, see the quote from Orson Scott Card who wrote Ender's Game.
QUESTION: Several readers have asked this question: What is the theme of Ender's Game?
OSC REPLIES:
I can't help you at all, because, in my opinion, a good novel won't have "a theme." That's what essays have. Novels have a STORY. If your teacher is asking you to find themes in a novel, to me that makes about as much sense as looking for gears in a fish. So how can I possibly help you find "THE theme"? You can quote me.
I think that a novel usually has multiple themes, and some of the theme are major, while shorter fiction often has one major theme.
Let's refine what we mean by theme; there could be a disconnect. In simple terms, it's what the story (narrative) is about that make a connection with the reader. In Hunchback of Notre Dame, one theme is unattainable love by a morally worthy character. Without this, who cares about Quasimodo? He's just a deformed laborer who has found a survival niche.
But he loves Esmeralda, he'll never attain her, and this is why we connect with him.
Novels do have themes. The point is more, what enjoyment is to be gained from trying to extract the theme from the novel? The enjoyment of the novel comes from the story and the characters.
I always find it odd that people feel comfortable telling the author of a novel that he or she is wrong about what the novel means and what the author did. Take the author at his word. He did not have a theme but he did have plot devices.
I disagree. I think it's great that the work can stand on its own, separate from the intent of the author. The author lays out the story and if it consistent, realistic (or follows the rules of it universe), and logical, I would expect different people to have different reactions to it. That's part of the fun.
Too, if the theme does not resonate with a reader, they'll not finish the book.
You could have compelling characters (characterization) following a structured narration (plot) in an exotic and colorful setting (setting), but if all they're doing is trivial and mundane and to no end, we're lacking an engaging theme and there's little reason to read the book.
I'll never forget the day when, as a child, I discovered figurative meaning in something that I was reading. That was the day that I decided to become a writer. "I want to do this magical thing!" I recall thinking.
A novel that is a true work of art should carry several themes that are up to the reader to extrapolate. A novel that is a work of art should also tell a great story.
But as the quote from an author and a creative writing instructor points out: People are assigning themes that the writer did not mean or did not intend.
A lot of people with literary aspirations and literary pretensions think you can write a great book (or make a great movie) about, what else can you call them these days but, political positions. That is the mistake the the woke people made as they ruined formerly profitable movies franchises. If you want to teach a lesson, if you want to indoctrinate, you need to trick the reader/viewer. Hide the dog pill in a lump of cheese. Tell a great story! Create compelling characters! Write some fun dialog!
Their simple solutions always neglect, human nature, edge cases, and appreciation for how unpredictable complex systems are. Sure if everyone were as good a person as they imagine themselves to be, everything would work.
"Basically, the reading (and viewing, I suspect) public is fatigued by trying to like content that has no intrinsic appeal or connection to the readers' experiences or interests."
I agree with a lot what you said. This quote is true too, but I think at this point it's less about exhaustion from "trying to like," and more about suspicion and resentment at what is obviously an attempt to shove an ideology down our throats.
I love Sherman Alexie, James Baldwin, and David Sedaris. They're great writers and storytellers. I can appreciate their perspectives and "identity" as far as it goes in their works, because the stories are three-dimensional, and all the characters are three dimensional. But I also don't want to read them all of the time, or most of the time.
What is happening now is a conscious effort (not an industry-wide conspiracy, of course, but an emergent movement from the efforts of each individual publishing house) to tell us we HAVE to read this stuff, and that we have to accept the societal narratives that go along with them.
Wow. Those poor Black authors. It is sad, but of course they could never appeal to someone so refined as yourself. Black is niche white is elevated and universal
"Black" themes/characters are NOT niche for black readers. Too, these works appeal to people of other groups who wish an insight into a social environment they've not experienced, but to the degree that one of these readers has not experienced one of these themes (e.g., being denied admittance to a restaurant based on who you are) these readers would have to take on faith that the experience is rendered accurately.
For people who have not directly exeperienced war, it's a similar problem when reading a war novel.
Apparently men under 30 have basically stopped reading, and publishing likes that just fine.
I feel like there's a huge market opportunity waiting here if someone can break through. Conservative books sell quite well, though they hate publishing them.
As the joke goes, young adult fiction can be divided into three categories: having problems with one's friends, having problems with one's boyfriend, or the problem is that one's boyfriend is a vampire.
Absolutely, but you used to have lots of stories about brave heroes in faraway times or places, as well as more realistic things like Gary Paulsen's 'Hatchet' where the kid survives in the wilderness with just a hatchet.
Video games are definitely part of the problem, but they are indeed leaving money on the table, either out of disinterest or a desire to keep men from reading.
I am aware, and am the proud owner of the fancy version of Steve's Noticing. I feel like there's a larger audience for stuff that's not explicitly far-right-coded but might still have a right-leaning audience, like boy's adventure stories, sword & sorcery, and hard sf. Passage Publishing definitely has its place, and the two might even have a symbiosis--"well, at least we're not Passage Publishing," opening the way for more subtly right-leaning stuff.
"I feel like there's a larger audience for stuff that's not explicitly far-right-coded but might still have a right-leaning audience, like boy's adventure stories, sword & sorcery, and hard sf. "
There is a large volume of such on Amazon Kindle (of uneven quality) which bypasses the publishing house gatekeepers.
Kamala has wisely made abortion (and gender politics more broadly) the focus of her campaign. Those who traffic exclusively in black identity politics are having a harder time getting paid than in 2020. It's also difficult for many right-wing pundits, who thought race would become more important as whites headed for minority status and that Roe would never be overturned. Pro-lifers were a source of free votes for the GOP, who could not and didn't expect to have their policy demands actually satisfied thanks to the Supreme Court.
It seems to me that Substack is "low-barrier" publishing, and I'd expect that aspiring black writers --like any other aspiring writers--would tend to create their own literary, as opposed to opinion, stacks. I wonder if there is any data on how many black fiction writers are using Substack.
The gags about the appearance of women I never particularly cared for--you could say the same about Chesterton. Better to go after their ideas, those are bad enough!
A talented writer can make a gag about the appearance of a person actually funny, as P.G. Wodehouse did. When writing about something else he worked in a reference to Chesteron's girth:
“The drowsy stillness of the afternoon was shattered by what sounded to his strained senses like G.K. Chesterton falling on a sheet of tin.”
If your health issue is visible and technically preventable that means you don’t care about yourself? What about people with other behavioral issues or addictions? Can they not have self-worth and also have a problem? I get why you don’t like woke” language, but degrading language is even worse. It goes beyond conformity. It quickly progresses to sharing negative commentary on the body.
And the big publishing houses wonder why people take a chance on unknown authors on Amazon rather than their stuff?
To be fair, I tried that once, and it's not going to happen again. The average quality of an unknown self-published author is two to three orders of magnitude below the average quality of something that came out of a publishing house.
That makes sense. With so much choice on Amazon one depends on curators and curators who only make money if you agree are bound to be better than those who don't.
There are podcasts like New Write that focus on right-leaning writers, I think. I'm not that crazy about all of them but they're different at least.
I wish there were some sort of mark or seal that said, "This work has been reviewed by a professional editor."
They must have been worse than useless if they weren't just kicked upstairs.
When I was in high school I remember Schocken as a publisher of Jewish philosophy with books like Maimonides "Guide to the Perplexed" or Martin Buber's "I and Thou" or Gershom Scholem's "Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism" all of which I tried to puzzle my way through as a youth. When did that change?
Yeah. They also do all of Kafka’s stuff, and they looked great back in the day. I went to buy a copy of The Castle recently but couldn’t because the cover was so bad. Looked like something a high schooler came up with.
I wonder how America's current elites will be viewed in 500 years.
They won't be, except as the generic decadent and corrupt trough-dwellers who follow seemingly inevitably after a wave of high culture.
I've seen the argument high culture is actually a product of the overgrowth of an unsustainable, overconsuming culture, so actually the golden age is the beginning of the decline.
I've heard it that way too, but the decline has well begun and nuthin's lookin' very golden...
America in 500 years? If anyone is still bothering to study history at that point they’ll be paying particular attention to the time we’re in now to learn how America ended
"And as we can see, the American embrace of multiculturalism and diversity ultimately led to their decline and fall. What had once been the mightiest nation in the world descended into internecine conflict as the birth rate fell further and its various groups attacked each other. A nation needs a common culture, preferably one rooted in thousands of years of history and with a mix of desirable traits that balances relationships between people harmoniously. Mercifully, there were people from civilized nations able to lead the people into a proper government after the fall of the American government in the 2045 Otherkin-Femboy Riots."
Zu Ke Deng Chan, historian of the late American Empire, Far West Exclave of the Middle Kingdom, Year of the Metal Dragon [2240 AD]
(translated from New Mandarin)
You’re joking but there is already a book called America against America written by a Chinese man in the 90’s that basically says this. Also check out Fall of Empires by Glubb.
Yup, read 'em both.
The joke was to make something that started sounding like standard criticisms on the right and gradually turned into Chinese triumphalism. But it probably should have been longer.
"Working in publishing is much like being an architect: it’s a highly genteel field that many people would like to get into". Being a full of s*** white Lefty is another field of this kind.
The twice-widowed Jacqueline Bouvier worked as a book editor after her second husband's passing for 19 years until her own passing at 64
My wife's previous mother-in-law did much the same after she was widowed in the mid-1960s. She co-founded Grove Atlantic in the early 90s and was there until her death until 2020. Tragically, she would never know the wonders of having Roxane Gay's imprint at her publishing house...
and then there's the imprint Roxane leaves on every chair and couch!
(sorry couldnt help myself)
Please Roxane, work from home. We insist.
lord help you if she has the seat next to you on the plane.
Sorry to say that you are an idiot.
thanks!
The funny thing about being an architect is that it is an obvious white-collar profession but one that can be done solo, which is why it's good for TV parents who work at home, such as the dad on The Brady Bunch as well as the mom on Family Ties. George Costanza on Seinfeld always wanted to pretend to be an architect, which is made fun of when he is in charge of interviewing potential scholarship recipients in honor of his late fiancée Susan.
“I’m Art VanDeLay and I’m an architect”
An old classmate got into publishing. She’s not at all from privilege, was just clever and Really Likes Books.
She told me that the profits mainly come from schoolbooks with God/mysticism/astrology a distant second.
> "the profits mainly come from schoolbooks"
In other words, the profits come mainly from deliberately overpriced monopsony textbooks students are required to purchase as part of their required program to obtain the credential required by misguided decisions such as Griggs v. Duke Power.
Ergo, the publishing 'industry' [sic] subsists materially on rent extracted from young credential-aspirers by older credential-holders.
Said another way, they own a tollbooth in the noösphere. They are using those revenues for ... stupidity.
"Some agents and editors say that publishers’ appetite for books about race and racism has waned after sales for some of the titles they rushed to acquire failed to meet expectations."
Get me rewrite.
"Some agents and editors quietly say that publishers’ expectations of readers' appetites for books about race and racism were delusional from the start. It was obvious that sales for nearly all of the titles they rushed to acquire would fail to meet expectations."
-----
Edit: "*nearly* all"? Reporters Alexandra Alter and Elizabeth Harris should justify the adverb by naming a book title that did meet expectations.
"The Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations"
I checked Amazon. No one took that title for such a book. t'would've been a swell punchline.
> "... you need to live in an expensive metro area, usually New York in the case of publishing. You have to hone your tastes to be classy, which isn’t cheap, and you have to keep up with the latest trends in elite culture via travel, theater attendance, conferences, going to the hot new restaurants, and so forth, which isn’t cheap either."
Perhaps a simpler way to say this is that it is a cartel. Naturally, more people want to enjoy the benefits of the cartel than there are places within the cartel to benefit from, so there are arcane barriers to entry to keep the oversupply of aspirants away from the undersupply of benefices.
But unlike, say, OPEC, which produces something everyone post-19th century needs, no one actually needs what the publishing cartel produces*, so the cartelistas are free to do dumb stuff such as hiring hostile obesoids to be their new overlords. Fortunately for the cartelistas, their hired dominatrixes were not only hostile but also incompetent, so they did no lasting harm to the cartel. Unfortunately for the rest of us, they did no lasting harm to the cartel.
---------
* Except for the administratively-contrived demand for credentialist textbooks described above.
I’d be interested to see data on book-purchasing rates by race. Certainly the big book vendors and publishers have done market research sufficient to establish it, but despite than the periodic “no one reads anymore!” lamentations, I’ve never seen it broken out granularly.
The external locus of control problem with a certain demographic is redolent in the quote: “For a person of color in this industry, a lover of books, the fact that not one mainstream publisher has come up with a long-term plan to capture minority dollars is insane to me,” Lucas said. …
Well, Lisa, maybe they were paying you to come up with that scalable strategy?"
In my observations, those who operate with an internal locus of control are better set up for success than those with an external locus of control. Until blacks adopt the internal locus (many have it, but the narrative insists that they don't) they will lose the positions of power into which they were misplaced, without working towards it.
But putting these black women into high-ranking publishing positions under the precept that they will make money for publishing companies is foolish because there's a reading problem in about 12 percent of the 15% of the black population. And, as a white person, I am not interested in reading the umpteenth external locus of control novel written by a bitter, racist black person.
When a teaching assistant in the mid 90s. we were forced to include "underrepresented voices" on our syllabi. Since then, the quality of literature courses has declined since 90% of the reading carries the theme of the poor immigrant or "marginalized" person who feels out of place in the so-called "white" world, never mind the fact that the population of the US is diverse in most places. A friend whose son is in junior high was lamenting over the choice of readings -- all identity garbage.
Most people want to read literature with universal, enduring, classical themes. Not navel gazing race garbage.
And until the majority of the black population grows up with parents who read to them, there isn't going to be a market for black literature. As well, until blacks start writing about something other than being black, there isn't going to be much of a market for that, either. However, they go into universities to study racism, black history, and black literature, and then turn around and grind out more of it.
On another note, I attended a panel discussion at a literary foundation, on writing cover letters that will get you published, and the two white gay men, and the gay Indian woman, talked ad nauseam about being gay and/or not white, with the Indian woman claiming that the best cover letter she ever got began with: "I'm a big fat black dyke." When I posted in the chat that the quality of the writing supersedes the identity of the writer, she said, "You've been lied to all your life." Then, later, I discovered she had called me by name in a post on X, calling me a "racist colonizer" and claiming that I had "acted up" in her workshop.
There's more to that story, but suffice to say that publishing identities is the death knell of great literature; the slippery slope is real.
"Most people want to read literature with universal, enduring, classical themes. Not navel gazing race garbage."
I've been an avid reader my entire life, and studied English Lit in college, in the 1960s. I'm coming from that perspective...
In reading *fiction*, voice matters, and in some fashion the author, who projects his/her literary content, broadcasts his/her content in that voice. The readers are the receivers, and there must be a sort of "wavelength match" for the book to be read by the readers in the public market for reading material. Otherwise, under normal market conditions, it does not sell.
I'd suggest that the author's life experience informs voice, and it also contributes to selection of theme, to a degree. If an author is saturated in urban street life and knows little about social refinements, they'll have real trouble in reaching an audience among the refined--who likely read much more than the general bulk of the population. It can be done legitimately by setting up the story as what amounts to escapist fiction (almost all hard-boiled crime writers do/did) and finding a way to get the reader to connect with the main characters, who often supply the POV of the narrative.
Similarly, Henry James is off-putting for the same reason, but to a different audience.
In short, the reader, with normal motivations, must want to experience the theme and the characters involved. That we've recently endured a period where general audiences were led to read--or try to--narratives dealing with themes that did not resonate, built around characters for whom the reader could not feel a connection, is a result of the Floyd Effect.
Basically, the reading (and viewing, I suspect) public is fatigued by trying to like content that has no intrinsic appeal or connection to the readers' experiences or interests.
I think that race/ethnicity poses an initial barrier to general acceptance, unless the author makes racial/ethnic identity a non-topic. My exposure to "Portnoy's Complaint" while in college showed me that unless assigned, I would not have voluntarily chosen to read about a Jewish neurotic as readily as I would read most of Hemingway, but that if the writer either did not mention race/ethnicity, or they cleverly invented one that carried no baggage, as in "Catch-22", if the themes were universal enough to enable a ready connection, it would appeal to the general public.
Sometimes female writers' works are difficult to read for this same reason, with Flannery O'Connor and Patricia Highsmith both avoiding these difficulties by removing a sexualized POV and supplying universal themes.
This works against male authors, too, I suspect. All of Hemingway's female characters that I can recall have no depth or nuance, They are foils for the male characters. Maybe Flaubert succeeded with M. Bovary, but I still think her character was revealed from an anonymous masculine POV.
One may want to try to point out the classical themes in the current best sellers list.
https://westportlibrary.libguides.com/nytimesbestsellers
Also, one is wrong about themes, see the quote from Orson Scott Card who wrote Ender's Game.
QUESTION: Several readers have asked this question: What is the theme of Ender's Game?
OSC REPLIES:
I can't help you at all, because, in my opinion, a good novel won't have "a theme." That's what essays have. Novels have a STORY. If your teacher is asking you to find themes in a novel, to me that makes about as much sense as looking for gears in a fish. So how can I possibly help you find "THE theme"? You can quote me.
I think that a novel usually has multiple themes, and some of the theme are major, while shorter fiction often has one major theme.
Let's refine what we mean by theme; there could be a disconnect. In simple terms, it's what the story (narrative) is about that make a connection with the reader. In Hunchback of Notre Dame, one theme is unattainable love by a morally worthy character. Without this, who cares about Quasimodo? He's just a deformed laborer who has found a survival niche.
But he loves Esmeralda, he'll never attain her, and this is why we connect with him.
Novels do have themes. The point is more, what enjoyment is to be gained from trying to extract the theme from the novel? The enjoyment of the novel comes from the story and the characters.
I always find it odd that people feel comfortable telling the author of a novel that he or she is wrong about what the novel means and what the author did. Take the author at his word. He did not have a theme but he did have plot devices.
I disagree. I think it's great that the work can stand on its own, separate from the intent of the author. The author lays out the story and if it consistent, realistic (or follows the rules of it universe), and logical, I would expect different people to have different reactions to it. That's part of the fun.
Too, if the theme does not resonate with a reader, they'll not finish the book.
You could have compelling characters (characterization) following a structured narration (plot) in an exotic and colorful setting (setting), but if all they're doing is trivial and mundane and to no end, we're lacking an engaging theme and there's little reason to read the book.
Fair enough but people don't need to see the strings to enjoy the puppet show
Agreed.
You can't think about this stuff while reading, or else it won't be fun.
Later, maybe, is the time to think about this stuff.
I'll never forget the day when, as a child, I discovered figurative meaning in something that I was reading. That was the day that I decided to become a writer. "I want to do this magical thing!" I recall thinking.
A novel that is a true work of art should carry several themes that are up to the reader to extrapolate. A novel that is a work of art should also tell a great story.
But as the quote from an author and a creative writing instructor points out: People are assigning themes that the writer did not mean or did not intend.
A lot of people with literary aspirations and literary pretensions think you can write a great book (or make a great movie) about, what else can you call them these days but, political positions. That is the mistake the the woke people made as they ruined formerly profitable movies franchises. If you want to teach a lesson, if you want to indoctrinate, you need to trick the reader/viewer. Hide the dog pill in a lump of cheese. Tell a great story! Create compelling characters! Write some fun dialog!
What really cracks me up is that these self-same creative types flatter themselves that they have workable answers to the "wrongs" they focus on.
Their simple solutions always neglect, human nature, edge cases, and appreciation for how unpredictable complex systems are. Sure if everyone were as good a person as they imagine themselves to be, everything would work.
"Basically, the reading (and viewing, I suspect) public is fatigued by trying to like content that has no intrinsic appeal or connection to the readers' experiences or interests."
I agree with a lot what you said. This quote is true too, but I think at this point it's less about exhaustion from "trying to like," and more about suspicion and resentment at what is obviously an attempt to shove an ideology down our throats.
I love Sherman Alexie, James Baldwin, and David Sedaris. They're great writers and storytellers. I can appreciate their perspectives and "identity" as far as it goes in their works, because the stories are three-dimensional, and all the characters are three dimensional. But I also don't want to read them all of the time, or most of the time.
What is happening now is a conscious effort (not an industry-wide conspiracy, of course, but an emergent movement from the efforts of each individual publishing house) to tell us we HAVE to read this stuff, and that we have to accept the societal narratives that go along with them.
Wow. Those poor Black authors. It is sad, but of course they could never appeal to someone so refined as yourself. Black is niche white is elevated and universal
You misunderstand, perhaps purposely.
"Black" themes/characters are NOT niche for black readers. Too, these works appeal to people of other groups who wish an insight into a social environment they've not experienced, but to the degree that one of these readers has not experienced one of these themes (e.g., being denied admittance to a restaurant based on who you are) these readers would have to take on faith that the experience is rendered accurately.
For people who have not directly exeperienced war, it's a similar problem when reading a war novel.
But they still won't hire any straight men.
Apparently men under 30 have basically stopped reading, and publishing likes that just fine.
I feel like there's a huge market opportunity waiting here if someone can break through. Conservative books sell quite well, though they hate publishing them.
As the joke goes, young adult fiction can be divided into three categories: having problems with one's friends, having problems with one's boyfriend, or the problem is that one's boyfriend is a vampire.
Not much room for teen males to read something.
Absolutely, but you used to have lots of stories about brave heroes in faraway times or places, as well as more realistic things like Gary Paulsen's 'Hatchet' where the kid survives in the wilderness with just a hatchet.
Video games are definitely part of the problem, but they are indeed leaving money on the table, either out of disinterest or a desire to keep men from reading.
Check out Passage Publishing
I am aware, and am the proud owner of the fancy version of Steve's Noticing. I feel like there's a larger audience for stuff that's not explicitly far-right-coded but might still have a right-leaning audience, like boy's adventure stories, sword & sorcery, and hard sf. Passage Publishing definitely has its place, and the two might even have a symbiosis--"well, at least we're not Passage Publishing," opening the way for more subtly right-leaning stuff.
"I feel like there's a larger audience for stuff that's not explicitly far-right-coded but might still have a right-leaning audience, like boy's adventure stories, sword & sorcery, and hard sf. "
There is a large volume of such on Amazon Kindle (of uneven quality) which bypasses the publishing house gatekeepers.
Kamala has wisely made abortion (and gender politics more broadly) the focus of her campaign. Those who traffic exclusively in black identity politics are having a harder time getting paid than in 2020. It's also difficult for many right-wing pundits, who thought race would become more important as whites headed for minority status and that Roe would never be overturned. Pro-lifers were a source of free votes for the GOP, who could not and didn't expect to have their policy demands actually satisfied thanks to the Supreme Court.
https://x.com/VDAREJamesK/status/1827625958200799566
"industry titans"...lol, as if
It seems to me that Substack is "low-barrier" publishing, and I'd expect that aspiring black writers --like any other aspiring writers--would tend to create their own literary, as opposed to opinion, stacks. I wonder if there is any data on how many black fiction writers are using Substack.
I feel like the ‘morbidly obese’ comment was unnecessary.
Yeah, I would've gone with something like "disgustingly fat."
The gags about the appearance of women I never particularly cared for--you could say the same about Chesterton. Better to go after their ideas, those are bad enough!
A talented writer can make a gag about the appearance of a person actually funny, as P.G. Wodehouse did. When writing about something else he worked in a reference to Chesteron's girth:
“The drowsy stillness of the afternoon was shattered by what sounded to his strained senses like G.K. Chesterton falling on a sheet of tin.”
Why? It’s salient point. If she doesn’t care about herself, why should anyone care what she has to say?
If your health issue is visible and technically preventable that means you don’t care about yourself? What about people with other behavioral issues or addictions? Can they not have self-worth and also have a problem? I get why you don’t like woke” language, but degrading language is even worse. It goes beyond conformity. It quickly progresses to sharing negative commentary on the body.