Maybe the next literary movement is one that already happened
June 25, 2025 12:02 AM Subscribe
The key to locating the next literary movement is looking wherever the literary world is not considered The World. You have to sniff around the subcultures that have yet to reach critical mass. “At some point in the 2010s we no longer had this breakdown between subculture and mass culture and high culture,” says Geoffrey Mak, author of Mean Boys: A Personal History. “The internet has fractured everything into small, interlinked tribes, and that has an effect on real life. Now, you're not expected to speak toward culture at large because that's not really possible. So all you can do is speak toward your circle.” from Where will the next literary movement come from? [Dirt]
Reads very cliquey. Not sure I'd be interested in whatever the author considers the "next literary movement", TBH.
posted by signal at 5:16 AM on June 25 [6 favorites]
posted by signal at 5:16 AM on June 25 [6 favorites]
Why does this sound so terrible? Like, this does not sound like a way to produce good writing, it sounds like a way to create always-dying microindustries of you writing about your friends. (am_i_so_out_of_touch.gif)
Like...the problem with categorizing stuff is sometimes you and your ten friends in a trench coat all dating each other seems like a category, and a group of bestselling writers with decades-long careers and millions of adoring fans seems like a category, so it makes some kind of sense that your category can and should replace theirs because it's just categories, right? The great continuum of literature, Shakespeare and your grocery list.
Although! This piece fits somehow together with Lincoln Michel's latest, which is about literary tastes and awards and blockbusters and the problems with publishing books for everybody.
posted by mittens at 5:44 AM on June 25 [5 favorites]
Like...the problem with categorizing stuff is sometimes you and your ten friends in a trench coat all dating each other seems like a category, and a group of bestselling writers with decades-long careers and millions of adoring fans seems like a category, so it makes some kind of sense that your category can and should replace theirs because it's just categories, right? The great continuum of literature, Shakespeare and your grocery list.
Although! This piece fits somehow together with Lincoln Michel's latest, which is about literary tastes and awards and blockbusters and the problems with publishing books for everybody.
posted by mittens at 5:44 AM on June 25 [5 favorites]
It seems to me that the next literary movement - at least, all the books that everyone I know are talking about - comes up from writers who cut their teeth on fanfiction. This may or may not be a good thing, I suppose it's subjective, but I personally like the style, it brings in a lot of new ideas, so I'm happy with this. Hell, I might even be one of these new writers who used to write fanfic, one day.
posted by HypotheticalWoman at 6:34 AM on June 25 [5 favorites]
posted by HypotheticalWoman at 6:34 AM on June 25 [5 favorites]
As a former comparative-literature major, I welcome our new fanfic overwriters. The anxiety of influence can bite me -- I'm here for the glory of influence!
posted by humbug at 8:01 AM on June 25 [2 favorites]
posted by humbug at 8:01 AM on June 25 [2 favorites]
Reads very cliquey. Not sure I'd be interested in whatever the author considers the "next literary movement", TBH.
Exactly. Maybe there are no real, large-scale movements anymore, just localized trends.
It makes me think of when I read an article about something or other "breaking the Internet", and almost always it is a thing no one I know has heard of. These things are very limited to a particular sub-network.
I don't want global literary movements. Very "winner takes all." I want to know how to learn about the myriad sub-movements.
posted by Ayn Marx at 9:00 AM on June 25 [4 favorites]
Exactly. Maybe there are no real, large-scale movements anymore, just localized trends.
It makes me think of when I read an article about something or other "breaking the Internet", and almost always it is a thing no one I know has heard of. These things are very limited to a particular sub-network.
I don't want global literary movements. Very "winner takes all." I want to know how to learn about the myriad sub-movements.
posted by Ayn Marx at 9:00 AM on June 25 [4 favorites]
The reason fanfiction won't produce the next literary movement is because it's not interested in producing the next literary movement. I'm sure there's plenty of potential for greatness there, but the cage is too small and empty for anyone with ambition to choose to remain inside it.
posted by jy4m at 9:00 AM on June 25 [1 favorite]
posted by jy4m at 9:00 AM on June 25 [1 favorite]
This article makes an error of a kind I've seen more than once in writing about the belletristic arts and in writing about culture: wrongly ascribing an attitude to a group and then proceeding merrily along, as though this obvious mistake is established and recognized truth. Here's the erroneous passage:
Something about this article feels childish and needy to me. It reads like it was written by someone who is desperate for novelty and ripe to be inducted into a cult. It's also so New-York-centric that it blithely and ignorantly presents its own parody.
posted by zirconium_encrusted at 9:15 AM on June 25 [8 favorites]
"A small lit mag might advertise as a hobby among a few friends but for Americans born in the shadow of the startup blitz, the hope is to get a book deal out of it. Even people with no plans to scale their DIY project harbor a secret wish that their clout will scale infinitely."I'm not totally sure what "the shadow of the startup blitz" is, but I know what zines are. I think that a zine is a "small lit mag". I know people who make zines. And I know that they do not seek book deals or clout. To say that everyone who puts together a zine has a secret desire for book deals and clout is to misuse the universal quantifier.
Something about this article feels childish and needy to me. It reads like it was written by someone who is desperate for novelty and ripe to be inducted into a cult. It's also so New-York-centric that it blithely and ignorantly presents its own parody.
posted by zirconium_encrusted at 9:15 AM on June 25 [8 favorites]
I'm pulling for the next "literary movement" to come from furry porn.
posted by egypturnash at 9:28 AM on June 25 [6 favorites]
posted by egypturnash at 9:28 AM on June 25 [6 favorites]
Fanfic is already a literary movement, one which anyone can see at the bookTok table at B&N. I still remember how unsurprised I was to see a blatantly Reylo book cover at the center of The NY Times bestseller display.
Those books aren’t for me, I’ve never read a pro novel by a fic writer that I’ve enjoyed, but I can recognize their presence in mainstream reading culture and that the scenes described in the article are niche and mostly irrelevant, the paper and words equivalent of dressage.
posted by betweenthebars at 9:33 AM on June 25 [3 favorites]
Those books aren’t for me, I’ve never read a pro novel by a fic writer that I’ve enjoyed, but I can recognize their presence in mainstream reading culture and that the scenes described in the article are niche and mostly irrelevant, the paper and words equivalent of dressage.
posted by betweenthebars at 9:33 AM on June 25 [3 favorites]
That being said, I’m around 400 pages into A Place of Greater Safety and feeling that Hilary Mantel:Camille Desmoulins :: Tumblr:Sasuke. The fic impulse is real.
posted by betweenthebars at 9:43 AM on June 25 [5 favorites]
posted by betweenthebars at 9:43 AM on June 25 [5 favorites]
> "I’ve never read a pro novel by a fic writer that I’ve enjoyed"
I don't know your tastes, but I could recommend N. K. Jemisin (e.g. The Fifth Season), Sarah Rees Brennan (In Other Lands), Martha Wells (All Systems Red), Tamsyn Muir (Gideon the Ninth), and Naomi Novik (Uprooted), among many others.
There are a *lot* of interesting authors who started out in fanfic at this point.
posted by kyrademon at 10:40 AM on June 25 [4 favorites]
I don't know your tastes, but I could recommend N. K. Jemisin (e.g. The Fifth Season), Sarah Rees Brennan (In Other Lands), Martha Wells (All Systems Red), Tamsyn Muir (Gideon the Ninth), and Naomi Novik (Uprooted), among many others.
There are a *lot* of interesting authors who started out in fanfic at this point.
posted by kyrademon at 10:40 AM on June 25 [4 favorites]
Seconding Tamsyn Muir - the things she is doing in her series of books were an extremely pleasant surprise for me, especially seeing her develop even further as an author as the books proceeded. I wait with baited breath for the next installment, though it is definitely something for Sci-Fi/Fantasy oriented people, broadly speaking.
posted by DarlingMonster at 10:59 AM on June 25 [3 favorites]
posted by DarlingMonster at 10:59 AM on June 25 [3 favorites]
All my life I’ve known that I can’t do scenes, that this is bad for my career. What, after all, were the Bloomsbury Group or the Algonquin Round Table but scenes?
Twenty years ago, if I read an article like this—and they were certainly out there—I would think: I’m too boring, I’m too country, I was born in the wrong place … Now I just think: I’m too autistic for this. This may or may not be true, but it’s a little more comforting. It certainly explains how I’ve been on the edge of scenes while only half realizing it, with absolutely no share in the coolness or success going on.
posted by Countess Elena at 1:01 PM on June 25 [3 favorites]
Twenty years ago, if I read an article like this—and they were certainly out there—I would think: I’m too boring, I’m too country, I was born in the wrong place … Now I just think: I’m too autistic for this. This may or may not be true, but it’s a little more comforting. It certainly explains how I’ve been on the edge of scenes while only half realizing it, with absolutely no share in the coolness or success going on.
posted by Countess Elena at 1:01 PM on June 25 [3 favorites]
I'm with signal and mittens. Much of this feels like satire:
Four years later, literary readings on the coasts explicitly boast that there will be noreadings. “The fact that you could say that to your writers—to admit, ‘you will bore someone with your work and actually everyone just wants to get together and drink and feel pretty good about themselves’—feels so brutal,” book scout and poet Nina Reljić says. “But I think that brutality is what everyone’s going for.”
posted by doctornemo at 1:09 PM on June 25 [3 favorites]
Four years later, literary readings on the coasts explicitly boast that there will be noreadings. “The fact that you could say that to your writers—to admit, ‘you will bore someone with your work and actually everyone just wants to get together and drink and feel pretty good about themselves’—feels so brutal,” book scout and poet Nina Reljić says. “But I think that brutality is what everyone’s going for.”
posted by doctornemo at 1:09 PM on June 25 [3 favorites]
To the article's point, things are so fractured that it would be hard for a single movement to swoop in. Instead we see movements in different niches and domains.
posted by doctornemo at 1:11 PM on June 25 [4 favorites]
posted by doctornemo at 1:11 PM on June 25 [4 favorites]
I am impressed the the essay linked as being against scenes turns out to be even more anxious to be in one.
Did appreciate the bit in the middle about people who meet to… write.
posted by clew at 3:34 PM on June 25 [2 favorites]
Did appreciate the bit in the middle about people who meet to… write.
posted by clew at 3:34 PM on June 25 [2 favorites]
Ah, needs more Milieu glue.
"The new world struggles to be born."
"So where will the next western literary movement come from? You can think of literary movements as a simple equation: scene + genre. The new forms that literature takes, and the people that make it, together in a binary star system. Yes, we can still separate the art from the artist. But if you want to understand where the next literary movement will come from, you have to consider art and the artist together..."
posted by clavdivs at 3:45 PM on June 25 [1 favorite]
"The new world struggles to be born."
"So where will the next western literary movement come from? You can think of literary movements as a simple equation: scene + genre. The new forms that literature takes, and the people that make it, together in a binary star system. Yes, we can still separate the art from the artist. But if you want to understand where the next literary movement will come from, you have to consider art and the artist together..."
posted by clavdivs at 3:45 PM on June 25 [1 favorite]
I miss the Misery Loves Company Zoom readings. One of the MLC principals has an event for his new collection Friday, and I’m looking forward to it.
Elle Nash always has excellent advice for writers, whether as an editor or a reader.
posted by infinitewindow at 4:23 PM on June 25
Elle Nash always has excellent advice for writers, whether as an editor or a reader.
posted by infinitewindow at 4:23 PM on June 25
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posted by clavdivs at 1:26 AM on June 25 [1 favorite]