Literary fiction - like vaudeville - isn’t dead. It’s just not too healthy.
posted by Lemkin at 12:17 PM on December 27 [1 favorite]

I'll forgo my usual complaints about Whither Fiction pieces to focus on one little bit: "In November, HarperCollins struck an 'opt-in' AI deal, in which authors are compensated $2,500 for giving their book over to an AI training model."

You can sense the hushed tone. It's the sort of thing you only want to whisper from the shadows.

But that's silly. Authors should take that money. Twenty-five hundred so your book can be fed into a machine that will never take your job because LLMs are not going to advance to the point of writing books? It's the one time in history the machine revolution can not take your job! Take the money! Bleed 'em dry! Make your luddism pay!
posted by mittens at 12:19 PM on December 27 [5 favorites]

(okay okay one more comment, it's refreshing to read a Whither Fiction piece that doesn't mention Sally Rooney at all.)
posted by mittens at 12:20 PM on December 27 [1 favorite]

Jane Austen, Marcel Proust, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, and Virginia Woolf all self-published. And they didn’t have the Kindle store.

As convenient a bogey as the Big Five are, they are not the reason why literary fiction is so little-read.
posted by Lemkin at 12:26 PM on December 27 [5 favorites]

Maybe the kind of thing that you need to write if you want an MFA is not the same thing that you need to write if you want to be read by lots of people.
posted by 1970s Antihero at 12:31 PM on December 27 [4 favorites]

Thanks for posting this; a fun read. It's kind of a mess, though, tbh: AI, comp title timing, mergers and acquisitions, and small presses all jockeying for pride-of-focus. "Whither Fiction" indeed.

Much of it resonates with my experience as a reader (and writer, less fortunately), but the overall arc of the essay ignores entirely most of the big changes of the last 75 years in the readership, from demographic changes to the rise of home/competing media and the fall of others (newspapers, magazines). All of which have had a big effect on everyone hanging around with baited breath, waiting for the next Norman Mailer to emerge, or for the next Norman Mailer book, or whatever.

Also, the essay is... wrong. Maybe even Wrong. The landscape has changed, for sure, but there is, in fact, plenty of literary fiction being published by the big 5 and by small presses, to say nothing of self-published or works published in translation. I don't have comparison numbers to hand, but there is no dearth whatsoever of new literary fiction being published. More than 1960? Less? I'd assume more, but in any case, I work on a literary award for debut novels, and we get plenty of submissions per year. More generally, when I talk with editors and agents, "literary fiction just doesn't exist anymore" is not a theme.
posted by cupcakeninja at 12:36 PM on December 27 [10 favorites]

William Blake is another one who self-published.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 1:34 PM on December 27 [2 favorites]

Author shares novel with anauthor who shares it Artur who in a letter to their publicist mentions that Author has a great work in the rounds, anauthor, concurs.

publicist writes Artur to inquire about anauthors view on authors work for which publicist contacts author directly

for which author returns the query with
no, this is too good for you.
posted by clavdivs at 1:40 PM on December 27 [1 favorite]

waiting for the next Norman Mailer to emerge

I don’t believe that many people care much about the last Norman Mailer, for that matter. Writers like him whose reputations are supported by their outsize personalities (i.e. Capote, Vidal, etc.) suffer particularly sharp post-mortem drops in their literary stock.
posted by Lemkin at 1:58 PM on December 27 [2 favorites]

I think the world has very much moved on from Mailer, and many of his generation. The place that mainstream/lit authors used to hold, though, used to be so different from where things stand now.
posted by cupcakeninja at 2:01 PM on December 27 [3 favorites]

(at least with capote-as-personality we got movies and miniseries, even if i guess nobody is actually going to go back and read the books!)
posted by mittens at 2:37 PM on December 27 [1 favorite]

I disagree; thanks to the explosion of MFA programs, we now have altogether too much literary fiction getting published—far more titles than there are readers who want to consume them. I can’t even keep up with the novels published by people I know personally.
posted by Just the one swan, actually at 2:49 PM on December 27 [2 favorites]

Twenty-five hundred so your book can be fed into a machine that will never take your job because LLMs are not going to advance to the point of writing books?

I truly admire your optimism. But, I'm not at all convinced a sufficiently-fed LLM wouldn't be able to churn-out a viable, say, Sarah Maas-ish title, or something along those lines. Even a title a notch below that would certainly sell well enough to justify the effort.

Or, did you neglect to add /s to that post?
posted by Thorzdad at 3:00 PM on December 27 [1 favorite]

Harold Pinter, Betrayal:

I’m a bad publisher because I hate books. Or to be more precise, prose. Or to be even more precise, modern prose, I mean modern novels, first novels and second novels, all that promise and sensibility it falls upon me to judge, to put the firm’s money on, and then to push for the third novel, see it done, see the dust jacket done, see the dinner for the national literary editors done, see the signing in Hatchards done, see the lucky author cook himself to death, all in the name of literature. You know what you and Emma have in common? You love literature. I mean you love modern prose literature, I mean you love the new novel by the new Casey or Spinks. It gives you both a thrill.

posted by Lemkin at 3:18 PM on December 27 [1 favorite]

1970s Antihero: Maybe the kind of thing that you need to write if you want an MFA is not the same thing that you need to write if you want to be read by lots of people.
Case III: thing that you need to write because Ich kann nicht anders.
And I'm not going to get taught how to write in an MFA or writer's workshop because they will knock the chips off my shoulder and [regression to the mean] reduce my true voice to the generic.
posted by BobTheScientist at 3:19 PM on December 27 [3 favorites]

In John Sladek's Roderick, there's a minor bit where a writer is working with a computer that predicts sales. Predictions are updated each time they finish a sentence. It's cutting edge technology, but the pressure breaks the writer. Unable to cope with the constant projected failure, they retreat into safety and produce a word for word copy of their last, best selling novel. Only the title is different. Since the modern publishing house's editing, layout and production is fully automated, no one notices until the book hits stores . . . except the readers don't notice, either. It's a huge hit.

A bit of satire levelled at publishers for going for formulas crap over stuff people might read seriously. Reminiscent of the complaints here, but written over 40 years ago.

Maybe there's an argument that it's gotten worse, but how it's changed isn't really addressed in the article (unless you count throwing out a couple older names as addressing it.) I feel like this has been a constant complaint. I read tiny amounts of literary fiction these days, but when I check a few books in my reading history it seems to involve major publishing houses.

The place that mainstream/lit authors used to hold, though, used to be so different from where things stand now.

This seems right to me, though I suspect has a lot to do with the professionalization of the pundit class. TV doesn't need to recruit Gore Vidal to comment on a political convention.

I disagree; thanks to the explosion of MFA programs, we now have altogether too much literary fiction getting published—far more titles than there are readers who want to consume them.

This seems correct also. And far more commentary on literature is accessible, too. It's harder to come to a consensus.
posted by mark k at 3:19 PM on December 27 [3 favorites]

"writer" used to include the job now described as "influencer" and now we have people whose job is just "influencer", who needs those dreary books full of convoluted sentences when we can have blipverts instead?
posted by egypturnash at 3:56 PM on December 27 [2 favorites]

Nobody reads books anymore, they read the wrong kind of books, the publishing business is hopeless about predicting hits, the business is too focused on hits, the business was so much better when wealthy gentlemen who weren’t concerned about profits chose what to publish…. I once went through about a century of Publisher’s Weekly issues and found the complaints and predictions were remarkably consistent. There are problems, serious ones. Many are not that new, though.
posted by zenzenobia at 4:15 PM on December 27

William Blake is another one who self-published.

"written in cold blood with a tooth pick"
posted by ginger.beef at 4:20 PM on December 27

My problem with this kind of "Make ... Great Again" article is, "When exactly do you mean?" When was this time, give me a year, when Literary Fiction was pored over by the Common Reader who could not get enough of it. 2005? 1985? 1935? When was it? Because I don't ever remember a time when the books people read weren't mostly pulp of some kind or another. What is the lost era we should all be yearning for now?
posted by kittens for breakfast at 4:30 PM on December 27

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