In other words, if you’ve ever wanted to hear me get grilled on why I hate romantasy novels, you’re not going to want to miss this interview.

Thanks so much to for having me on!

For many years, MFA workshops have gaslit authors into believing that there’s a standard “formula” for writing a great novel.

What’s the conflict? What do the characters want? What are the stakes?

Answer these questions, and you’re on your way to writing the next Great American Novel.

There’s just one problem. None of these formulas will actually ever produce a great work of literature because real novels don’t have simple answers.

Imagine identifying the main “conflict” in The Brothers Karamazov or figuring out what Holden “wants.”

In other words, everything you’ve learned in your MFA program is complete bullshit.

I’ve spent most of my adult life reading novels, writing about novels, and—most importantly—writing my own novels. I’ve written three novels to date (with a fourth one on the way!), and today, I’d like to tell you about the real way to write a novel.

Throughout this post, I’ll be referencing my four novels—The Lilac Room, The Leverkühn Quartet, Blue Snow, and The Brodsky Sisters, as well as telling you a bit about my own writing process.

Now, without further ado, let’s help you write your first novel.

Before You Write…

It might be tempting to rush into writing your first novel—after all, it’s tough not to feel constantly behind—and while there’s no “wrong” time to start writing, I recommend following these three steps before you get started.

1) Read great literature.

The best way to develop your writing voice is to read as much great literature as you can—and to identify your biggest influences.

Mine are Dostoyevsky, Thomas Mann, T.S. Eliot, J.D. Salinger, and Sylvia Plath. You’ll find the spirits of each of these authors embedded in my writing.

There are no better teachers than the literary greats.

2) Skip the creative writing classes.

I firmly believe that creative writing classes do more harm than good to your writing voice because of the amount of standardization that happens in these workshops. I took one creative writing class early in my writing career at Brown, and I can’t tell you how stifled I felt as an author wasting away in those workshops every morning. When it comes to feedback, most of your peers aren’t going to know better than you, and unless you’re very lucky, the failed writer who’s now taken up a second-rate teaching position at a random college won’t teach you anything beyond the generic “MFA workshop tips” that you can obtain from a quick Google search. I was continually appalled by the generic writing exercises we were assigned at Brown, and we didn’t read a single piece of literature written before 1950.

I promise you that old books will take you much further than classes taught by writers you’ve never heard of.

3) Live a little.

Some novels were born out of a ghost story contest (Frankenstein), others from one man’s experience at sea (Moby Dick). There’s no one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to novel writing, but what most great novels have in common is that they were born from experience.

Yes—writing a novel requires living your life.

The best advice I can give, then, before you start writing, is to go out and experience the world.

It’s no secret that writers tend to be introverted—and I can’t tell you how many authors I’ve met who are total recluses and have never left their apartments. But the introverted writer who ultimately reaches literary success is the one who dared to put himself out there, translating his many experiences into beautiful words. The best way to develop a brilliant novel idea is by taking in the world around you... and by living a little bit of life.

It might seem counterintuitive, but don’t spend all your days writing—instead, live your life, explore the world, shuffle back to your desk in the early hours of the morning… and then write.

With that out of the way, let’s get into the actual process of creating a great work of literature.

The Idea

The first thing you’ll need to do is to come up with a viable idea. In my experience, this is usually the most difficult part because ideas never come to you when you’re actively trying to summon them. I’ve lived through long stretches of my life where I think that I won’t possibly think of another great novel idea, and sure enough, something always comes to me eventually, so be patient. In many cases, inspiration strikes randomly.

I’ll give you a great example. I was on the subway one afternoon in my early twenties, and two of my friends (whom I had introduced to one another) were discussing a party they’d attended the previous week. This might have been unremarkable in itself—everyone in New York is always scuttling off to one party or another—but when I learned that the soirée in question had been featured in The New York Times, I was livid.

I couldn’t understand how I hadn’t been invited.

My ire took up a substantial portion of my inner musings for the next two days or so, and I soon started to wonder why I cared so much in the first place. Was it prestige? Status? Feeling left out?

There was something to these “elite New York circles”—and I had to find out what.

Thus, The Lilac Room was born.

There’s another little tidbit about The Lilac Room that might be of interest. The novel is partially set inside a Frank Sinatra jazz bar. As I was building out the world of The Lilac Room—and its protagonist, Cassie Feuerbach, who grows obsessed with New York’s “elitist, mathematically-driven circles,” as she aptly describes them—one of my friends was daydreaming about his plans to start a Frank Sinatra jazz café one day—only the café was going to have a secret underground room that turned into a licentious cabaret of sorts.

(The literary agent I worked with briefly didn’t like the underground cabaret in the Frank Sinatra jazz bar that made its way into The Lilac Room, but he can suck it, really.)

Some of my other novels were directly influenced by great literature—combined with my own experiences, of course. The idea for The Brodsky Sisters, for one, came to me during a recent re-read of The Brothers Karamazov: I thought that it would be fun to reinterpret Dostoyevsky’s famous novel from a female Jewish perspective. Similarly, I got the idea for my novel The Leverkühn Quartet while reading Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus. I was captivated by the character Adrian Leverkühn and wanted to create my own tortured composer (who, in honor of Mann’s great anti-hero, is also named Adrian). My Adrian is loosely based on a tortured composer I used to know in college, and Adrian’s many compositions were inspired by my friend’s own musical creations.

I’ve had many failed ideas as well, so make sure you really like your idea before you start writing. You’ll be stuck with it for a long time.

The Characters

Once you have your idea, it’s time to sculpt the characters who will help it come alive.

Character-building is perhaps my favorite part of novel writing because, more than anything, I write to explore human psychology—and if you want to write psychologically believable novel characters, forget almost everything you’ve been taught about character development.

“What do they want?” “What’s their wound?” “What do they fear?”

You were probably taught to ask these questions in your MFA program, and if you’ve been using them to build out your characters, then congratulations—your characters probably suck.

The fact is that no human being on this planet is sitting around thinking, “I wonder what wounded me…” “I wonder what my fears are…” The world would be a lot simpler if we all knew what we wanted, but the truth is that most of us don’t know the answers to these questions—so building out your characters with this formula is going to leave you with a cast of one-dimensional characters that absolutely no one is going to remember.

So what should you do instead?

Well, the only way to write psychologically believable characters is to figure out what’s so special about real people.

Instead of reducing your character’s psychology to wants and fears, talk to as many people as you can to get a fuller picture of how each person operates. Sherman Alexie once said that all fiction writing is plagiarism, and that’s absolutely correct. Pay attention to quirky details in your day-to-day life that you can steal for your story. For instance, I once met a guy who collected hotel slippers and kept them all in a giant cardboard box. That seemed like something that Cassie would do in The Lilac Room, so the following paragraph materialized:

I changed into a bathrobe—a terry cloth getup I’d stolen during my first sojourn at the Ritz. Enchanted by the pairs of slippers that appeared each evening by my bed—the bags of tea that were replenished every morning at my desk—I’d made it my mission to pilfer as many “complimentary” goods as fit into my suitcase and had since amassed a box of unused slippers, doled out to Manhattan strangers who wandered up the winding staircase to my old apartment and called themselves my guests.

If you want to write a character who doesn’t directly resemble someone you know, then find a real person who can speak to the sort of experience you’d like to capture. For example, I’m currently writing an atheist character for The Brodsky Sisters, and I’ve been interviewing staunch atheists to learn about their worldviews.

Eventually, you’ll have such a deep understanding of people that all such MFA “character-building” questions will seem meaningless. We’re human, after all—not cartoon characters.

The Big Questions

I’ve never heard conversations about “big questions” in contemporary writing circles because the current literary milieu seems to have forgotten that literature should explore life’s big questions rather than just tell a story.

Each of my novels starts with big questions that run throughout the narrative—and I mean run throughout because no novel worth its salt will ever lose track of its philosophical themes.

My novels frequently explore questions I’ve been mulling over in my own life. The Lilac Room asks “What makes a person rare?” The Leverkühn Quartet asks “What is Beauty?” Blue Snow asks “What does it mean to live life authentically?” The Brodsky Sisters asks “What is the point of life?” By the end of each of these novels, my characters either arrive at their own conclusions or compel my readers to consider these ideas in the context of their own lives.

If you’re looking to write a great novel, then big questions should be your bread and butter. Start with a question and have your characters wrestle with it throughout—and make sure they eventually find some answers. You can have more than one question per novel, of course, and you probably should, but it’s helpful to start with one and go from there.

Many of our culture’s greatest works of literature are great precisely because they ask big questions—so don’t ever let literary agents tell you that your novels are “too philosophical.” If anything, strive to write as philosophically as possible.

The World

I’ll start this section with a quote from my favorite composer, Gustav Mahler, who makes a prominent appearance in The Leverkühn Quartet:

“The symphony must be like the world; it must embrace everything.”

Replace “symphony” with “novel,” and you have my philosophy on novel writing.

Each novel should have an immersive, recognizable world that sets the scene for the story to come.

Many novelists like to reuse the same worlds—think Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County or Hardy’s Wessex. For my own novels, I borrow a technique from Dickens—pick your favorite real city and give it a personal spin. Dickens did this with London, of course. My city of choice is New York.

My novels are all set in Manhattan and focus on the glamorous yet lost old world (think Gatsby). You can frequently find my characters in Art Deco–inspired rooftop bars or jazzy restaurants. I also love to use classical and jazz music to give my worlds a certain flavor.

My novels feature real places in Manhattan (I hope to send my readers on a Liza Libes literary tour around the city one day), but you’re also welcome to make up fictional places in real cities.

Whatever your world may be, make it as immersive as possible with sights, sounds, smells, and memorable artifacts. These aspects will make your world come alive.

The Research

Some novels require a lot of research; others, not so much.

Because The Leverkühn Quartet followed a classical music plot, I had to do a great deal of research on New York’s “classical music world” in order to create a believable string quartet. I also spent hours every day watching the lectures of Leonard Bernstein to build out the analysis of Mahler that appears throughout the text.

Blue Snow, on the other hand, was largely internal, so less research went into its creation—but I still brushed up on my Latin and my Dante, both of which make a prominent appearance in the book.

Because The Brodsky Sisters—my most ambitious work thus far—tackles the tension between atheism and religion, it’s required the most research of any of my novels so far, and I’ve been slowly making my way through the following reading list:

Any novel will require some basic research, but you’re welcome to do your research along the way rather than loading up on research before writing. I personally like to stagger my research and chapter-writing—I’ll read what I need to in order to craft my next chapter, and then I’ll return to my research until I have enough information to write the next one.

The Chapter Outline

Now you’re ready to start outlining your chapters!

I know some writers who don’t work with a full outline, and you don’t have to have every single chapter mapped out before you start writing.

For The Leverkühn Quartet and Blue Snow, I had every chapter meticulously planned before I started writing, but for The Lilac Room, I went into the first draft without knowing exactly where the novel was going to take me. I seem to have now struck a happy medium with The Brodsky Sisters: I have detailed outlines of 3–4 chapters ahead of my current chapter-in-progress and a general idea of the novel’s trajectory—but by no means have I worked out all of the minute details.

But whether you’re a careful planner or a more spontaneous artist, I would at least recommend having a running list of notes somewhere outside of your draft. I have a giant Brodsky Sisters master doc that I continually refer to in order to keep track of plot lines, character development, and ideas that come to me in the middle of the night.

The Muse

Before you start writing, you’ll need someone or something to guide you along the way.

For Dante, it was Beatrice. For Virginia Woolf, it was Vita Sackville-West. For James Joyce, it was Nora Barnacle. But your muse doesn’t have to be a person. It can be a piece of music, a work of art, a beautiful poem, or even a landscape.

Just bear in mind that your muse will stay with you throughout your writing process (perhaps longer than you’d like!), so make sure to pick a good one.

Who’s my muse? The ghost of Dostoyevsky.

Duh.

The First Draft

It’s time to start drafting!

Sitting down to write the draft is the most daunting part, but it doesn’t have to be.

I usually aim for a chapter a week, which means I’m churning out about 3,000 to 5,000 words every seven days. If your chapters are on the shorter side, that comes out to only 500 words a day—a paragraph or two.

In fact, if you’re writing 500 words per day, that’s only 200 days to complete a 100,000-word draft—less than a year!

Novel writing is less daunting in short chunks, and the good news is that you can always find time to hammer out 500 words a day if you put your mind to it.

Don’t worry too much about sounding perfect in the first draft—just keep writing so that you’re continually making progress. You can always come back and polish your sentences during the editing stages.

The Revisions

I’ll usually do one brief sweep of revisions after every chapter to clean up any obvious awkward phrases, but I leave all major revisions until after I’ve completed my first draft.

Once I’ve put the finishing touches on the last chapter of my first draft, I’ll go back and devote about a week to editing each chapter. At this stage, I might spend an hour or two on a single sentence until it sounds perfect; I’ll cut out extraneous details and elaborate on any scenes that need just a little bit more flavor. Finally, I’ll make sure that my themes and big ideas make sense throughout.

After this initial round of edits, I’ll typically go back and do one more sweep where I read my entire novel and clean up any outstanding plot holes or awkward phrases. At this point, I’m usually quite proud of the end product!

The End Game?

You might think that you’re done with your novel, but it’ll probably go through 17,000 more drafts before it gets published, so make sure that you’ve written the novel that you want to read rather than the novel that everyone else wants you to write because you will be reading that damn novel more than anyone else on the planet.

Even though you still have a long journey ahead of you before your novel hits the shelves, give yourself a pat on the back. You’ve written a book! That’s no small feat, and you should be quite proud.

I hope you’ve learned a little bit about writing a novel today, and I’m so excited to see where your writing journey will take you!

Best of luck on your novelistic pursuits!

The publishing industry has a censorship problem.

Ever since I’ve started querying my novels, I’ve gotten lots of feedback on what you can and cannot do in a literary novel. I’ve been told that my openings are too slow, that my characters are too philosophical, and even that my opening chapter is “too commercial” for literary fiction.

In a word, the publishing industry has taken to policing the sh*t out of my art, and as a staunch defender of free speech, I’ve lost nights of sleep wondering whether I’ll ever be able to write the novel I want to write while also enjoying literary acclaim.

I know for a fact that I’m not alone in feeling this way. Every day, I receive countless messages from Pens and Poison readers who feel that the publishing industry no longer upholds the tenets of artistic freedom, and I know I speak on behalf of all creatives in the world when I say that I fear for the future of literature in our society.

No writer should ever have to find themselves thinking “Am I allowed to write this?” more often than “Is this any good?” but, unfortunately, because the publishing industry has imposed such strict rules on our literature, most writers attempting to score traditional publishing deals find themselves increasingly preoccupied with the former question at the expense of the latter.

All across the country, MFA workshops are teaching students that there’s a “correct” way to write literature. As a result, the publishing industry increasingly conforms to a dominant mode of artistic craft, convincing an entire generation of aspiring writers that “good literature” must be written in a certain style.

But this sort of thinking is the very antithesis to the passion that once produced great literature. After all, great writers didn’t become great by following set prescriptions—they became great by breaking all the rules.

So here are twelve literary opinions that would get me kicked out of an MFA program—and the rules I’ve dared to break with each.

1. Literature Should Be Philosophical

The literary establishment today cares more about “pacing” than about slow, philosophical moments.

I’ve had a literary agent admit that my philosophical digressions are “brilliant” but suggest that they be trimmed to promote faster pacing.

But slow philosophical moments have always been at the heart of great literature—just ask Dostoyevsky. The idea that philosophical digressions should be cut to “tighten pacing” is a result of a culture that has lost its ability to think critically—and a literary establishment that cares more about adapting books to the big screen than it does about promoting philosophical thought.

2. Great Literature Speaks to Morality

From Sally Rooney’s one-dimensional characters stewing in political ennui to Ben Lerner’s autofictional stand-ins, the publishing industry likes to churn out writing that fundamentally resists meaning. But these books will almost certainly fade into oblivion because good literature should carry a lasting moral message.

The reason we still read Anna Karenina today, for instance, is not only that Tolstoy is a master of Russian prose but also because the novel teaches us about right and wrong. We root for Levin not because he is “relatable,” as today’s literary agents insist characters be, but because he undergoes a redemption arc. Similarly, we watch Anna’s life gradually unravel because she has traded loyalty, love, and duty for empty pleasure. In the end, she commits suicide because, in the absence of children and family, her life has lost all meaning.

In a world in which many contemporary novels mistake ambiguity for depth, it is almost heretical to insist that literature ought to mean something or to appeal to objective morality. But great literature has always been about morality and meaning—even if the publishing industry believes the very opposite.

3. Tell, Don’t Show

“Show don’t tell” is a dumb rule.

Every single great writer has told things up until about 30 years ago, when MFA programs collectively decided that our attention spans are too short for telling.

But take a look at the opening of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises.

There is absolutely zero showing in this paragraph. We are told literally every single detail about Robert Cohn instead of being “shown” them through a scene.

This is great writing.

That’s not to say you can’t show—of course you can—but I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been told by agents to convert my beautiful prose passages into “scenes with dialogue” (they are all obsessed with dialogue). It’s become a faux pas to explain à la Hemingway, but real writers know that there is room for both showing and telling in great literature.

Let’s bring back telling!

4. “Accessible” Isn’t Always Better

A recent Threads post argued that “shorter chunked paragraphs” and “approachable prose” should be “industry standard.”

Well, congratulations, real_mstar_author! Your deranged literary fantasy already exists: we have dumbed down books to absurdity to the point where they all read like this:

In case you needed another reason to lose faith in our society, this is an actual opening paragraph from a debut literary novel set to be published by Hachette next spring, and it sounds like the text message you wrote to your ex during your sophomore year of college after one too many glasses of wine.

I’ve had enough of this juvenile prose in the name of “accessibility.” Great literature exists to challenge us—not to tell us what we already know.

5. Beautiful Prose Matters

On a related note, beautiful prose matters!

In case you’re wondering why this opinion is even remotely controversial, take a look at this advice to writers from Brooklyn College MFA professor Joshua Henkin:

Cut out your most beautiful sentence if it’s getting in the way of your story! Not just a beautiful sentence—the most beautiful one!

The literary establishment has declared such a war on beauty that writing poetically has now become a negative.

Sally Rooney’s Normal People provides an apt case in point:

Rooney’s prose reads like something you might encounter in an instruction manual—or a picture book for toddlers. But even more chilling is the fact that we as a society celebrate Rooney’s writing because we’ve come under the collective delusion that simpler is always better.

Literary agents today, in fact, will flat out tell writers to cut out “literary” prose, warning them against submitting supposedly meandering, prosy, or metaphor-laden sentences.

Imagine telling a writer that metaphors detract from writing! Such advice is the logical conclusion of a society that no longer values beauty and believes that literature should serve purely utilitarian ends.

But great literature should be lyrical and beautiful—and sometimes the beautiful sentence needs to stay even if it slows down the “pacing” by just a second.

6. Characters Don’t Need to Be “Relatable”

Literary agents constantly tell me that they can’t “emotionally connect” to my characters.

I wrote about this issue in a recent Pens and Poison essay, and I can’t stress enough how detrimental it is to our literature to believe that characters are only worthwhile if they are “relatable.” Such a philosophy stems from a culture obsessed with its own self—and results in a literary ecosystem whose characters all start to look, think, and act the same.

Great literature contains characters of all shapes and sizes—and sometimes the greatest characters are the ones we relate to the least.

Just ask Humbert Humbert.

7. Write What You Don’t Know

Today, you will be cancelled if you write a character who’s not from your own background.

Just ask this literary agent, who takes issue with certain writers portraying “the perspective of a historically marginalized group”:

I love to write characters who share my experiences as much as the next guy, but there’s also value to writing characters who are unlike you.

Great writers should dare to write what they don’t know—it’s called “fiction,” after all.

8. Long Sentences Are Better Than Short Ones

The literary establishment today will tell you to cut out long sentences because they make us “concentrate too hard.”

I sometimes wonder whether I’m not making this all up as part of some deranged dream, but I’m linking the source for you here.

We’ve apparently reached the point in our society where we can only handle picture-book-length sentences, but great literature has always contained long sentences—Henry James’s average sentence length is about 40 words long—because long sentences teach us how to think.

9. Long Books Are Better Than Short Ones

If you’re a debut author looking to get a novel published, there is a hard 100,000-word limit—with no exceptions.

I was even told by a literary agent that my 100,000-word book (approximately 300 pages) was too long—and that editors won’t even read it!

Another agent told me that 100,000 words is too long for a Gen Z audience.

I appreciate shorter novels and novellas as much as the next guy, but long books are long for a reason—they give us the room to develop characters and to create a masterful work of art.

Just imagine The Brothers Karamazov at 300 pages—the main action wouldn’t have even made the cut!

10. Digressions Are Important

Literary agents hate backstory and “unnecessary details.”

I genuinely wish—for the sake of all great writers out there—that I was making this all up, but apparently, backstory has become emblematic of weak writing rather than an intentional stylistic choice.

It seems that literary agents have collectively decided that anything they’re too lazy to read is simply a mark of bad writing—or writing that’s “not submission ready”—but I challenge these agents to pick up any work of great literature.

I will direct you once again to The Brothers Karamazov—the greatest novel ever written—which overflows with backstory.

11. Slow Openings Are Wonderful

Literary agents claim that “first pages are not the place for slow build-ups.”

“Make sure,” she tells us, “you’re starting the story where the conflict or emotional tension begins.”

If that isn’t policing art and demanding that all literature conform to a set formula, then I don’t know what is.

Great literature doesn’t always start in the middle of the conflict—nor would any great author ever have tolerated the idea that “first pages are not the place for slow build-ups.”

Imagine telling Steinbeck to “make sure” to start his story “where the conflict or emotional tension begins.”

We would have never gotten the following gorgeous opening of East of Eden.

Steinbeck’s great novel begins with a complete absence of conflict—and that’s why, by the time Cathy Ames emerges on the stage, our reading experience is so much more enthralling—and so much more sinister.

The slow build-up that this agent won’t even consider is precisely the reason that East of Eden has earned its status as one of the 20th century’s most monumental works of literature.

Slow build-ups create great literature.

12. Literature Should Take Risks

Combine all of these rules, and contemporary “literature” all starts to sound exactly the same.

MFA programs have collectively waged a war against great literature, but I’m here to wage a war on MFA programs until we bring back artistic freedom.

Great literature should take risks—it always has. And only when we restore risk-taking to the publishing industry will we see great literature back on our shelves.

In the meantime, I’ll keep breaking all the rules.

My name’s Liza.

You may know me as the writer behind your favorite Substack, Pens and Poison, but when I’m not reading Dostoyevsky or lamenting the state of our culture, I’m writing novels.

My dream has always been to move people with my stories in the same way that my favorite stories have made my life more beautiful and meaningful—and the best way I know to do that is by putting my words out into the universe.

Over the past five years, I’ve been actively chasing my dream of becoming a published author. I’ve written six novels in total, and I’m particularly proud of three of them. My novels have sparked debates about art, culture, beauty, and the meaning of life—and many chapters have even moved readers to tears.

Despite these literary feats and my burgeoning online presence, publishing professionals frequently tell me that there’s no market for the sorts of slow, introspective books I write.

But I know that that’s not true—there is a market for slow, introspective books; there are readers who want to read a modern Kafka or a Dostoyevsky—and I have the audience to prove it.

The rise of BookTok culture has convinced many publishing professionals that readers don’t want deep, introspective fiction on our shelves, but every day, I get messages from Pens and Poison readers that remind me that there has to be a market for the sorts of books I write—and a larger one than most people think.

Sure, there’s a time and place for steamy romance and suspenseful thrillers and ideological fiction, but there’s also a desperate need for great contemporary literature that explores the human soul.

And frankly, I’m tired of being told that my books just won’t “sell.”

So today, I’d like to take you on a tour through the Liza Libes literary universe and tell you a bit more about my novels with the hope that we can get my pitches in front of a literary agent who shares my love of the literary greats.

Whether you’re a longtime follower or are just passing through the Pens and Poison universe, I’d love it if you could take a moment to share this post with your friends. With a bit of luck, we can get these pitches in front of the right people—and get my books out into the world.

Here’s a bit about each of my novels—and what makes them special.

THE LILAC ROOM

The Pitch

Cassandra Feuerbach—or Cassie, if you catch her outside of a business meeting—has built her entire identity on control: control of her New York startup, control of her reputation, and (if she’s being honest) control of her loneliness. But when her sales agent Rebecca Solomon dies in the office bathroom (that can’t be good for publicity), Cassie’s delicate façade begins to unravel.

Delving into Rebecca’s past, Cassie meets Rebecca’s secret lover—the kind, ungainly Adam Gershon—and is drawn into the glittering, deranged world of The Lilac Room, a controversial social experiment that took Rebecca’s life.

As she pieces together the details of Rebecca’s downfall, uncovering secrets about the excesses and hypocrisies of New York’s social elite, Cassie gradually realizes that she might not be morally superior to The Lilac Room’s dubious creators.

Torn between the ruthless ambition that built her success and the conscience that Adam awakens in her, Cassie must choose whether to remain complicit in the morally fraught corporate world or to sacrifice her company to keep her conscience clean.

The Characters

Cassandra Feuerbach

The headstrong yet somewhat callous CEO of career coaching firm Empire Academy, Cassie is desperate to join the ranks of the New York elite.

Adam Gershon

An uncouth FBI agent whom Cassie meets the day before her sales agent, Rebecca Solomon, mysteriously passes away.

Nelli Wigg

Adam’s flighty ex-girlfriend who owns a jazz club in Brooklyn... and who knew the girl who passed away.

Aaron Mendelson

The CEO of Stellar Career and Recruitment, Empire’s biggest rival, who might have been connected to Rebecca’s demise.

The Themes

Ambition vs the Good Life

At the beginning of the novel, Cassie believes that success is bound up with prestige, wealth, and status. By the end of the novel, success means something different to her.

Moral Corruption

At the center of The Lilac Room are the effective altruists—a group of people obsessed with optimizing humanity. But at what cost?

Hedonism vs. Responsibility

Cassie and Nelli are both slaves to their desires, but at what point does pleasure become self-destructive?

The Ills of the Corporate World

The corporate world of The Lilac Room treats people as instruments rather than ends in themselves, effectively stripping people of their humanity.

THE LEVERKÜHN QUARTET

The Pitch

New York young professional Elise Goldberg hasn’t touched her violin in nearly a decade. She enjoys a quiet life at home—with her lucrative banking job and her somewhat religious Jewish fiancé—and does not think twice about the passion she once traded for stability. But when she reconnects with her ex-lover, the brilliant but troubled composer Adrian Liederschloss, Elise is flung back into the world of music.

Plunging deeper into the milieu of her new string quartet—a volatile circle of creatives, ideologues, and outcasts—Elise becomes entangled in a Faustian drama to recapture her violin virtuosity as she questions her engagement to her fiancé, her more-than-friendship with her childhood best friend, and her place in the Jewish world. Grappling with the cost of artistic obsession on the cusp of her debut at Carnegie Hall, Elise must ultimately decide not only whom she loves but whether Beauty can be found in a world that seems to have turned its back on it.

The Characters

Elise Goldberg

A former violin prodigy of Russian-Jewish heritage who joins her ex-lover’s new string quartet.

Adrian Liederschloss

A brilliant yet troubled composer who believes that only suffering can create great art.

Jonathan Kaminsky

A retired Navy lieutenant and Elise’s childhood friend who doesn’t know her biggest secret.

Ben Orlov

Elise’s fiancé who comes from an Orthodox Jewish family yet comes to terms with Elise’s secularism.

The Themes

Beauty and Suffering

Adrian believes that suffering is the sole source of artistic greatness, while Elise believes that all great art must have something to do with Beauty.

The Role of Memory

Elise associates some of her most tender moments with childhood memories, driving her decisions in the present.

Jewish Identity and Belonging

Judaism is both a cultural and a religious identity—but what happens when one clashes with the other?

Tradition vs. Modernity

Leverkühn’s characters are constantly on a quest either to break free from tradition or to preserve it—but which way is correct?

BLUE SNOW

The Pitch

Mia Rozen is a successful indie pop-star—but since her muse Teddy cut her off for good, she can no longer write music. Now she’s stuck in therapy—and worse, her label might drop her soon. But Teddy was never hers in the first place, and all she’s left with is a husband who offers safety but doesn’t really understand her art.

Told through a series of confessional therapy sessions, Blue Snow reconstructs Mia’s past with Teddy as she confronts her mistakes and sins, deciding whether she can continue mining the chaos of her past for the sake of art—or whether choosing peace and adulthood will require extinguishing the volatility that made her an artist in the first place.

The Characters

Mia Rozen

A volatile indie pop-star who has achieved all of her artistic dreams but can’t write music without her muse Teddy.

Teddy Garfinkel

An immature subway worker who becomes the lifeblood of Mia’s art and the source of her obsessions.

Cal Borghese

A quirky Dante scholar who can’t stop talking about sin.

Georgia Melnick

Mia’s best friend from college who has ambitions of her own.

The Husband

Mia’s unnamed husband who loves her but can’t seem to understand her.

The Themes

Fantasy vs. Reality

Mia falls in love less with Teddy than with her idea of him—and Blue Snow asks whether we ever truly fall in love with a person or whether we construct our world around an idea of them.

Art and Obsession

Unlike Leverkühn, where art is philosophical, Blue Snow examines the pathological side of art. Mia’s songwriting becomes inseparable from her fixation on Teddy—and her sanity unravels shortly after.

Authenticity vs. Performance

In the world of Blue Snow, everyone performs. Mia believes that Teddy is the one authentic person she has ever met, but he may be performing just as much as everyone else.

Sin and Redemption

Cal romanticizes sin, while Teddy seeks purification through religion. Blue Snow asks whether sin is truly evil—and what our chances are at redemption.

Enjoyed those pitches?

Well… I have a special surprise for you!

I’m so excited to unveil my latest novel-in-progress—and the fourth official novel I hope to add to the Liza Libes oeuvre soon!

Some of you know that I’ve been (diligently) re-reading The Brothers Karamazov lately. That’s because my latest project is an homage to Dostoyevsky and a loose retelling of The Brothers Karamazov—from a female Jewish perspective rather than a male Christian one (with a contemporary twist, of course).

Without further ado, I’d love to introduce you to The Brodsky Sisters.

THE BRODSKY SISTERS

The (Working) Pitch

When Nicole Brodsky—the formidable CEO of Boston Consulting Conglomerate and the matriarch of the Brodsky family—exposes the affair of her oldest daughter—Delilah Brodsky—with a much younger coworker, the estranged Brodsky sisters are flung back together for the first time in years, reopening decades of trauma and resentment. But before the family can reconcile, Nicole is found dead in her Manhattan hotel room.

The death appears to be a suicide until police uncover records of Delilah’s threats to kill her mother—and suspicion soon falls on the eldest Brodsky sister.

As the investigation unfolds, the sisters become divided not only over who killed Nicole, but over questions about Jewish identity, desire, loyalty, and faith as they confront long-buried family secrets—including the existence of an unknown fourth sister whose identity threatens everything they believe about their family.

The Characters

Nicole Brodsky

A ruthless CEO who built one of the country’s largest consulting firms—and is found mysteriously dead at the Ritz-Carlton.

Delilah Brodsky

The eldest Brodsky sister who inherited her mother’s brilliance. Once a rising director at her mother’s firm, Delilah is both humiliated by her affair and suspected of matricide.

Agnes Brodsky

An atheist journalist with a love of philosophy and literature, Agnes prides herself on her devotion to reason over faith.

Evie Brodsky

The youngest Brodsky sister and a sensitive art student who has embraced Orthodox Judaism.

The Themes

Faith in the Time of Modernity

The Brothers Karamazov was set in a time when religious skepticism was more anomalous than faith. In our time, those roles are reversed. The Brodsky Sisters asks whether there is room for faith in a world that has increasingly abandoned it—and whether we can find meaning in a world that has turned its back on religious belief.

Freedom vs. Duty

Delilah believes that freedom means satisfying desire, Agnes believes it means intellectual autonomy, and Evie believes that true freedom comes through obedience to God. But what is freedom, really?

Family as Inheritance

The sisters inherit far more than genetics from Nicole—and her death forces them to ask which parts of that inheritance they wish to keep.

Envy and Resentment

At the heart of the novel is the Brodsky sisters’ resentment of their mother’s success, which drives them to reveal their true colors.

I’d love to hear about which one of my projects piqued your interest the most—and which one you’re most looking forward to reading!

And if you enjoyed reading about my four novels, help me get my books published by taking a moment to share this post with your friends.

My hope is to get my novels in front of a literary agent who shares my love of the literary greats so that we can bring great literature back into the world.

In the meantime, thanks so much for reading Pens and Poison.

Allen Levi’s Theo of Golden is this summer’s go-to read for BookTokkers and academics alike—and it broke every rule in contemporary publishing.

Last month, The Wall Street Journal ran a feature on Levi’s unconventional journey to literary fame following the publication of his bestselling novel Theo of Golden. While I tend to gloss over most contemporary fiction news (which often pertains, as The Wall Street Journal admits, to BDSM or vampires), this particular story immediately captured my attention: since its publication three years ago, Theo of Golden has sold 2.5 million copies—and it was originally self-published.

That fact alone should give every editor in New York City pause: if a novel capable of reaching millions of readers could not initially find a home in the traditional publishing industry, then literary professionals have erroneous assumptions about what readers desperately crave today.

Upon its initial release, in fact, Theo of Golden sold three thousand copies—a more than respectable number for a self-published title—and continued to reach indie fiction lovers across the country until Simon & Schuster finally recognized what readers knew long ago: our culture is in desperate need of serious literary fiction.

As someone who has spent the past few years analyzing trends in the publishing industry, I can only chuckle at the reaction of Levi’s literary agent, who felt like she was “walking into the woods and discovering a unicorn.”

No hate for Theo of Golden, which abounds with beautiful sentences and complex ideas, but the irony is, of course, that the book only appears to be a unicorn because the publishing industry has spent decades engineering a literary landscape in which slow, introspective, and profound books have become exceedingly difficult to find.

The rise of BookTok culture—a TikTok book community characterized by algorithm-driven content and bite-size recommendations—has increasingly conditioned readers to expect stories that deliver immediate gratification rather than those that require sustained intellectual engagement. Several “BookTokers,” in fact, admit to reading only dialogue in novels while skipping over “slower” scenes, creating a reading culture where books are almost literally reduced to screenplays. Publishers, in turn, cater to the BookTok community, and the cycle continues.

In other words, Theo of Golden has only earned its claim to uniqueness precisely because the publishing industry systematically turns away all other books like it.

Every year, the publishing industry churns out hundreds of new fiction titles that all sound the same. Teeming with short sentences and declarative phrases delivered by detached, ironic narrators, these books no longer require readers to consider what a work of fiction means. The value of a book has been reduced to its ability to provide quick, digestible entertainment rather than to challenge its reader.

The result is an entire literary ecosystem that has surrendered its capacity for reflection—and a broader culture that has lost its ability to think critically about our world.

Let’s look at some examples from recent literary fiction bestsellers, starting with Sally Rooney’s Normal People.

Rooney’s sentences are simple to a fault. With a didactic and juvenile cadence akin to the sentences one might find in a picture book, her prose contains no words or ideas that a third grader would not understand, and—in fact—seems targeted precisely at a small child learning how to read. Her average sentence—at twelve words in length—communicates only the bare minimum information required to advance the plot, creating an entire novel that is remarkably easy to consume but rarely challenges the reader’s imagination.

One could excuse the publishing industry if it were just Rooney writing in this infantile style, but such literary minimalism has infested nearly every single literary fiction title that lines our shelves today.

Let’s take a look at another bestselling example—Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear, the literary rave of the past few months.

Burke’s prose follows much the same pattern as Rooney’s: short, declarative sentences move the reader rapidly from one assertion to the next, with the narrator explaining every aspect of her personality—she is disciplined, sober, organized, and successful—before readers have the opportunity to draw their own conclusions. We can describe Burke’s prose as utilitarian, its overtly literal sentences devoid of metaphor or syntactic variation. The result is a novel that is easy to consume but difficult to contemplate.

One final example to bring my point home—Taylor Jenkins Reid’s The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo.

Reid’s prose is stripped entirely of literary texture. She begins almost every sentence in this paragraph with the words “I” or “and,” employing a total of two commas over eleven sentences. Driven by parataxis (“I want / I want / I want”), her sentences are embarrassingly literal, conveying information with the efficiency of a corporate email. The narrator announces every desire and motivation outright, eliminating subtext and discovery—the very qualities that have traditionally distinguished literature from Facebook status updates. Taken as a whole, her prose efficiently communicates information but possesses little musicality or stylistic distinction.

Let’s contrast these examples with the opening of Levi’s Theo of Golden:

The difference is almost immediately apparent. Where Rooney’s prose reports, Levi’s evokes; where Burke explains, Levi reveals. Theo of Golden demonstrates that language is not simply a vehicle for plot but an art form in its own right: every sentence becomes an opportunity to create beauty. While most contemporary literary fiction thus treats language as a transparent delivery system for plot and ideology, Levi trusts his readers to slow down and savor the cadence of a well-crafted sentence—and the meaning of his ideas as a whole.

Theo of Golden therefore stands as a direct antithesis to the prevailing wisdom of the contemporary publishing industry, challenging the broader orthodoxy that readers want fiction that reads like a movie script.

But if readers are clearly willing to embrace the thematic and stylistic complexity of Theo of Golden, why, then, does the publishing industry keep pushing out didactic, juvenile, and minimalist literature?

The fact is that the stylistic similarities among the novels we examined above are not accidental—they reflect an editorial philosophy that increasingly equates literary quality with accessibility.

Because editors increasingly acquire books that can be pitched in a single sentence—and then adapted for television and recommended on social media—minimalism has become not only the norm but a hard requirement in the contemporary publishing world, with publishing professionals routinely claiming that any sentence over fifteen words causes readers to “concentrate too hard.” Such language suggests that the publishing industry has not only become convinced that readers of contemporary fiction do not have the attention spans to digest long, flowery sentences but also that the industry itself has shaped the tastes of its own readers.

Operating in this paradigm, writers are frequently told to avoid “poetic prose and metaphors,” with one agent offering the following advice on her blog:

Often times [sic] the writers will focus on sounding “literary” and write meandering, prosy or metaphor laden sentences. While it is a style choice, it’s not usually a successful one… Flowery prose and metaphor often detract from your writing. You can often make more impact using fewer, but stronger words.

Thus the “literary” voice, which this agent defines through “flowery prose and metaphor,” becomes not only the less desirable writing style but an active faux pas. Writers who take after Fitzgerald’s ornamental phraseology or Nabokov’s metaphor-laden prose face constant rejection, while writers who produce literal and legible writing see their books line our shelves. Over time, these editorial preferences have helped create a reading culture in which readers are told they no longer have the patience for long, intellectually demanding books.

But the irony is that readers are rarely given the opportunity to encounter them in the first place.

The publishing industry might have convinced us all that we don’t have the attention spans for long, intellectually demanding books anymore, but the success of Theo of Golden offers hope for a civilization that has increasingly abandoned its capacity for reflection.

Publishing shapes our culture far more than we like to admit. The very books championed by our publishing professionals become the books that we not only read and discuss but also aspire to write ourselves. If year after year, therefore, the publishing industry rewards simpler, faster, and more disposable fiction, then readers inevitably become accustomed to “fast-paced” books that require no afterthought. If, on the other hand, publishers start championing ambitious, intellectually rich novels again, then there is every reason to believe readers would rise to meet them.

As our literature loses its capacity to challenge readers, an entire generation of thinkers becomes less comfortable with complexity—but we can restore critical thinking to our culture by daring to publish difficult books again.

Perhaps, then, the real lesson of Theo of Golden is not that readers suddenly rediscovered serious literary fiction but that they never stopped wanting it. The publishing industry simply stopped believing they did.

So maybe it’s time for the publishing industry to take notes from Theo—and to believe in its readers again.

Americans are bored of reading.

A 2021 Gallup poll found that the average American now reads 12.6 books per year, down from 18.5 in the late 1990s. The contrast is even starker in college-educated readers, whose yearly book quota has dropped to 14.6 from 21.1. Worse still—by 2025, the median American had read just two books, with the average reader clocking in at eight. That means that 20% of the population reads 80% of all books in circulation.

In other words, most Americans have stopped reading.

As always, it’s easy to blame the decline of reading on technology: Americans are now scrolling on TikTok, Netflix, YouTube, and Instagram at record rates, and with the publishing industry racing to transform books into movie scripts, there seems to be little reason to struggle through a 700-page novel when you can just watch Matt Damon run around a cave brandishing a bow and arrow.

It’s true—modern modes of entertainment have made long-form reading virtually obsolete, and with TikTok and Instagram videos frying our attention spans, most of us can no longer make it through an average-length novel—let alone a literary behemoth.

Sure, the technology boom has certainly accelerated the reading bust, but that’s not the whole story.

There’s something even more insidious pushing people away from reading: literature has become an ideology training camp for the radical Left—and most of us more moderate folks, in the words of Ivan Karamazov, would like to return our tickets.

A whopping 80% of English literature professors today identify as liberal, the largest percentage from any subject out of the 15 surveyed in a poll reported on by The American Interest. As a result, students in English classrooms across American universities are trading their Shakespeare and Chaucer for Marx and Engels in increasing numbers. As one X poster aptly put it, “‘literature’ is [a] code word for Marxism.” Indeed, following a recent change to UCLA English department graduation requirements, UCLA English majors must now take one course in each of the following categories: “Gender, Race, Ethnicity, Disability and Sexuality Studies,” “Imperial, Transnational, and Postcolonial Studies,” and “Genre Studies, Interdisciplinary Studies, Critical Theory.”

Yet not one course mandates the study of Shakespeare, Chaucer, or Milton.

So is literature simply inherently about sex and critical theory? And have these ideologies simply infested English departments because the study of literature naturally lends itself to progressive politics?

One narrative certainly claims that readers overwhelmingly identify as liberal. A 2025 Guardian poll found that Labour voters in the UK were more likely than any other group of voters to have read a book in the past year. Similarly, according to a 2007 IPSOS poll, liberals, on average, read more books than conservatives. This data appears to suggest that liberals are more likely to call themselves bookworms than conservatives, but not by much—the same IPSOS poll found that conservatives typically read eight books in the past year, while liberals read nine. That difference is, perhaps, not statistically significant enough to conclude that reading is an inherently “liberal” activity.

So why have literary circles become so disproportionately left-leaning?

One hypothesis is that creative types tend to lean left politically—and that writers have simply created a literary culture where only other like-minded writers feel welcome. Individuals who score high in the psychological trait “openness” from the Big Five Inventory—those interested in creativity and exploration—are often society’s writers, painters, and musicians, and because these people are often drawn to creation and novelty, they tend also to be left-leaning. Openness, furthermore, is the best predictor of political orientation—and individuals scoring high in openness tend to lean left. While there is nothing inherently wrong with such an ideological imbalance—artists have never been obligated to represent the political composition of the general public—the broader issue arises when our literary culture begins to alienate broad swathes of the population. We’ve seen this in the publishing industry’s bias towards leftist politics and in academia’s rampant politicization of English curricula.

No wonder conservatives don’t want to participate in such a leftist clown show.

And just because creative types are more likely to lean left does not mean that writing is an inherently “leftist” activity. Some of the world’s most renowned writers—T.S. Eliot, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, for example—held staunch conservative convictions and drew in a robust conservative reader base. The idea that a reader or a writer must necessarily be a progressive has been born, perhaps, out of our contemporary imaginations.

As the publishing industry shoves DEI down our throats, it is no accident that more conservatively-minded readers associate literature with woke politics and refuse to give it a chance. After all, when universities, publishers, and literary institutions parrot the same political vocabulary—identity, power, privilege, oppression—readers outside of that political culture select themselves out of the pool of literature lovers, contributing to the widespread misconception that literature itself is inherently left-leaning.

As a more traditionally-minded writer in an overwhelmingly liberal space, I’ve often felt alienated from university classes, literary communities, and the publishing industry. I have been called a racist for claiming that Shakespeare is an objectively better poet than Maya Angelou, disqualified from submitting my work to many literary agencies because I am neither queer nor a minority (Jews don’t count), and lambasted on my own YouTube channel for inviting conservative speakers to express their opinions on literature. I’ve had my novels turned down by publishers because I didn’t sufficiently discuss “privilege” and have been told that there’s no audience for my book about literature that’s geared towards conservatives.

In the early days of Pens and Poison, I was also told that it would be impossible to secure an audience for my work because the Venn diagram of conservatives and lovers of literature had virtually no overlap.

But that couldn’t be true. Frustrated with the political bias in the literary world, I sped ahead with Pens and Poison, starting my platform with a simple mission: restore literature to its rightful place in the humanistic tradition and disprove the widespread misconception that literature is for the Left—to speak, in other words, to the supposedly non-existent conservatives who like literature.

Today, I have almost 250K followers across Instagram and YouTube. Last night, I conducted a survey on my Instagram page—a hub of all things literature and culture—to gauge my audience’s political leanings. Out of 1,242 book lovers surveyed, 57% identified as conservative, while only 11% identified as liberal. As of this morning, my Substack mailing list now has 11K readers.

Clearly, literature isn’t just for the left.

I know for certain that I’m not alone. Every day, I get dozens of messages thanking me for starting my platform, and I’ve since proven that there are at least 250K readers and writers who love literature but feel that contemporary literary culture doesn’t want them.

And what happens when people feel unwelcome in a cultural institution?

They leave.

I was once told that conservatives simply don’t like literature, but I know today that that’s not true. The Left has simply alienated everyone who does not share their beliefs—and it is no surprise, consequently, that Americans today associate literature with fringe ideologies. But books, on the contrary, are one of the few places where people with radically different worldviews can encounter one another and learn to come together despite their differences.

Because great literature asks something much bigger than questions of race or gender.

Great literature asks what it means to be human.

And unless we can find a way to depoliticize literary study, literature might not survive.

I know I am not the only writer with a more traditional bent. In encouraging centrists, libertarians, conservatives, and anyone in between to share their love of literature, I hope to create a space that invites writers of all political affiliations to shift the focus of literature away from identity politics and back to the human condition.

The left might have hijacked literature, but we know better—and if we want people to read again, it is our duty to make literature intellectually pluralistic again.

Because great literature belongs to everyone.

Even if you’ve never picked up Melville’s Moby-Dick, you’ve probably encountered the image of Captain Ahab standing at the helm of the legendary Pequod, cursing the great white whale and vowing to take his revenge. Even if you’ve never read The Great Gatsby, you’re likely familiar with Gatsby’s elusive green light—and the hopes and dreams it represents. And even if you’re new to Shakespeare, you’ve probably seen our Danish prince standing in the graveyard with the skull of his old jester, lamenting the passage of time.

These images have become cultural icons in their own right, but they didn’t gain their notoriety by accident—they represent the pinnacles of some of literature’s most memorable characters.

But what makes them so memorable?

Take Ahab, for one. Melville’s great captain is the master of his ship while failing to gain mastery over his own self. Similarly, Gatsby reinvents his identity to renounce his past yet spends the entire novel obsessing over it. And, perhaps most famously, Hamlet vows to take revenge yet cannot act.

These characters are great precisely because of their many contradictions.

Today, however, you’d be hard-pressed to find a Hamlet or an Ahab—or even a character as seemingly mundane as Holden Caulfield.

In fact, closing the pages of a contemporary novel, you might remember the characters’ sexualities or national origins, but by the time you’ve finished breakfast the following morning, you won’t remember a single detail about the inner workings of their minds.

Because the moment that you close that final page, you cease to puzzle over them.

I’ve been wanting to write this essay for a long time now, but it sat on the back burner for a while because I couldn’t quite put my finger on why contemporary literature is so forgettable. I’ve diagnosed the uniform quality of its prose and the rampant politicization of the entire industry, but I could never understand why, just weeks after finishing a contemporary novel, I could never seem to remember a single detail about its characters.

I’ve previously ascribed this phenomenon to the fact that contemporary literature recycles the same archetype over and over again, and there is substantial evidence to support my diagnosis: the majority of contemporary authors are liberal white women who not only import their worldviews into their novels but also make no attempt to hide them. During the second chapter of Sally Rooney’s Normal People, for one, the male love interest Connell—a stand-in for Rooney’s obsession with class consciousness—literally hands his lover Marianne a copy of The Communist Manifesto. Rooney’s inclusion of such a scene not only reveals the sloppy nature of her characterization but also acts as an obnoxious exercise in political didacticism, creating an immediately recognizable Marxist revolutionary whose character depth ends at the mention of class struggle. Equally off-putting is Claire Caro Burke’s Natalie from everyone’s favorite TikTok hit Yesteryear, whose flaws I dissected here.

Relying more on navel-gazing than soul-searching, these authors only know how to produce the same sort of characters over and over again—the politically enlightened, emotionally self-aware young liberal—or how to attack the inversion of them.

But there is something else going on—and such political myopia is only one symptom of a much larger problem.

After a prolonged quest to pinpoint why contemporary literary characters feel so empty—and to acquire sufficient evidence to support my claims—I have finally unearthed some fascinating answers.

To illustrate the nature of my most recent “aha” moment, let us visit some of my recent interactions with publishing professionals.

As I understand it, my novels remain unpublished for the following three reasons:

1. There is a perception among literary agents that there is no “market” for the sorts of slow, introspective literary novels that I write—or that if there is a market, it will be difficult to craft a pitch to appeal to an editor. These rejections frequently look like this:

2. I do not espouse the correct political themes in my novels and am missing the leftist “secret sauce” that will make my books marketable in “today’s climate” (I have discussed this issue at length here). Such rejections frequently take the following form:

3. The sort of person who typically becomes a literary agent (liberal, white, young, woman) simply does not “connect” to the types of characters I write. These rejections usually read like this:

I can acknowledge marketability (or the perception of it), and I can even understand how an agent who has only ever been in one sort of social circle might reflexively demand a “depiction of privilege” in a literary novel. But “I didn’t connect with the characters” is not only a puzzling excuse but also one that is indicative of a larger, more insidious trend within our culture.

As serious readers, we do not necessarily read to “relate” to the great characters of the Western literary tradition—that would be juvenile, solipsistic, and, frankly, a waste of everyone’s time. Rather, we read to learn something about people who might think and act differently from ourselves. I cannot relate in the slightest, for example, to a man from two-hundred years ago who spends his life on a boat chasing a whale that’s torn his leg off, but I weep every time Ahab declares, “I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.” By the same token, I have little in common with a man who willingly murders two ladies with an axe just to prove a theory, but I sure as hell love living in Raskolnikov’s mind every time I choose to do so (more times than I’d like to admit).

In other words, I read to learn about the repulsive side of human nature or about worlds that differ from my own. I read because I want to learn everything there is to know about every sort of person on our planet—and no other great tradition has ever assembled a richer collection of human personalities.

Under the iron rule of “relatability,” however, books featuring abhorrent protagonists might never have made it onto our shelves—no literary agent would ever have “connected” with Humbert, nor would Alex from A Clockwork Orange have inspired much empathy in an acquisitions meeting.

The idea that a book is only worthwhile if one can “relate” to its characters stems from a culture obsessed with its own self—and results in a literary ecosystem whose characters all start to look, think, and act the same.

That culture is ours, yet up until last week, I lacked the vocabulary to properly diagnose it.

Up until last week, I didn’t know what it meant when a literary agent said she couldn’t “relate to my characters”—I assumed that my brainchildren simply surrounded themselves too frequently with “emotionally supportive men” (see point 2). But this past week, I finally got a sense of what’s going on behind the scenes—and I can finally explain why contemporary fiction feels so empty.

Let’s unpack it.

Read more

You might know me from social media as that girl who fights wokeness in literature, but in 2015, I came into college as a liberal.

Educated at one of the nation’s premier private schools alongside Malia Obama and Rahm Emanuel’s kids, I was steeped in the intellectual tradition of the great progressive educational philosopher John Dewey. A renowned American pragmatist, Dewey believed that the primary purpose of education was to inspire social reform; armed with this conviction, he collaborated with the University of Chicago to found the Lab School, one of the most progressive private high schools in the country.

To say that my foundational education was progressive is an understatement—as early as second grade, my classmates and I were bombarded with climate change documentaries and readings in civil rights. My seventh-grade humanities class, in fact, spent the year discussing “Social Justice in a Democratic Society”—the official name of our middle school English seminar—and that same year—back in 2009—the school cancelled classes for a week to shepherd us into “Diversity Day” workshops. My eighth-grade English teacher—sporting a mullet and an array of beaded necklaces—looked like she’d walked right out of Woodstock, and my high school history teacher complained in our school newspaper several years ago that “neoliberal influence” had caused the school to lose sight of Dewey’s original “radical” mission. The “real” John Dewey, he writes, would have been just like “Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Brandon Johnson or AOC.”

All of this is to say that my school was “woke” beyond proportion even decades before the word had formally become part of our lingo—and that, educated by Dewey’s disciples before continuing my education at Columbia University, progressivism was all that I had ever known.

It’s not that I was ever a staunch Social Justice Warrior or that I’ve ever voluntarily introduced myself to anyone as “she/her.” I was just liberal in the old-fashioned sense: I cherished intellectualism, women’s rights, equality, and—most importantly—freedom. Swayed by these values, I voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, prancing out of the booth with a cheeky “I Voted” sticker on my chest.

At 19, in fact, I’d often get into arguments with my grandmother, a retired Soviet chemistry professor, who insisted that a vote for Donald Trump would lead our country in the right direction.

I remember feeling bewildered that my biggest role model, a woman who had lived through and escaped the oppressive regime of the Soviet Union—where neighbors snitched on one another to the KGB and the press kowtowed to the whims of Joseph Stalin—would support a candidate whom John Oliver and Trevor Noah told me would erect an American Third Reich.

We were Jewish, after all.

During the several months leading up to the 2016 election, I attributed my grandmother’s scorn of the Democratic Party to her senility—after all, she had always taught me the value of diverse perspectives and embodied the highest ideals of feminism as the former chair of her department back in the Soviet Union. But even more importantly, she had taught me that we should never take our American freedoms for granted.

So I was rightfully perplexed by her allegiance to Donald Trump. Trump did not understand the value of freedom, I would always argue. Trump did not have values.

Yet on Wednesday, November 9th, 2016, walking into an exam for my Abnormal Psychology lecture at Barnard, Columbia’s all-girls sister school, I was surprised to find that the morning’s most abnormal behavior patterns were not nestled in the exam questions but plastered on the faces of my classmates, many of whom burst into the classroom bawling, insisting that they were unable to sit for the exam because of the election results.

The professor acquiesced and moved the exam to the following week.

I was rightfully taken aback. What were these girls even crying over? No one had died. Barack Obama would still be president for the next several months. We would have a dullard for a president for the next four years, sure, but did these girls really think that they—members of the privileged elite whose parents were paying $80,000 per year for them to attend one of the best universities in the world—would be personally affected by the reign of Donald Trump?

What was more astonishing was that my classmates—girls who supposedly represented the apex of female empowerment—did not at all embody the feminist strength that my grandmother once taught me. Incapable of sitting through a 45-minute exam because they had read on their phones that the world was ending, my classmates weren’t strong or independent—they were weak.

Back across the street at Columbia, I expected to be met with a dose of sanity—liberal-minded people like me who, although critical of Trump, would spend the day brainstorming solutions to keep democracy alive instead of narcissistically upending everyone else’s lives to make space for their mental health crises. Instead, a fever had set upon campus. These students, either melodramatically sulking to class or barricading themselves in their dorm rooms, genuinely believed that Trump’s presidency would be the end of liberal democracy.

Expecting to have a candid conversation with my peers about the future of America, I was instead branded a misogynist for daring to ask why everyone seemed so upset that afternoon.

Over the next several months, the menacing spirit of November 9th permeated classrooms, infecting the rhetoric of my professors. In a course called “Masterpieces of Western Literature,” for one, I was told that it was “incorrect to argue that a patriarchal structure can benefit society’s women.” On the flip side, I received an A in the same class for a paper that argued against prevailing gender norms in Ancient Greek society.

It wasn’t just one class. In a Shakespeare seminar the following year, my professor—believing that Titania and Bottom’s “relationship” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream was an example of “queer desire”—took points off of my exam because I disagreed with her “queer” reading about the play. When I later turned in a paper proposing that Twelfth Night was a play about transgenderism, I was greeted with an A+ grade.

Later, in my senior thesis program, I was called a misogynist for daring to cite the contrarian scholar Camille Paglia—before being ejected from the program entirely. My thesis advisor—with whom I have since cut ties over his despicable pro-Hamas rhetoric—believed that Paglia was not a scholar to be taken seriously and sent me an ominous article from The New York Times that seemed to disprove Paglia’s take on Sylvia Plath’s poem “Daddy.” The implication was, of course, that I was not free to explore the angle of the poem I was most interested in because it ran against the grain of the prevailing feminist scholarship that shrouds Plath’s work.

In other words, there was no consistent standard for what constituted “good scholarship.” A scholarly essay from Paglia—who holds a PhD from Yale University—was not taken seriously by faculty at Columbia University, while a random article from a bad journalist at The New York Times became the gold standard of literary critique simply because it said the “right” things. The same department that had rewarded me for advancing fashionable ideological readings penalized me for citing scholars whose conclusions fell outside the accepted orthodoxy.

And while I can only personally attest to such incidents at Columbia University, they reflect a much broader transformation in elite higher education, which is now increasingly defined by growing hostility toward dissent.

Indeed, I soon noticed a pattern across my English classes: my classmates and professors alike were allergic to disagreement. Parroting talking points about the death of democracy while brandishing The Communist Manifesto like a pitchfork, they refused to hear out the experiences of a young woman—me—whose parents had suffered actual oppression because of that same disturbing book. Teaching Edward Said, academia’s premier critic of the State of Israel, those same professors warned us about the resurgence of Nazism while refusing to acknowledge Israel’s role in helping so many Jews find safe homes in the wake of Hitler’s reign. Inspired by Said’s delusional “literary” essays, my classmates would claim that Jane Austen would have been complicit in imperialist expansion and that T.S. Eliot’s poems were “trash” because he was a conservative—all while refusing to engage with the actual writings of these literary greats.

The plague was not confined to English classrooms—it shaped the ideologies embedded in our school newspaper and informed the viewpoints of my literary magazine’s editorial team, which began prioritizing submissions from underrepresented demographics regardless of quality, because, as our secretary put it, “If they’re writing about oppressed minorities, it has to be good.”

How did liberalism, once the label for all things good and free, transform these publications into Joseph Stalin’s Pravda?

Back in high school, I had been taught the importance of liberalism in all its forms, and I still staunchly believe today that liberalism is the way forward when it comes to free inquiry in our society. But what the so-called progressive left embodies on college campuses today is far from the liberalism I’ve always known; instead, it is the same regressive energy that took over the Soviet Union in the 1920s. It is the same spirit that informs the politics of Darializa Chevalier and Claire Valdez—both of whom picked up their radicalism at Columbia University—and is responsible for the socialist fever that has taken over New York City over the past year. It is the same antithesis to open discourse that Dewey himself—with all his progressive tendencies—would have gawked at had he witnessed just how intolerant the educational sphere he helped shape has become.

Graduating from Columbia, I was left not with the open-minded experience I was promised in my acceptance letter but with a new acceptance letter to the Republican Party, now the more tolerant of our two major political factions. And while strands of the podcast bro right have their own racism and intolerance problems, the more moderate right—the new embodiment of classical liberalism and tolerance—offers hope for a society built on freedom and open discourse. There is, after all, undeniably more intellectual diversity on the political right than on the political left.

Over the past decade, we’ve witnessed major American institutions replicate what I observed that somber November 9th morning on the campus of Columbia University: a narcissistic tendency to blow all dissenting viewpoints out of proportion and a refusal to engage in open discourse. If Columbia taught me one thing, it’s that the intellectual (anti-intellectual?) left does not stand for freedom of expression but is concerned solely with shutting down dissenting viewpoints. This absence of free speech was exactly why my family had fled the Soviet Union back in the early 90s, and it’s the same reason that my grandmother had been so wary of Hillary Clinton back in 2016.

Today, I realize that my grandmother was never for Donald Trump at all but against the loss of freedom in our society. Having lived through the Soviet Union, she recognized the earliest symptoms of a culture that no longer tolerated dissent long before I could, and though it would take years for me to understand what she had seen immediately, I understand today that we must ask ourselves whether any given political cause can ever justify the abandonment of open inquiry. Because when challenging socialist doctrines gets you called a Nazi and a bigot, we lose the sorts of freedoms my grandmother predicted we’d lose back in 2016—the sorts of freedoms I want to fight for today.

To me, therefore, conservatism does not necessarily represent the caprice and turbulence of MAGA Republicanism but a hope for the return to a tradition that once forged our free and open society. The American right has abandoned many of these values, too, but through a return to the tradition of classical liberalism and open inquiry, we can recover the values that New York City and Columbia University have already abandoned. That’s what conservatism has always meant, after all—conserving the tried-and-true values that contribute to a flourishing society. Conserving the values that my grandmother once crossed an ocean to find, and the freedoms that make our liberal democracy worth preserving.

Christopher Nolan butchered the most important detail in The Odyssey—but that might not be his fault.

I just saw the new Odyssey this past Thursday, and to Nolan’s credit, the film is not only cohesive and engaging but also a fantastic standalone piece of art. I came into the movie with low expectations—especially given the online discourse surrounding its DEI casting—but with the exception of a few minor hiccups—Ellen Page, Zendaya, Travis Scott, and Lupita Nyong’o—I didn’t mind the casting overall. Matt Damon shone in his performance, and the action scenes were both suspenseful and entertaining.

Given my general distaste for contemporary cinema, I would go so far as to say that I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed my overall experience.

But there’s one detail I just can’t get over as a literature lover: Nolan changes the fundamental ethos of the Homeric universe—and the results are disastrous to the Odysseus our civilization has cherished for thousands of years.

At the core of Nolan’s Odyssey is the premise that Odysseus has suffered immense trauma during his time at war and just wants to forget. As the mastermind behind the Trojan horse, he feels responsible for the Trojans’ suffering and experiences PTSD-like flashbacks not unlike those of a Vietnam War veteran. Throughout the film, the goddess Athena haunts him in the form of a young girl his men behead during the sack of Troy, and by the time Odysseus reaches home, he breaks down in tears.

These are all clever plot devices that no doubt resonate with a contemporary audience familiar with the ills of war in the abstract.

There’s only one problem. Homer never wrote such an Odysseus.

In the original Greek text, Odysseus is not only largely unaffected by the Trojan War but actively revels in his conquests. In keeping with the heroic ideals of Homeric Greece, Odysseus is proud of his actions at Troy—and he wants everyone to know that he, the sacker of cities, was largely responsible for the Achaean victory.

It is no accident, then, that Odysseus’s pride also becomes the source of his sufferings.

When Odysseus and his men come up against the Cyclops Polyphemus, our hero tricks the giant by calling himself a “Nobody,” prompting Polyphemus to declare “Nobody is killing me!” Taking these words literally, the Cyclops’ allies leave Odysseus and his men alone, but Odysseus can’t stand the thought that Polyphemus will forever believe that “Nobody” defeated him. In his all-consuming pride, he pompously declares that he, Odysseus, the sacker of cities, gouged out the giant’s eye—before making his final escape.

Armed now with the knowledge of Odysseus’s identity, Polyphemus prays to Poseidon and asks the god to ensure that Odysseus and his men never return home.

In other words, Odysseus’ hubris not only sets the entire epic into motion but is also responsible for the entirety of his sufferings on the way home.

Nolan, however, consciously omits this scene from his film, claiming that it would be far too difficult to pull off such a joke in an English-speaking context. But far more plausible is that including the “Nobody” scene would have undoubtedly thwarted his efforts at creating a weaker Odysseus who believes the Trojan War was all for nothing.

But why make a weaker Odysseus in the first place?

We can only speculate, but boy, do I have some theories.

Sure, Nolan likely altered Odysseus’s character to appeal to a more sensitive, modern audience—perhaps the sorts of anti-war activists who have opposed Israel’s war in Gaza or American involvement in Iran—but it is equally as likely that Nolan simply never got the chance to understand Odysseus’s true character in the first place.

We know for certain that Nolan based his adaptation of Homer’s great epic on Emily Wilson’s 2018 translation. And the fact is that Emily Wilson portrays Odysseus as a moral coward.

It is no secret that Emily Wilson harbors a negative bias against Homer’s eponymous hero. In her introduction to The Odyssey, she calls him an “adulterer,” a “thief and a liar,” a “colonial invader,” a “mass murderer,” and a “soldier with a traumatic past” (among other far-fetched epithets). She portrays Odysseus’s intrusion in Polyphemus’ cave as an “episode” that “seems to meditate uneasily on the processes of colonization,” and repeatedly foregrounds the victims of the Trojan War rather than the Achaeans’ heroic achievements. In a Guardian interview, she admits to changing Homer’s πολύτροπος (polytropos)—an adjective that has previously been rendered as “resourceful,” “skilled in all ways,” and “cunning”—to “complicated” out of a personal belief that Odysseus does not merit a positive description at the outset of the poem.

And, of course, she repeatedly jumps at any opportunity to portray Odysseus as a coward throughout her bizarre translation.

Let’s take a look at her portrayal of the Cyclops episode—that “colonial invasion” that reads very differently between classic translations and Wilson’s abomination of a text. Specifically, we’ll examine the moment that Odysseus reveals his name to his formidable opponent.

I’d like to first show you a translation that’s not mentioned very frequently today but that you may have heard of from another literary genius—George Chapman’s Odyssey that is perhaps most famous for its appearance in John Keats’ poem.

Chapman writes,

By great necessity conquer’d, in my breast:
‘Cyclop! if any ask thee, who impos’d
Th’ unsightly blemish that thine eye enclos’d,
Say that Ulysses, old Laertes’ son,
Whose seat is Ithaca, and who hath won
Surname of City-razer, bor’d it out.’

Notice Chapman’s glory-filled diction: necessity “conquer’d” Odysseus’s breast; he “impos’d” a blemish on the Cyclops’ eye; his “seat” is in Ithaca, reemphasizing his kingly status; and, of course, he’s a “City-razer.” With Odysseus’s heroic spirit shining through so clearly, it’s no wonder that Keats was inspired to write such a beautiful homage to the epic’s first full appearance in the English language.

And it’s not just this more archaic translation that exudes glory—Robert Fagles’ 1996 translation has the following:

I called back with another burst of anger, ‘Cyclops—
if any man on the face of the earth should ask you
who blinded you, shamed you so—say Odysseus,
raider of cities, he gouged out your eye,
Laertes’ son, who makes his home in Ithaca!’

In Fagles, Odysseus, the “raider of cities” shamed the Cyclops. He’s proud of his time at Troy, and he views his connection to his Achaean homeland as the source of much of his glory.

Let’s take a look now at what Emily Wilson does to this passage.

I was
still furious, and shouted back again,
’Cyclops! If any mortal asks you how
your eye was mutilated and made blind,
say that Odysseus, the city-sacker,
Laertes’ son, who lives in Ithaca,
destroyed your sight.’

In choosing the word “mutilated,” Wilson shifts the emotional center of the passage from the victor’s glory to the victim’s injury. Her word choice frequently alters the tone of the passage, with “Whose seat is Ithaca” and “Who makes his home in Ithaca” becoming the bland “who lives in Ithaca”; similarly, the more neutral “anger”—or even Chapman’s charged “By great necessity conquer’d, in my breast”—takes on a more negative connotation with “I was still furious.”

The language is modern, sure, but it sounds more like a series of text messages rather than a victorious declaration.

Similarly, in an earlier passage, Wilson renders “Nobody” as “Noman” (in one word), deemphasizing Odysseus’s outrage at the thought of himself as nobody. In fact, English readers unfamiliar with the Greek story may miss this pun entirely, believing, perhaps, that Odysseus has simply chosen an arbitrary name for himself to disguise his identity.

But the most telling sign of Wilson’s disparagement of Odysseus’s heroism is not in this passage but in the one that follows.

In the Cyclops’ ensuing prayer to Poseidon, Fagles has the following:

‘‘Hear me—
Poseidon, god of the sea-blue mane who rocks the earth!
If I really am your son and you claim to be my father,—
come, grant that Odysseus, raider of cities,
Laertes’ son who makes his home in Ithaca,
never reaches home...’

In repeating Odysseus’s declaration verbatim, the Cyclops acknowledges Odysseus’s noble lineage and his glory as a Greek warrior.

Wilson, on the other hand, does this:

‘Listen, Earth-Shaker, Blue-Haired Poseidon:
acknowledge me your son, and be my father.
Grant that Odysseus, the city-sacker,
will never go back home...’

She completely omits the line “Laertes’ son who makes his home in Ithaca” (which, by the way, does indeed appear in the Ancient Greek), thereby weakening the Cyclops’ recognition of Odysseus’s lineage and kingship. One can surmise that this is Wilson’s attempt to sever Odysseus from his national ties, creating a sort of omni-cause where all are one and where lineage no longer matters.

But in the world of the Homeric epic, glory—and specifically Odysseus’s glory—is uniquely bound up with the theme of nostos—our hero’s burning desire to return to Ithaca. Indeed, Odysseus’s stubborn pride is reflected in the fact that he will stop at nothing to come home—even if it means enduring a greater amount of suffering along the way.

One of the most revealing episodes of Odysseus’s unwavering devotion to his homeland is when he and his men encounter the lotos-eaters; while Odysseus’s compatriots just want to eat the flowers to forget, Odysseus pulls them all away:

But I brought them back, back
to the hollow ships, and streaming tears–I forced them,
hauled them under the rowing benches, lashed them fast
and shouted out commands to my other, steady comrades:
‘Quick no time to lose, embark in the racing ships!’

Nolan’s Odysseus, however, displays no such steadfast heroism. In fact, Nolan completely alters the storyline in keeping with his depiction of Odysseus as a traumatized war veteran by having Odysseus willingly eat the lotos flowers on Calypso’s island. Instead of glorying in his war efforts, he simply wants to forget them, and at one point in the film, Calypso even warns him against eating any more of the flowers, urging him to remember his wife and son.

The fact that Odysseus would even forget Penelope and Telemachus on Calypso’s island in the first place is so grossly out of keeping with Homer’s original character that one can only presume that Nolan inherited a version of Odysseus already stripped of Homer’s heroic sensibility.

Finally, there is Nolan’s portrayal of Odysseus’s PTSD-ridden flashbacks. War-torn and emotionally destroyed by the time he reaches home, Odysseus dives into a regretful recollection of the Trojan War and gradually admits that he believes it all to have been for nothing. Viewers are thus asked to consider Odysseus’s actions in the context of our present world, and while such an artistic decision works within the universe of the film, it’s certainly not the story that Homer tells in his epic—especially given that such an anti-war ethos would have been completely foreign to the Ancient Greeks.

Nolan, nevertheless, insists on creating a world where the Achaean onslaught at Troy will have civilizational repercussions for the next several centuries—and it’s an idea he borrows again from Emily Wilson.

Let’s first take a look at Fagles’ depiction of Odysseus’s triumph in the Trojan War—and then compare it to Wilson’s.

Retelling the story of the Trojan Horse to the Phaeacians, Odysseus reminisces on his conquests in the following terms:

For Troy was fated to perish once the city lodged
inside her walls the monstrous wooden horse
where the prime of Argive power lay in wait
with death and slaughter bearing down on Troy.
And he sang how troops of Achaeans broke from cover,
streaming out of the horse’s hollow flanks to plunder Troy—
he sang how left and right they ravaged the steep city,
sang how Odysseus marched right up to Deiphobus’ house
like the god of war on attack with diehard Menelaus.
There, he sang, Odysseus fought the grimmest fight
he had ever braved but he won through at last,
thanks to Athena’s superhuman power.

Fagles consistently preserves the epic grandeur of Homer’s scene. Troy is “plundered”; the Achaeans “ravaged the steep city”; Odysseus advances “like the god of war”; the entire battle is “the grimmest fight he had ever braved.” These are the memories of someone who is proud of his conquests at war—and wants everyone around him to revel in his glory.

Wilson, on the other hand, has this:

The town was doomed to ruin when it took
that horse, chock-full of fighters bringing death
to Trojans. And he sang how the Achaeans
poured from the horse, in ambush from the hollow,
and sacked the city; how they scattered out,
destroying every neighborhood. Like Ares:
Odysseus, with Menelaus, rushed
to find Deiphobus’ house, and there
he won at last, through dreadful violence,
thanks to Athena. So the poet sang:

Notice how Wilson immediately downplays the glorious register of Homer’s original text. She translates Homer’s αἰνότατον πόλεμον (awe-inspiring war) as “dreadful violence,” toning down the glory embedded in the Greek to make a political statement about the ills of war from a contemporary perspective. Rather than celebrating Odysseus’s martial prowess, she emphasizes the evils of bloodshed, replacing heroism with shame and judgment. The very fact that she translates poleimon—the word that gave us our word “polemic”—as “violence” suggests that she cannot help but insert her own biased interpretation of the Trojan War into her translation of the poem. Instead of “awe-inspiring,” she puts “dreadful,” giving Homer’s language a distinctly negative connotation and inviting readers to interpret Odysseus as a man filled with sorrow and regret.

To be fair to Nolan and Wilson, there is some nuance at this stage in Homer’s poem. Odysseus does, indeed, start quietly weeping after his recollection of the war, but he’s not regretful in any way. He’s simply a human with deep and conflicting emotions.

And therein lies the beauty of Homer’s Odysseus. He is complex in a way that Wilson’s Odysseus is not.

Despite her supposed expertise in Ancient Greek, Wilson does little to understand the complexity embedded in Homer’s characters—or willfully misrepresents them in order to promote a lopsided worldview. She strips Odysseus of his charisma to appeal to a more liberal audience, resulting in the very Odysseus we saw this past week on the big screen. With this in mind, one can hardly blame Nolan for creating the Odysseus we’ve been shredding to pieces this past week in think-pieces across the Internet—he was simply trusting a supposed authority who gravely misled him.

The reality of any book-to-film adaptation is that it will inevitably make changes to the source material. But in this case, one particular change alters the entire world of The Odyssey, portraying a culture built on shame rather than one that revels in glory. The ending of the film is appropriately bleak, with Odysseus, though reunited with his family, grimly sailing off to honor the dead. Such a bittersweet end inserts a negative ethos into Homer’s otherwise triumphant closing chapter, and while it fits nicely into the world of the film, it’s certainly not an accurate depiction of The Odyssey we know and love.

So should you go see the film if you haven’t already? If you want a three-hour flick with Matt Damon running around trying to get home, then absolutely—and to Damon’s credit, he nails his performance. But if you want an accurate retelling of Homer’s Odyssey, then you can skip out on this latest blockbuster and wait until it hits your favorite streaming platform.

My full written review of Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey is coming soon, but in the meantime, I thought you might enjoy watching my YouTube review before you head out to see the film this weekend.

Today, I get into why Nolan’s film is good but not stellar and why you should never read the Emily Wilson “translation” of the Odyssey.

Thanks so much for watching and be on the lookout for my essay on Nolan’s Odyssey soon!

If you want to know exactly what’s wrong with a culture, take a look at the literature it produces.

There has been one such artifact floating around the cultural stratosphere—Yesteryear by influencer Caro Claire Burke—and while I’d hesitate to call it “literature,” it exposes everything that’s wrong with both the contemporary publishing industry and our civilization at large.

Burke’s novel follows a “tradwife” influencer who travels back in time and wakes up in the 19th century—only to realize that the “perfect” life she’s been living isn’t as fulfilling as she’s always believed.

Given what we know about the leftist women who run the publishing industry, you don’t really need to read the book to extrapolate its exact message, but out of curiosity (and a naive willingness to give ideologues the benefit of the doubt), I decided to read the first several chapters.

And, boy, were all of my assumptions wrong.

Yesteryear defied my expectations in the worst possible way: it was somehow even more inaccurate, judgmental, and ludicrous than I could have conceived in my wildest dreams.

Let’s take a look at the first page.

Burke’s “satire” is clumsy at best. Before we see our protagonist, Natalie Heller Mills, make a single meaningful decision, we’re told—through a self-righteous monologue—that she’s disciplined, sober, and effortlessly successful; motivated by material gain, she looks down on anyone who doesn’t embody her values.

While such a setup could be intriguing, there’s only one problem—no human being on the planet thinks this way.

In order to pull off a successful internal monologue, one must study the basic tenets of human psychology. Take Dmitri Karamazov from The Brothers Karamazov, for one. Dmitri is the last person we’d think of as a saint, and he often comes up with the most off-putting defenses for his poor life choices. Nevertheless, he possesses a basic self-awareness that makes him not only sympathetic but believable as a character.

Yesteryear’s Natalie, on the other hand, exhibits no such depth. Reduced to a list of assumptions about a given archetype, she comes off less as an individual consciousness and more as a direct embodiment of Burke’s own prejudices. And while it is true that one might expect a satirical novel to contain a greater number of over-the-top characterizations than a “serious” social critique in the vein of The Brothers Karamazov, an effective work of satire must nevertheless retain a degree of artistic subtlety. Pride and Prejudice’s ever-so-frivolous Mrs. Bennet, for instance, leaps right off the page; likewise, London’s “bright young things” in Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies are every bit as psychologically convincing as they are ridiculous.

Put simply, the best satirists effectively humanize their targets.

Not so in Yesteryear. Burke’s writing has zero subtlety—and it is clear that she has done zero research on the values of the conservative Christians she’s set out to mock.

One might excuse Burke if she had merely written a sloppy opening paragraph, but the morally self-righteous tone continues for pages on end:

One is tempted to write Natalie off as an ideological construct rather than a character in her own right. Everyone outside of her immediate circle becomes an absurd caricature—”the Angry Women,” “some hateful witch in Manhattan,” the people “crazy with bloodthirst”—and throughout it all, Burke can’t help but continually point out the supposed shortcomings of “tradwife” parenting. Natalie’s asides, after all, are so obviously written through the lens of the author rather than through the eyes of our protagonist that one is tempted to dismiss the entire novel as a second-rate manifesto.

By the end of the first chapter, it becomes painfully obvious that Burke has never once meaningfully interacted with the sort of person she means to satirize, and therein lies the biggest problem with her critique: Burke is only capable of presenting a series of cardboard villains because she refuses to acknowledge that her political opponents are human, too.

One is left, therefore, to characterize Burke’s novel as revolting and despicable. Sure, the “tradwife” life isn‘t for everyone—trust me, I’m certainly no conservative Christian—but one cannot deny that many women who do become stay-at-home mothers report feeling more fulfilled than ever. To portray conservative women as power-hungry grifters devoid of self-awareness is not only grossly inaccurate but mind-numbingly evil.

One can only hope that Yesteryear—like many other contemporary “literary” novels examining hyper-specific contemporary problems from hyper-specific contemporary angles—will disappear into the sands of time like the might of King Ozymandias. But the fact that Yesteryear has caused quite a national storm over the past few months raises a far more interesting question than whether Burke can write believable characters (she can’t): why was this particular story—with its one-dimensional ideals and insufferable writing style—given so much attention in literary circles?

The answer, of course, has less to do with Yesteryear’s objective literary merit and more to do with the ideology embedded in its pages.

I can almost guarantee, in fact, that if someone had written a novel with a similar one-dimensional caricature of a radical leftist, the entire literary world would be losing it as we speak. We’d be seeing thinkpieces right and left about how the author is “dehumanizing political opponents by reducing them to ideological caricatures,” how the novel is “a shallow culture-war screed masquerading as literature,” or how the writing style itself is “artistically bankrupt.”

We can speculate, of course, about what such a reaction might look like, but we might never know for certain because the publishing industry would never allow such a novel to reach our shelves in the first place.

Literary agents and editors alike have declared an industry-wide boycott on stories with traditional sensibilities, blacklisting everything from “conservative leaning books” and “dated ideals of relationships” to “love triangles” and “‘clean’ romance.” While any one of these exclusions might seem innocuous in isolation, when dozens of gatekeepers begin rejecting the same sorts of books for the same ideological reasons, these biases permeate the editorial practices of an entire institution.

In other words, when enough gatekeepers create similar laundry lists of topics they don’t want to read about, an entire literary culture becomes intellectually homogenized.

If the vast majority of agents, after all, decide that they don’t want to represent stories about religion, then it becomes virtually impossible for an author writing positively about religion to get his or her book on the market, effectively boycotting that topic from the entire industry—and from the carefully curated books that get delivered to the shelves of your local bookstore.

But how bad is the problem, really?

I analyzed trends across 14 “Anti-Manuscript Wish Lists” from literary agents and editors, and the results are both illuminating and disturbing.

Here are the lists I hunted down from various corners of the Internet:

While it is industry standard for publishing professionals to reject genres outside of their specialty, a more chilling pattern emerges upon a closer perusal of these guidelines. Nearly every agent and editor above reports an aversion to religious themes, and a striking number reject books that feature police officers, military protagonists, conservatives, and Zionists. Several agents discourage the submission of stories that portray marginalized identities (unless written by authors sharing those identities), and others explicitly dismiss books they see as politically or morally out of step with their own values.

While a list of 14 is by no means representative of every professional in the publishing industry, the fact that many agents and editors now feel comfortable publicly announcing these ideological exclusions should concern anyone who believes that literature benefits from genuine viewpoint diversity. Because regardless of intention, the practical effect of these lists is to send a clear message to religious and conservative writers: your stories are not welcome here.

Even conservatives who don’t write overtly “conservative” fiction face the possibility of rejection for promoting “dated ideals of relationships” (whatever that means) or “morality stories” (which just means “morality I disagree with”). One literary agent, for instance, lamented that my novel, which examines the role of beauty and religion in our contemporary culture, failed to adequately address “privilege” and featured “emotionally supportive men.”

Across my three novels, I frequently explore themes of marriage, faith, duty, and morality because they rank among the most enduring questions of our civilization. Yet because my characters ultimately choose marriage over polyamory, faith over spiritual nihilism, and objective morality over moral relativism, they become alien to literary agents who have actively imposed an embargo on the traditional moral imagination.

I was lucky enough to gather tangible evidence of ideological bias in the literary establishment, but the fact is that these prejudices are seldom expressed so bluntly. Instead, they are often reframed as matters of “personal taste,” with agents and editors frequently writing off manuscripts on the basis that they didn’t “connect” with the story or that they couldn’t “relate” to the characters. What this means in practice is that literary agents don’t end up championing the sorts of traditional or religious ideals they don’t subscribe to themselves, resulting in an entire literary milieu where manuscripts become filtered not only by literary merit or commercial viability, but also by ideological compatibility.

This is soft censorship at its finest—and it defies literature’s very purpose to portray a diversity of characters and convictions.

It is true that some of our culture’s greatest authors have been devoted leftists—Jean Paul Sartre, Bertolt Brecht, George Bernard Shaw, to name a few—but it is also true that many others have produced great works of literature—Crime and Punishment, Brideshead Revisited, Anna Karenina—with more “traditional” takeaways. Both are equally valid, and both deserve to live on our shelves. At the end of the day, after all, a healthy literary ecosystem should welcome a variety of viewpoints, featuring novels that sympathetically portray Christians, Republicans, police officers, soldiers, stay-at-home mothers, and traditional families—as well as socialists, atheists, progressives, feminists, environmentalists, and leftists. One need not come at the expense of the other.

Today, however, authors are increasingly discouraged from writing believable, likable characters from across the ideological spectrum. They are either confined to launching an attack on their opponents in the vein of Yesteryear or producing “relatable” protagonists with leftist beliefs. The result is an entire literary culture that has become convinced that the general reading public only wants books like Yesteryear—when in reality, novels that contain alternative worldviews are filtered out long before readers ever have the opportunity to choose them.

But I would predict that if we allowed books with more traditional messages and more politically diverse characters to exit the publishing pipeline, then such books would find a much broader readership than Yesteryear—because most of us are sick of this crap.

The success of Yesteryear poses a grim reality for heterodox readers and writers across the country, but not all hope is lost for the ideologically contrarian novel. As readers, we must actively push for a publishing culture that welcomes writers from across all aisles of the political spectrum. We must make our voices heard and fight against soft censorship in the publishing industry, reminding gatekeepers that literature cannot fulfill its highest purpose until it is free to imagine every possibility of the human mind—and to challenge our existing sensibilities. Because the purpose of fiction has never been to reassure us that our political opponents are monsters but to remind us that, like us, they are human, too.

The day we remember that lesson will be the day our culture regains its humanity.

Loving America has become something of a faux pas.

Across all aisles of the political spectrum, America hatred is now a rite of passage. On the left, America is a nation built on racism, oppression, and inequality—and should therefore be burned to the ground. On the right, America has lost its former glory at the hands of evil immigrants (especially the Jews) who wish to wipe out Christian values—and burn the country to the ground.

But those of us who aren’t preoccupied with America burning in its various iterations have more than a handful of nice things to say about a country that has always represented hope, dreams, equality, and freedom to millions of people across our globe. And as one of those deplorable Jewish immigrant kids, I wanted to do something special for my favorite country on her 250th birthday—so I wrote her this letter.

I hope you’ll read it, too.

Dear America,

I don’t remember the first time I heard your name, but it must have been sometime in my stroller days when, carted off to preschool with my brown kosichki (braids) and my turquoise varezhki (mittens), I was forced to learn a bunch of words that we didn’t have at home. See, the walls of my small two-bedroom apartment were plastered with Cyrillic letters, and I ran around singing the Russian alphabet at two before memorizing my first Pushkin poem at the age of three. I grew up on funny cartoons that the other playground kids had never heard of, and my favorite song—the one about a set of swings that hurled you up towards the sky—was in a language that my classmates didn’t understand.

Maybe my trouble relating to the other preschoolers sprouted from the fact that I didn’t speak their language very well—and they certainly didn’t speak mine. I could introduce myself and count to ten, but I didn’t know what my teachers meant by “birdhouse” or “windowsill,” and the only reason I knew the days of the week was because I’d learned them from my grandmother’s stockpile of common English phrases. She might laugh today at the seemingly far-fetched notion that there was ever a time that she taught me English—she barely speaks it herself—but back then, she was the only one in my family patient enough to teach a Russian girl how to talk to the Amerikantsi.

Yet it wasn’t until I was five years old that it dawned on me that I wasn’t properly a Russian girl.

See, by the time I hit Kindergarten, reading those Cyrillic letters began to annoy me—they were different from the letters that we had in school, and there were so many more of them to piece together. Overwhelmed, I’d stomp around that old apartment proclaiming that I didn’t want to read those letters anymore (too bad no one had told me about my future best friend Fyodor back then), and my dad was quick to take my side.

Nestled on our brown faux leather couch between a Russian picture book and a mug of chamomile tea, my dad crossed his arms. “Why do you keep bothering her with those Russian books?” he insisted, scowling at my mom. “She doesn’t need Russian. Our daughter is an American.”

An American? Was I really one of those?

It didn’t seem nice to be an American—whatever that was. Whenever the word was brought up in my family, it was always used as an insult—like “uncultured” or “stupid” or one of those other words that grownups don’t say around children. If my friend Megan’s parents didn’t bring their daughter to the symphony with me, for one, it was because they were Amerikantsi. If Annie’s dad packed her potato chips for lunch, it was because he was Amerikanets. If Josh’s mom signed him up for softball after school, it was because she was Amerikanka.

Those Amerikantsi did some pretty weird things, too. Where I grew up in Chicago, they were always having arguments about some cubs and some socks, and over winter break, they always got presents a week before I did, which didn’t seem very fair. They went outside without their shapkas and scharfs (hats and scarves) and sat in front of the air conditioner all day, which was going to give them pneumonia. They didn’t save their plastic bags and mason jars, and they liked to prance around the house without their tapochki (slippers). They didn’t even congratulate you after you got out of the shower.1

The worst one was when you were in the airport and some teenager with a hoodie and a plastic suitcase would be sitting na polu—on the floor.

You weren’t ever supposed to sit on the floor.

My grandmother would shake her head and sigh. “Amerikantsi!”

Suffice it to say that I didn’t want to be one of those Amerikantsi. They were lazy, uncultured, rash, and, apparently, comically unprepared for reality.

So growing up, I liked to say that I was Russkaya—and that didn’t seem to bother anyone. The kids at school never seemed to like me anyway—because I didn’t understand their sports, their holidays, their food, their music, their TV shows—and I didn’t really like them back. I had my Ukrainian best friend outside of school, and she understood better than anyone that you had to wear your tapochki inside. Her dad was doktor, and her mom was doktor, and together, we watched our favorite Soviet cartoon about the wolf who always chased the rabbit—and I felt understood.

Maybe that’s also why I started reading Russian literature from an early age—there were people in those pages who understood my habits and my psyche better than I did myself. In fact, it might have been my status as a perpetual outsider that fostered my broader love of literature, where someone was always being misunderstood.

It was also through literature that I soon learned to speak English the proper way—where I’d picked up not only “birdhouse” and “windowsill” but also “dilapidated” and “alacrity”—and I couldn’t wait to wow those Amerikantsi with my new vocabulary.

Maybe that was what it would take to finally be understood.

So imagine my surprise when I realized that none of the other eight-year-olds had ever heard of “pariah” and “sagacity”—words I’d picked up from my friend Tom Sawyer—and I remained just as unintelligible as ever. Besides, no one wanted to hear about my travels around the world in 80 days with Phileas Fogg; they only wanted to talk about touchdowns and Nintendos and the Krusty Krab.

Frustrated, I sulked back home to orange fish soups and my stuffed Cheburashka—a character from my favorite Russian cartoon.

So, no offense, America, but I didn’t really get why you were special. Your kids didn’t stand a chance against me in fourth grade multiplication tables (I learned the Soviet way), and your grownups liked Wrigley Field way more than the Lyric Opera. In fact, you seemed kind of crummy to me—especially after I left you for the first time to visit my cousins in Britain and made some European friends.

God, it was just like in the Harry Potter books! And best of all, they didn’t do Amerikanskiye things.

Our friends across the pond liked reading novels and going to the ballet and eating strawberries and broccoli instead of hamburgers and learning new languages and visiting art museums and dressing like princesses rather than like the homeless guy next door. Instead of learning about slavery in thirteen different grade levels, they learned about kings and queens and Shakespeare, and instead of watching hillbillies on horses while munching on some chicken legs, they sat at proper tables eating crumpets with their Earl Grey teas.

Flying back from Heathrow, I couldn’t believe just how much I’d fallen in love with Trafalgar Square and the Globe Theater and those quaint little shops on Oxford Street.

In the last row of the economy cabin, I turned to my mom and asked her why I had to be American when my cousins could be British. After all, England was so much more culturally similar to the European mentality I’d grown up with.

Besides, I didn’t understand why my parents—who perpetually looked down on those Amerikantsi—had ever left the Motherland in the first place. It’s not like our lives were that great, anyway.

By then I was a teenager, and I’d learned in school from James Baldwin and Ta-Nehisi Coates that the American Dream was a lie, and that no one really got ahead in a country that was prejudiced against anyone who wasn’t Bill Gates (this was before Elon’s time). No one seemed to like us or to understand why we celebrated Christmas on December 31st—or why a bunch of Jews put up Christmas trees on New Year’s to begin with—and if it was really so great in America, then why did it take us sixteen years to afford one of those European vacations that my classmates had been on about since practically the second grade, and why did so many of the other kids have houses with four stories and gardens in their backyards when we were confined to our teeny two-bedroom apartment all our lives, and why did we have to fly in the very last row of the entire plane, and why did all my teachers say that America was mean and racist, and why did Hemingway and T.S. Eliot and all my favorite writers leave if it was so great back in America, where the plane would dump us off in several hours, and we’d go back to our lame sports and fake food and failing education system once again?

I could always move to Europe later on in life, my mom suggested. If I really wanted to.2

That was it! No more of these Amerikantsi! I could be a proper European—just like all the authors of my favorite books! I could walk up and down The Strand just like my favorite Dickens characters and maybe take afternoon tea at the Savoy. I could live a proper cultured life where people could pronounce my parents’ home country (Azerbaijan) or, at least, had heard of it. I could revisit my European roots and live my adult life in a world that understood good food and great literature and all the oddities of growing up very un-American.

America—I really thought that I was going to leave you!

In fact, if I hadn’t missed that application deadline to Oxford—my lifelong dream college where I was going to be just like Hermione Grainger—maybe I wouldn’t be here with you anymore.

Maybe I would have been irrevocably immersed in that strange European propaganda that somehow found its way into my childhood and convinced me—as it’s convinced so many other people—that America is the land of racism and uncultured boors.

Maybe you would have never had the chance to prove to me just how wonderful you are.

Shortly after my seventeenth birthday, longing to leave the Midwest and its baseball and its Irish pub obsession, I submitted an application to Columbia University. According to my homeroom teacher, my chances were slim at best. I hadn’t been immersed in endless community service projects like all the other American kids, and you really didn’t get into the Ivy League without connections, he explained. Most of those Columbia kids were either Chinese nationals who paid the full tuition or billionaires’ daughters who played weird sports like squash. You didn’t get into the Ivy League as some no-name immigrant kid with no extracurriculars (except reading books and writing novels, which hardly counted), and you certainly didn’t live out the American Dream because the American Dream did not exist.

America had been rigged against me, I was told at school, from the very start.

So when I got my acceptance letter to Columbia that week in March, I couldn’t believe it.

Could my teachers have all been wrong?

After all, this no-name immigrant kid with no money and no connections and no extracurriculars was going to the mystical Ivy League.

I won’t tell you, America, about how Columbia University kind of sucked (you can read about that here), but I know it’s not your fault that a bunch of clowns took a really great idea and flushed it down the toilet. (You might not be surprised to learn, America, that those same people tend to hate you most.) But despite Columbia’s many flaws, the fact is that you, America, helped create a system where a no-name kid like me who wrote corny novels in her tiny bedroom could receive one of the best educations in the world—and could one day see her words in bookstores. You helped me perceive a universe of possibilities where, suddenly, dreams weren’t “exclusionary,” like that schmuck Ta-Nehisi Coates had written, but where the American Dream was playing out right before my eyes.

All around me, my classmates were interning at the White House and starting companies and applying to medical school and working in banks and writing screenplays and becoming models—and, suddenly, I felt like I could do something life-changing, too.

I could be a writer—just like I’d always wanted to be! I could occupy a universe where no one was going to laugh at me for my vocabulary and where I could talk about all the times I’d ever felt alone. Somewhere along the way, maybe some other little girl—with her long braids and woollen mittens—would feel like she belonged amongst my stories just like I’d once felt that I’d belonged among Pierre and Andrei and Natasha. I could be just like the writers who had gotten me through years of alienation, and no one was going to stop me because this was America, and you could do anything you wanted.

These Amerikantsi—many of whom, contrary to what I’d always been told, also came from no-name immigrant families—were off changing the world!3

And I could change the world, too. I could move people with the same words that had once burdened me as a kid—the English words that were the lifeblood of my stories and formed the language of my people—the Americans.

America, maybe you were kind of cool.

But it wasn’t until my twenty-first birthday that I really fell in love with you—that I learned how much you’d done for my poor family when they’d needed help the most. It wasn’t until my twenty-first birthday that I learned why my parents moved here in the first place—and how passionately you had saved them.

It was over brunch not too long after my graduation—or maybe several weeks before it. Either way, I was back in Chicago for a few weeks, and it was time to catch up with my mom.

It was on that same morning that I learned that in 1991, my dad had gone to prison for being different.

An engineering job at Azerbaijan’s first “tech firm,” he scored a senior position at the company early on in his career. Around the same time, as the Soviet Union collapsed and Azerbaijan became an independent state, a few corrupt officials, jealous of his success, decided to frame him for money laundering because, as a Jew, he wasn’t like everyone else.

With no set legal process in a brand new country, my dad was carted off to prison in a place that didn’t like you for being different.4

I wish I could tell that genius Ta-Nehisi Coates that my family knows a thing or two about oppression.

But my dad didn’t let any of that get to him. He survived his sentence by gaining the respect of a group of high-profile criminals, who helped him secure a parole-like reprieve. By the time he got home nine months later, my grandparents had already been in contact with you, America. You promised us a new home where none of us would be persecuted for being different—because you said that being different was all right.

It doesn’t matter that, in coming to America, my dad was forced to abandon both his career and his possessions. It doesn’t matter that he arrived at O’Hare Airport in Chicago with just $100 in his pocket after several years of professional success back home. It doesn’t matter that he lived in a Jewish ghetto and fried potatoes at Burger King while holding a master’s degree in engineering. It doesn’t matter that he learned English from his answering machine and got his bike stolen during his first year in his new home. It doesn’t matter that it took him years to save up to propose to my mom and to bring her to America with him.

None of that mattered because in America, my dad was free.

And no one was ever going to come after him just because he was different.

After several years, my dad, a no-name immigrant who had spent nine months in prison in his late twenties, had saved up enough money to buy that dumpy two-bedroom apartment I always compared to the mansions of my peers. After several years, he had put his entire savings into my education and sent me, a no-name immigrant kid, to the same grade school that was good enough for our own president. After another decade, he could afford to buy his kid an international plane ticket to go on a vacation, and after another several months, he saw his favorite daughter off to another school that had been good enough not just for that current president but for many more throughout our history.

All of the things that had seemed pretty lame to me growing up suddenly became amazing.

Miraculous, even.

It was a miracle what you could do as a random immigrant to America.

And suddenly, I understood why my parents had sacrificed everything they had back at home so that I could have my life here—in America.

It truly is a miracle that, today, I’m sitting here at 1:19am on Tuesday morning because I don’t have to get up early for work tomorrow because, as an American entrepreneur, I set my own schedule and earn my own money. It’s a miracle that I got one of the best educations in the world and found a way to make a great living for myself with my two English degrees. It’s a miracle that I’m lucky enough to hold a passport that allows me to visit almost any other country in the world, and it’s a miracle that, following every international vacation that I can now afford with my own earnings, I come back to a home that encourages freedom and innovation. And it’s a miracle that I live in a country where I can support myself financially while chasing my dreams of one day becoming a famous writer.

And the crazy thing is, America, I know I’m going to realize those dreams because I have you.

Jeez, America, I owe you an apology. You’re not just pretty cool. You’re wonderful.

I’ve never believed in God, but I do believe in miracles. And I know that it’s a miracle that, out of all of the places I could have been born on our lonely planet, I have the honor and the privilege to be the first person in my family to have been born in the greatest country in the world. Today, I wake up every morning (or afternoon, when I’m up late writing these essays) with an inordinate amount of gratitude that I’m lucky enough to call myself an American.

Maybe I won’t ever understand, America, why your people like watching guys with funny sticks hit balls and run around a field, and maybe I’ll have to talk to you one of these days about why none of them have ever seen a ballet, but I’ll take air conditioners and removable water bottle caps and 24-hour supermarkets and slop bowls and even those oblivious tourists in Times Square over Russian militancy and British totalitarianism any day.

America, I hope you know that your haters are wrong. The American Dream is real, and I can prove it!

I am the American Dream.

America, I’m glad we became best friends. I’ll always have your back when all the bullies come your way—just like you’ve always had mine.

Here’s to 250 years of freedom, innovation, diversity, and the power to be anyone you want to be.

And even though your hamburgers are really crappy, I love you dearly—and will love you forever.

Happy 250th birthday to the greatest country on planet Earth.

Your biggest fan,

Liza

When we introduce ourselves to someone new, we often ask where they’re from or what they do for a living—but if you really want to get to know someone, ask them about the books that have stayed with them the longest.

What’s their favorite novel? Which book made them cry the most? Which one disappointed them? Which character felt uncannily familiar?

The answers to these questions tell a far richer story than a simple list of favorite books ever could—so today, I’ve put together a list of fifty questions that every serious reader should answer—as well as my personal responses.

If you’ve been following me for a while, you might not be surprised at some of my answers (yes, there’s an absurd amount of Dostoyevsky), but there are also many favorites I haven’t yet had the chance to discuss on Pens and Poison.

So if you really want to get to know me, look no further than my new literary questionnaire.

I’ve left a blank questionnaire template at the bottom of my answers so that you can fill out your own version in the comments. I’d love to get to know my readers, and I have a feeling that your list will tell me a lot more about you than you realize :)

Without further ado, here are the 50 questions that every serious reader should answer—and my personal responses.

50 Questions for Every Serious Reader (Liza’s Version)

1. Favorite book
The Brothers Karamazov — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

2. Second-favorite book
Crime and Punishment — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

3. Third-favorite book
White Nights — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

4. Favorite book that’s not by Dostoyevsky, ffs
The Sound and the Fury — William Faulkner

5. Least favorite book
Normal People — Sally Rooney

6. Second-least favorite book
Beloved — Toni Morrison

7. Book that made me cry the most
White Nights — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

8. Book that made me laugh the most
Three Men in a Boat — Jerome K. Jerome

9. Most underrated novel
Beware of Pity — Stefan Zweig

10. Most overrated novel
The Handmaid’s Tale — Margaret Atwood

11. Book I wish everyone would read
The World of Yesterday — Stefan Zweig

12. Book I wish I’d read sooner
The Unbearable Lightness of Being — Milan Kundera

13. Book that changed the way I think
The Screwtape Letters — C. S. Lewis

14. Most beautiful prose I’ve ever read
Pale Fire — Vladimir Nabokov

15. Favorite opening sentence
From a little after two oclock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the office because her father had called it that—a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty-three summers because when she was a girl someone had believed that light and moving air carried heat and that dark was always cooler, and which (as the sun shone fuller and fuller on that side of the house) became latticed with yellow slashes full of dust motes which Quentin thought of as being flecks of the dead old dried paint itself blown inward from the scaling blinds as wind might have blown them.

(Absalom, Absalom! — William Faulkner)

16. Favorite ending
Nausea — Jean-Paul Sartre

17. Favorite literary character
Aloysius (Brideshead Revisited — Evelyn Waugh)

18. Literary character I relate to most
Natasha Rostova (War and Peace — Leo Tolstoy)

19. Favorite literary villain
Augustus Melmotte (The Way We Live Now — Anthony Trollope)

20. Favorite author
Fyodor Dostoyevsky

21. Favorite living author
Dostoyevsky—he lives in my heart.

22. Book I return to again and again
Crime and Punishment — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

23. The book I’d save if I could keep only one
The Iliad — Homer

24. The book I’d recommend to someone who wants to fall in love with literature
Middlemarch — George Eliot

25. Book I’ve reread the most
The Catcher in the Rye — J. D. Salinger

26. Favorite novella
Chess Story — Stefan Zweig

27. Favorite short story
A Rose for Emily — William Faulkner

28. Saddest ending
Tess of the d’Urbervilles — Thomas Hardy

29. Happiest ending
Jane Eyre — Charlotte Brontë

30. Favorite play
Hamlet — William Shakespeare

31. Favorite poem
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock — T.S. Eliot

32. Favorite opening chapter
East of Eden — John Steinbeck

33. Favorite closing chapter
Crime and Punishment — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

34. Favorite literary friendship
Raskolnikov and Razhumikhin (Crime and Punishment — Fyodor Dostoyevsky)

35. Favorite literary romance
Amelia and Dobbin (Vanity Fair — William Makepeace Thackeray)

36. Most unforgettable scene in literature
Phoebe on the merry-go-round in Central Park (The Catcher in the Rye — J.D. Salinger)

37. Best narrator
Nick Carraway (The Great Gatsby — F. Scott Fitzgerald)

38. Book I wish had a sequel
None of them—sequels are usually bad.

39. Book that intimidated me the most
The Holy Bible

40. Hardest book I’ve ever finished
The Phenomenology of Spirit — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

41. Book that surprised me the most
Romeo and Juliet — William Shakespeare

42. Book that disappointed me the most
Never Let Me Go — Kazuo Ishiguro

43. Book I recommend most often
Anna Karenina — Leo Tolstoy

44. Book I wish more people knew about
The Childhood of a Leader — Jean-Paul Sartre

45. Book I wish I could read again for the first time
The Master and Margarita — Mikhail Bulgakov

46. Book that made me fall in love with reading
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone — J.K. Rowling

47. Book that deserves to be taught in every school
Basic Economics — Thomas Sowell

48. The greatest novel ever written
The Brothers Karamazov — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

49. The most beautiful sentence I’ve ever read

For the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

(Dover Beach — Matthew Arnold)

50. One final recommendation that hasn’t been mentioned yet
The Magic Mountain — Thomas Mann

Now—onto you!

50 Questions For Every Serious Reader (For You to Answer)

1. Favorite book

2. Second-favorite book

3. Third-favorite book

4. Favorite book that’s not by your favorite author

5. Least favorite book

6. Second-least favorite book

7. Book that made you cry the most

8. Book that made you laugh the most

9. Most underrated novel

10. Most overrated novel

11. Book you wish everyone would read

12. Book you wish you’d read sooner

13. Book that changed the way you think

14. Most beautiful prose you’ve ever read

15. Favorite opening sentence

16. Favorite ending

17. Favorite literary character

18. Literary character you relate to most

19. Favorite literary villain

20. Favorite author

21. Favorite living author

22. Book you return to again and again

23. The book you’d save if you could keep only one

24. The book you’d recommend to someone who wants to fall in love with literature

25. Book you’ve reread the most

26. Favorite novella

27. Favorite short story

28. Saddest ending

29. Happiest ending

30. Favorite play

31. Favorite poem

32. Favorite opening chapter

33. Favorite closing chapter

34. Favorite literary friendship

35. Favorite literary romance

36. Most unforgettable scene in literature

37. Best narrator

38. Book you wish had a sequel

39. Book that intimidated you the most

40. Hardest book you’ve ever finished

41. Book that surprised you the most

42. Book that disappointed you the most

43. Book you recommend most often

44. Book you wish more people knew about

45. Book you wish you could read again for the first time

46. Book that made you fall in love with reading

47. Book that deserves to be taught in every school

48. The greatest novel ever written

49. The most beautiful sentence you’ve ever read

50. One final recommendation that hasn’t been mentioned yet

That was fun! Don’t forget to leave me your lists in the comments!

One of the most common interpretations of Crime and Punishment is also one of its greatest misreadings.

When I studied Crime and Punishment at Columbia, we focused on Raskolnikov’s abject poverty, his relationship to masculinity, and the anguish that plagues him throughout the book.1 Though these themes do make an appearance in the novel in one way or another, they don’t even scratch the surface of the central question of his most monumental work: Why does Raskolnikov commit murder?

The modern university and the contemporary literary establishment often treat Crime and Punishment as a novel about poverty, oppression, and inequality. According to this reading, Raskolnikov kills the pawnbroker because he has no other choice. Reduced to nisheta—a Russian word that suggests extreme poverty to the point of moral degradation—Raskolnikov acts out of desperation. Proponents of this reading often turn to the novel’s epilogue, where nisheta is cited as Raskolnikov’s primary motive, but curiously enough, Raskolnikov himself rejects this explanation. Earlier in the novel, in fact, he explicitly tells Sonya that his crime was not done to feed his family—and that it had nothing to do with money. Indeed, had Raskolnikov’s crime been economically motivated, we might have expected him to use at least some of the money he took from the pawnbroker for the greater good of society—or at least to help out his mother and sister. Instead, he hides the money and leaves it untouched. These circumstances stump the jury at his trial; nevertheless, they conclude that Raskolnikov had good intentions and commute his sentence.

It is still tempting to conclude that Raskolnikov’s crime is economically motivated: the reason we say sympathize so much with Raskolnikov, one might argue, is that he lives in an unjust society that has made such a murder practically inevitable—after all, what else could he have done to feed himself? Such readings often turn Crime and Punishment into an explicitly political novel that conveniently serves contemporary left-wing or even Marxist causes, inviting, for instance, comparisons between Raskolnikov and Luigi Mangione: both men were justified, these readers will claim, in sacrificing a single individual for the greater good of society.

But what such Marxist apologists often miss about Crime and Punishment is Dostoyevsky’s deeper exploration of human psychology. Indeed, Raskolnikov’s crime is philosophically rather than economically motivated, and Crime and Punishment is more a novel about morality than it is about poverty and oppression.

But if Raskolnikov’s crime isn’t motivated by poverty, then what is his motivation?

To answer that question, we must look beyond the economic circumstances of nineteenth-century Russia and toward the intellectual currents that shaped both Raskolnikov and his creator.

Dostoyevsky was a military engineer before he became a writer, but prior to military school, he attended a French boarding school, where he developed a love for French literature. His first literary project, in fact, was a translation of a lesser-known Balzac novel into Russian, and though the book flopped upon its release, he spent the next several years of his life enamored both by French culture and the progressive ideas coming out of the French academy. In his mid-twenties, he discovered the writings of Charles Fourier, the founder of utopian socialism, and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the so-called “father of anarchism.” Around the same time, he joined an underground literary group called the Petrashevsky Circle whose founder was a known disciple of Fourier.

Fourier’s utopian philosophy shared a fundamental core with the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham, who believed that the morality of a given action must be judged according to whether it increases the sum of human happiness, which, in turn, would lead to collective social harmony. Though Dostoyevsky was actively involved in Petrashevsky’s secret society, he was skeptical of the utilitarian idea that individual human beings could be sacrificed for the greater good of the collective, and it was this doubt that would eventually become the primary philosophical question of his two early great works: Notes from the Underground and Crime and Punishment.

The following year, members of the Petrashevsky Circle were sentenced to death for conspiratorial activity, and Dostoyevsky prepared to meet his fate in front of a firing squad—that is, before an incoming letter from the tsar saved his life. Pardoned, he was sent instead to exile in Siberia, where, much like Raskolnikov, he turned to religion and developed deeply religious tendencies. Transformed by his near-execution, he embraced Christian morality over abstract intellectual theories and espoused individual human beings over the collective abstraction of “humanity.” His transformation is famously captured in the final pages of Crime and Punishment: “Instead of dialectic, there was life.”

Following his release from prison, Dostoyevsky set out to challenge utopian socialism through literature.

While his later novel Demons tackles the intricacies of his early revolutionary days and the ills of Russian nihilism, his first great novel, Notes from the Underground, directly attacks utopian socialism through the musings of the Underground Man, who rejects utilitarianism’s “mathematical consciousness” and instead draws attention to the complexities of human nature. A direct response to Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s 1863 novel What is to Be Done?, Notes from the Underground critiques socialism’s central premise that human beings are rational creatures who can mathematically organize society for the greater good of the collective. Instead, according to the Underground Man, people deliberately act against their own interests and frequently desire freedom over happiness.

It is this attack on the utopian “mathematical consciousness” that lies at the heart of Crime and Punishment, which builds on many of Dostoyevsky’s ideas in Notes from Underground. But unlike the Underground Man, who rails against the utopian “mathematical consciousness,” Raskolnikov embraces it.

We first learn of Raskolnikov’s true motives in Chapter 5 of Part 3, where he and his friend Razhumikhin visit the police inspector Porfiry Petrovich.

Exasperated by the socialists at his housewarming party the previous night, Razhumikhin dismisses the utopian premise that crime is the natural consequence of an unjust and “abnormal” society. “They believe that a social system that has come out of some mathematical brain is going to organise all humanity at once and make it just and sinless in an instant, quicker than any living process!” he exclaims. Like the Underground Man, he observes that progressive socialists are quick to dispense with human nature and is skeptical of the assumption that the total eradication of poverty would lead to a thriving utopia. In attacking the Petrashevsky Circle’s philosophies, Razhumikhin thus becomes a stand-in for Dostoyevsky’s own ideas.2

But what is even more important to understanding Crime and Punishment’s overall message lies in one of the final observations in Razhumikhin’s monologue.

Razhumikhin tells us that the socialists believe that “the soul is retrograde.”

This characterization paints the most lucid picture of Dostoyevsky’s own convictions: the progressive nineteenth-century consciousness has lost sight of the human soul.

And that is precisely why Raskolnikov is driven to commit murder: he is spiritually homeless.

Indeed, Raskolnikov can no longer find meaning in his surroundings and therefore becomes easily susceptible to a tidy, hyper-rational way of thought. In his infamous article, he argues that there are so-called “ordinary people” and “extraordinary people,” and that the latter group holds the power to rise above the law for the promotion of the greater good. He repeatedly cites Napoleon as an example and argues that Kepler and Newton would have been morally justified in killing a dozen or so people if it meant that their ideas would benefit the rest of humanity.

This is the mathematical consciousness that Razhumikhin describes earlier in the chapter: the idea that each individual life has a set value, and that some lives are more valuable than others. Under this paradigm, each individual human action becomes nothing more than a series of calculations: Raskolnikov is justified in killing a woman who supposedly has no value to society—whom he repeatedly calls a “louse”—because her demise would theoretically benefit a great number of people.

But as Dostoyevsky will demonstrate by the end of the novel, that’s not quite how it works.

It is no accident that Dostoyevsky makes Raskolnikov into a student who expresses his ideas in an article: he wishes to show us that ideas developed in an intellectual vacuum often fall apart when brought into the context of the real world. The pawnbroker’s life might be useless to Raskolnikov in the abstract, but in reality, she is an individual human being with a living soul.

Crime and Punishment therefore protests against the utilitarian psychology that would soon infest not only Soviet Russia3 but also the more radical wings of our contemporary Western world. By analyzing the social movements of nineteenth-century Russia, Dostoyevsky masterfully predicted the eventual catastrophe of the Soviet Union and the “mathematical consciousness” that would lead to the loss of millions of lives in the name of greater social good.4 But what is even more astonishing is the extent to which Dostoyevsky anticipated the moral catastrophe of an ongoing radical leftist human experiment: when you can reduce humanity as a whole to an abstract mathematical equation, individual human lives become expendable.

Crime and Punishment is thus not a novel about poverty or income inequality but about the moral implications of a murder that’s supposedly done for the greater good—and about the dangers of utilitarianism. After all, Raskolnikov doesn’t kill the pawnbroker to feed his family or the world around him—he doesn’t even necessarily kill her because he believes that her life is worthless and that society would be better off without her. He kills the pawnbroker to prove a point to himself that he is one of these “extraordinary” people. In this way, Dostoyevsky masterfully highlights the arrogance and egoism that underpins a supposedly selfless and morally upright philosophy.

The catch is, of course, that Raskolnikov is not extraordinary in the least. Though Raskolnikov initially feels justified in defying moral law, as the novel progresses, he increasingly becomes sickened by his own philosophy and eventually confesses to his murder, learning that no one is above moral law and that innocent people die when you lose sight of the individual soul.

It is this idea that often makes modern progressive readers uncomfortable with the novel’s epilogue, which rejects the “mathematical consciousness” of Dostoevsky’s utopian contemporaries and challenges the Marxist “oppression” reading that is so popular on university campuses today. After all, if the novel were about the ills of Raskolnikov’s nisheta and the good intentions that underlie his murder, then we might expect the novel to end at the trial, where several witnesses testify to Raskolnikov’s morally upstanding character. If the novel were merely about the guilty conscience that accompanies Raskolnikov’s morally gray yet justifiable murder, then we might expect the novel to end after Raskolnikov’s confession—or, at the very least, we would witness Raskolnikov’s emotional recovery shortly after he turns himself in.

But the fact is that even after his confession, Raskolnikov continues to feel spiritually empty.

Confined to the Siberian prison camp—the katorga—he wonders how his fellow prisoners find meaning in their ordinary surroundings: “a ray of sunshine, the primeval forest, the cold spring hidden away in some unseen spot.” He laments the missed opportunity to kill himself like Svidrigailov and is disgusted by the idea that he’ll be free at 32 and will have nothing even then to live for.

But then Sonya pays him a visit.

It is at this point that Dostoyevsky delivers one of the most beautiful lines of the entire novel: Их воскресила любовь. They were resurrected by love.

The word choice here is critical: love doesn’t simply renew or inspire them—it resurrects them like the ailing Lazarus. Religion—channeled through Sonya’s love—becomes the primary vehicle through which Raskolnikov attains redemption for his sins. Life takes the place of dialectic in his consciousness, and all of a sudden, Raskolnikov feels that his fellow prisoners are more kind to him and that life is worth living again. The seven years that remain of his sentence feel like seven days because he suddenly finds meaning in his life again.

Raskolnikov regains the will to live because he finds beauty in the individual human soul.

Crime and Punishment is therefore not a novel about how the poor are oppressed by the rich or how extreme circumstances may justify certain violent actions—as many leftists will have you believe—but a novel about the value of the individual human soul, a book that explores the power of individual agency, and a beautiful encomium on the power of redemption. Raskolnikov commits murder not because society fails him but because he wishes to test a theory that strips him of a fundamental human element. Yet throughout the novel, Dostoevsky demonstrates that human beings cannot be reduced to theories or historical abstractions but that each and every one of us has value because we each possess a unique soul.

Crime and Punishment leaves us, therefore, not with a political but with a deeply spiritual and human message: when we lose sight of the human soul, people become reduced numbers, and when people are reduced to numbers, then individual lives lose meaning and value.

But there is hope yet for our society, argues Dostoyevsky, because each and every one of us can find redemption if we find meaning in the individual human soul, the wonders of the ordinary world, and the people we cherish most.

In 2014, I jumped into the “querying trenches” for the first time.

Ambitious, brazen, and seventeen, I had written a novel with a lofty Shakespearean title that explored the moral decay of contemporary adolescence. I wasn’t expecting to make it too far at that age, but none of the thirty agents I contacted so much as responded to my email, and I was left with a polished manuscript collecting metaphorical dust on my computer.

Yet as I moved out to New York City to study English at Columbia University—and to chase my publishing dreams in the literary capital of the world—I looked back on my high school novel with some embarrassment. Surely, I could write a better book.

And I did.

By the end of my sophomore year, a second novel had materialized on my laptop. I leapt back into those querying trenches but was soon informed that my book was too niche to gain a substantial audience. Disappointed, I enrolled in a creative writing class the following semester to see if I could hone my writerly craft as I prepared to draft my next novel. I rolled into the classroom with my pink leather Moleskine notebook and a fountain pen, excited to read Ernest Hemingway’s Hills Like White Elephants or Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find—short stories we’d analyzed in my high school creative writing class.

Instead, the professor dropped a poem shaped like a vagina in front of us.

I thought it was a joke.

The poem was from an MFA grad who had “liberated herself from the male gaze” by “reclaiming her vagina.”

The next two hours were an arduous exercise in dispelling the sardonic smile that kept creeping onto my face.

After weathering several more lackluster creative writing courses, I gave up my quest to learn to write from my professors and headed to the library to learn from a different sort of teacher: the literary masters.

By senior year, having cruised through almost the entirety of the Western literary canon, I had come up with yet another novel, and I was determined to graduate from form rejections and secure one of those mythical manuscript requests that would get my book in front of an agent.

I had to.

So when I got my first ever full manuscript request on the third query I sent out for my newest novel, I was elated.

The year was now 2023. My fingers no longer trembled every time I hit “send” on those cold queries. I was now twenty-six, and after countless Dickens novels and Salinger short stories, I had finally trained myself to write a good book. My newest creation, The Lilac Room, received glowing praise from beta readers, and months later, I found myself with no fewer than twenty-four full manuscript requests.

I sat tight until one bleak January morning, when I received the following email from a literary agent:

Liza—I finished the manuscript of THE LILAC ROOM, and I did so fairly rapidly because the narrative held my attention. That happens with less than 5% of the novels or memoirs queried to me. You are clearly a significant talent with a distinctive style and a versatile mind.

The agent wanted to set up a call to discuss next steps.

That was it, I thought. I was finally going to be a novelist!

But the agent wanted me to implement some “minor edits” before proceeding with a contract.

Over the next few months, I worked tirelessly through several more drafts of my manuscript. However, despite claiming at odd intervals that we were going to “make literary history together,” the agent soon expressed doubt about the viability of my novel on the current market.

One hundred thousand words might be too dense for a Gen Z novel, he wrote to me one morning.

A Gen Z novel?

I’m not writing just for Gen Z, I insisted.

Yes, but we’re going to have to market it as a Gen Z novel, the agent wrote back.

After I pushed back, insisting that my novel would resonate with readers of all ages—like any piece of literature—he vanished.

Squeezing my knees to my chest in the corner of my room several weeks later, I felt a tear dampen my cheek. My dreams were not yet shattered, I told myself, but how many more “better” books would I have to write?

Nevertheless, I stood up, wiped my tears, and dove into bed, resolving to write yet another book.

Manuscript requests on my next novel, The Leverkühn Quartet, flooded in once more—followed by the typical wave of rejections. Agents were excited about the premise but thought the novel was too “slow and philosophical.”

Then came the rejection email I’ll remember for the rest of my life:

I wondered if the story might benefit from a sharper lens on Elise’s privilege. She returns to her art on her own terms, surrounded by emotionally supportive men and buffered from real fallout. In today’s climate, readers are quick to pick apart depictions of class and access.

Depictions of class and access? Privilege? I had written a novel about the meaning of beauty and the cost of artistic obsession, and the agent wanted more about privilege?

The Leverkühn Quartet was a loose retelling of Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus, itself a twentieth-century retelling of Goethe’s famous Faust. I had penned the work with my general philosophy of literature in mind; literature’s purpose, I believed, was to create a centuries-long dialogue about what it meant to be human. I’d always written novels with the Western literary canon in mind, but maybe, I realized, I was missing a piece of the puzzle. Perhaps I needed to see more of the great work of our time. Sure, I’d read a lot of “contemporary” literature—Kazuo Ishiguro, Philip Roth, David Foster Wallace, Paul Auster, Donna Tartt—but none of those authors, whose books were now as old as I was, were considered “contemporary” by publishing standards.

I needed to figure out what was getting published today.

After an afternoon at Barnes and Noble, I shuffled into my East Village apartment with about ten literary fiction titles published within the last several years, among them Sally Rooney’s Normal People and Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation. Flipping to the first page of Rooney’s most famous work, I couldn’t wait to be dazzled by a contemporary “Call me Ishmael” or “All this happened, more or less.”

Instead, I couldn’t believe what I was reading.

Marianne answers the door when Connell rings the bell. She’s still wearing her school uniform, but she’s taken off the sweater, so it’s just the blouse and skirt, and she has no shoes on, only tights.

Oh, hey, he says.

Come on in.

She turns and walks down the hall. He follows her, closing the door behind him.

I closed the book and stared at the cover, making sure I hadn’t accidentally picked up a picture book. But there was the neon blue and green cover with Rooney’s title, its minimalist facial sketches staring at me mockingly.

#1 INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER.

That couldn’t be right. To be an international bestseller, one presumably had to learn storytelling techniques beyond monosyllabic dialogue and juvenile descriptions of a girl’s outfit. Surely, Rooney couldn’t be considered one of the great stylists of our era.

I was in some sort of cruel dream—and everyone seemed to be in on it.

Flipping through the other books I had brought home, I began to pick up patterns. The prose was minimalist and flat. The stories frequently revolved around racial identity and female empowerment. The sex was gratuitous.

This was what was getting published?

After about a dozen contemporary novels, I turned to Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov—one of the masters who had taught me how to write.

I can only describe the experience of reading Nabokov after slogging through “contemporary literature” as like eating a gourmet steak after months of McDonald’s meals.

Finishing Kinbote’s manic introduction to John Shade’s cantos, I burst into tears.

This was literature—and there was a whole group of people out there who would never know what it was like to cry mid-chapter because a beautiful sentence had been written!

Suddenly, my creative writing classes at Columbia started to make sense. How could those professors use great literature to teach students to write if their perception of “great literature” was limited to a narrow repertoire of marketable trends?

Meanwhile, inspired by Pale Fire, I was once again visited by the literary muses.

The result was my most recent novel, Blue Snow—and the rejections came pouring in as usual. At this point, however, I was nearly immune to the critiques that my novels were “too philosophical” or “too slow.” After all, I had received countless comments from a randomized group of beta readers—real readers—who didn’t seem to think so.

“It’s such a change of pace to read something deep for once!” one of my Gen Z readers wrote.

But literary agents didn’t seem to think so:

As a reader of literary fiction, I’m all for introspective characters who plumb the depths of their own psyche, page after page, to better understand the inner workings of their still-developing mind. But as a literary agent, I run screaming from that stuff as if I’d just emptied an entire can of Aqua Net on my head and lit a cigarette… Should you eventually choose to write something genre-specific and commercially viable, perish the thought, then feel free to send it my way.

Setting his unprofessionalism aside, I deduced that the agent’s primary complaint was that my writing was not “commercially viable”—and that I needed to try out genre fiction. But weren’t hundreds of new literary fiction titles being published every year, and didn’t “commercially viable” just mean that there would be readers who would want to read the book?

I had already sold hundreds of copies of my self-published poetry chapbooks—and novels typically had a much higher readership than poetry. I had had scores of people DM me expressing their interest in beta-reading my completely unpublished Blue Snow manuscript after skimming the pitch I’d posted to my Instagram story. Surely, my book was “commercially viable”—at least by the literal definition of the term. And sure, I could always write something “better”—any author could—but what happened when “better” was never good enough?

Something was wrong.

Over the next few months, I reflected on my experiences in both the Columbia English department and the query trenches. I read more contemporary literary fiction and poked around on Substack to see what other authors were saying about the state of fiction in the publishing industry. I quickly learned that I was not alone—and after some more research, I went public with my critique of publishing, on Substack and Instagram.

Soon, my DMs abounded with the words of jaded authors—many with even bigger platforms than mine—expressing their disillusionment with an industry that routinely turned away dense prose and philosophical musings. I listened to accounts from straight white men who felt shunned by an industry that looked down on stories depicting role models for young boys. I scheduled Zooms with Jewish authors who reported having their novels dropped by agents who claimed that the current climate would make it difficult to sell “Jewish stories.” I read messages from young women in creative writing programs who lamented the reign of buzzwords in their departments, and from older scholars of literature who had given up on contemporary fiction because the industry had lost sight of the broader literary tradition.

When my article on the soullessness of contemporary literary fiction became the third-most-read article on my Substack, I realized that my story was just one of many like it.

Every day, thousands of immensely talented novelists are shut out by an industry that pushes out the same type of novel produced by the same institutional pipeline because they dared to say something different.

While it might be tempting to blame the homogenization of fiction on literary agents or editors or even publishing houses, I believe the issue is not institutional but cultural—and our famed institutions are only succumbing to a uniquely fraught cultural moment.

To understand how we got here, we must first revisit the original purpose of the humanities.1

Traditionally, the humanities were about asking life’s biggest and most important questions: What is love? What is the nature of suffering? What is the purpose of my existence on this planet if I shall one day fade into nothingness? One can answer such questions through listening to a piece of music or reading a philosophical treatise, but I believe that there is no art form that more directly explores these ideas than literature, which poses questions through the stories we share and the words we all connect to.

We can call this concept of asking such questions as “humanistic inquiry” because these are the questions that make us human. Today, when we face an existential reckoning in the dawning age of artificial intelligence, I believe these philosophical questions are more important than ever.

But if publishing professionals routinely label incoming literary fiction submissions as “too philosophical,” how can we have these conversations in the context of contemporary literature?

It has become clear that contemporary literature has strayed far away from the tradition of humanistic inquiry.

But maybe we can fix that.

There are three main “issues” with the fiction in the publishing industry today. They are the following:

1) Aesthetic Standardization

Because the majority of literary fiction writers must pass through an MFA program to have a shot at publication in the genre, their writing style often conforms to the teachings of MFA professors, many of whom glorify minimalist sentences and emotional restraint. The result is a literary ecosystem where many writers, rewarded by our institutions for aesthetic and ideological alignment, sound more or less the same.

More about aesthetic standardization below.

2) Moral Flattening & Ideological Conformity

Traditionally, literature was meant to help us learn how to understand ourselves and the world around us. But in the latter half of the twentieth century, university English departments began to reject this tradition and instead embraced the postulates that a) meaning is relative, b) authorial intention is irrelevant, and c) universal truths are oppressive. Taught to analyze literature through these “postmodern” lenses, English department graduates—many of whom go on to hold positions of power in publishing or become writers themselves—believe that literature should passively observe rather than teach. Within this framework, literature is understood not as a vehicle for moral and humanistic inquiry but as a site for presupposing ideological conclusions without proper justification. Readers are therefore no longer asked to consider what a work of fiction means; they are asked to consider whether it signals the “right” kind of meaning. As these assumptions have spread from the academy into the publishing industry, novels themselves have increasingly abandoned moral seriousness in favor of ideological conformity.

More about moral flattening here:

3) The Commercialization of Sex and Eroticism

The retreat from aesthetic and moral seriousness, in turn, created fertile ground for the commercialization of sex. Today, the publishing industry encourages the inclusion of explicit sexual content in literature not because it operates as a meaningful artistic device but simply because it captures attention and drives sales. As a result, literary fiction has become gratuitously hypersexualized, and reading has become an erotic rather than a literary endeavor. Such excess reflects a market-driven literary culture that privileges immediate gratification over patience and thought.

I discuss the eroticization of literature here:

Read virtually any work of literary fiction published within the last ten years with these three pillars in mind, and you, too, will begin to pick up on these trends. But good literature is not “trendy”—nor is it gratuitous, morally bankrupt, or stylistically minimalist; instead, good literature explores the complexity of human nature through chaotic phrases that express the inner depths of human feeling and messy characters who prompt unexpected revelations about the human psyche.

To me, literature has always been about humanistic inquiry, and if there is any hope for our species to find meaning in an age that increasingly strips us of our human element, then it is imperative that we restore literature to its rightful place in the humanistic tradition.

It’s no secret that Russian is notoriously difficult to translate into English—and the works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky are no exception. Since the first English translation of Crime and Punishment appeared in 1886, over twenty different interpretations of Dostoyevsky’s most famous novel have made their way into the Anglosphere, establishing Crime and Punishment as one of the most retranslated books in literary history.

But what entices translators to keep revisiting a novel that now exists in more than twenty English iterations?

Perhaps it’s the recognition that no translation of Crime and Punishment will ever fully capture the spirit of the original.

Indeed, we need only look at Dostoyevsky’s portrayal of Raskolnikov in the novel’s early stages to apprehend several linguistic idiosyncrasies embedded in the Russian text. Part of Dostoyevsky’s genius lies, after all, in his ability to capture the inner lives of his characters, and nowhere is this psychological mastery more apparent than in his description of Raskolnikov’s mental state in the days leading up to the murders. One cannot comprehend why Raskolnikov—a seemingly moral and otherwise rational human being—is led to commit two such atrocities without first understanding the nature of his peculiar spiritual condition.

Most English translations will nonetheless misrepresent that very condition because of one fundamentally untranslatable Russian word.

Towards the end of the novel’s opening chapter, Raskolnikov leaves the pawnbroker’s apartment and tarries in the street in “anguish” before dashing into a pub—or so you’d think from reading the book in English. The problem, however, is that the “anguish” Raskolnikov experiences in nearly every English translation is not anguish at all—it is something far more upsetting.

In English, the word “anguish” suggests agony, suffering, or torment, and while Raskolnikov does indeed experience these emotions in the early chapters of the novel, the English word “anguish” carries a far more frantic emotional charge than its Russian counterpart.

Before we dive into this elusive word itself, let’s take a look at four different translations of the passage in question.

Constance Garnett:

Pevear & Volokhonsky:

Nicolas Slater:

Oliver Ready:

Taken together, these translations paint a remarkably consistent picture of a man consumed by both agitation and anguish. In each of these English versions, therefore, we sense that Raskolnikov is in a frenetic and almost manic state. Reading these English versions of Crime and Punishment, I picture a character standing in the middle of the street ready to tear his hair out or perhaps break into a panicked sweat; I imagine a man collapsing under the weight of the world without any means of escape.

But let’s take a look at the passage in Russian:

If you speak Russian, you’ll immediately read Raskolnikov in a completely different light. The word that most translators render as “agitation” (волнение) comes from our word for “wave” (волна). We typically use “волнение” to express a certain torment of the soul, and, in fact, the Russian dictionary defines the word as “душевное беспокойство,” which literally means “worry of the soul.” In other words, Raskolnikov feels a sort of spiritual disturbance rather than a sense of agitation or frustration.1

Yet the second of the two key concepts in this paragraph—“anguish”—is even more perplexing from a translation perspective.

The Russian word for Raskolnikov’s supposed “anguish” is тоска (toska). It appears six times in the first four chapters alone in reference to our protagonist’s early mental state and is therefore crucial to understanding the nature of his psychological disturbance.

To fully apprehend the meaning of toska, let’s turn to our friend Vladimir Nabokov. Despite his infamous hatred for Dostoyevsky, Nabokov perhaps understood his literary predecessor better than any other writer of his time:

No single word in English, writes Nabokov, renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody or something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.

Toska, then, is not the sort of anguish that denotes a disturbed or frenzied state; rather, it connotes a deep spiritual yearning perhaps closer to nostalgia.

I like to think of toska in the following terms.

Imagine you’re sitting at your kitchen table staring out the window. It’s raining, and you see a little bird flapping its wings yet struggling to fly. Maybe it’s a Friday night, and you have no plans for the evening, and suddenly, you start to empathize with that bird—before realizing, of course, that it cannot understand you, and you cannot understand it. Yet despite this fundamental disconnect, the bird, you grow convinced, is somehow your kindred spirit. You get up from the table and brew yourself a cup of tea before resuming your seat, watching the raindrops sliding down your windowpane for the next twenty minutes. You don’t know what in particular has upset you, but you know that the rest of the evening—and perhaps the rest of your week—is ruined.

You fall into a muted melancholy before retreating to bed.

That’s toska in a nutshell.

Raskolnikov, therefore, isn’t alarmed or upset—he is, above all, spiritually homeless.2

In fact, toska itself is couched inside the phrase “он не знал, куда деться от тоски своей.” Contrary to what several of the above translations may suggest, this phrase doesn’t necessarily mean that there was “no escape” from his anguish, which points to a certain inevitable doom, but rather that Raskolnikov doesn’t quite know where to go or what to do with himself. Dostoyevsky therefore paints a portrait of a man who has grown nauseated in the Sartrean sense, burdened by the weight of his own existence.

Of the four translations above, only Garnett’s accurately captures the spirit of the original: “he did not know what to do with himself to escape from his wretchedness.”3 While the other translators render the phrase in terms of “no escape,” suggesting an uncontrollable external force at play, Garnett manages to convey the internal nature of Raskolnikov’s conflict, emphasizing one of Crime and Punishment’s core ideas: Raskolnikov has trapped himself inside a conflict of his own making. He is not merely suffering but estranged from his own self. The difference may seem subtle, but it amounts to the difference between a man driven by panic and one driven by existential homelessness. The former is manageable; the latter is catastrophic.

So while no translation will ever perfectly capture the meaning of toska, perhaps that’s just the point of Dostoyevsky’s great work. Some words resist translation because they emerge from a particular culture’s way of experiencing the world. In this case, Russian gave Dostoyevsky a word for a feeling that does not exist in English.

Perhaps that’s precisely why translators keep returning to Crime and Punishment: buried inside that untranslatable “toska” is a more universal truth about an entire subset of people.

So how do we translate toska?

I propose the following solution.

Future translators ought to render тоска as “toska” in the English text and leave a footnote with an explanation of this untranslatable Russian word. Whenever it appears in the text thereafter, readers will not only be familiar with the connotation of the word but will also attain a unique window into the nature of the Russian soul.

But until someone comes out with such a translation, I suppose the Constance Garnett version will have to do.

I was 21 years old when I learned my father had gone to jail for being a Jew.

I had grown up without a rooted sense of Jewishness. I attended Jewish preschool and lit the menorah every December, but unlike many of my peers, I did not attend Hebrew school, did not have a bat mitzvah, and certainly did not parade the fact that I was Jewish. The first time I stepped foot in a synagogue was for my best friend’s bat mitzvah, and I am almost certain that my middle school friends did not even realize that I was Jewish.

There was no mention of Jewishness around my house apart from the hazy antisemitism that clouded my father’s happy memories of his childhood in the Soviet Union. My father grew up in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, a country that had taken in many Jewish refugees during World War II and that had a history of being friendly to Jews despite its Muslim background. My father, a mechanical engineer, was one of the first people in Azerbaijan to use a modern computer, and in 1991 he took an engineering job at Azerbaijan’s first “tech firm.” His dedication to his work and desire to break from the socialist prescription of keeping everyone poor resulted in an early career victory when he took a relatively senior position at the company. Around the same time, he witnessed the fall of the Iron Curtain, and Azerbaijan became an autonomous state with no set legal process. When a few corrupt officials from his company were accused of fraud and money laundering, a group of antisemitic Azeri executives decided to pin the blame on “that Jew.”

My father describes the nine months he spent in prison as daunting yet enlightening. Through wisdom and resilience, he survived his unwarranted sentence by cunningly gaining the respect of a group of high-profile criminals. Shortly thereafter, following a series of tense phone calls and interviews on the part of my grandparents, he was granted political asylum in America. My grandmother likes to tell the story of how, after enjoying a stable life as a computer engineer in Baku, my father spent every morning of his first year in Chicago frying potatoes at Burger King (he hasn’t touched french fries since). Through the self-actualization that the Jewish tradition taught my father, he regained his professional status as an engineer in America and within 10 years saw his two kids off to private school.

So you might understand why I didn’t grow up very “Jewish.” My parents’ decision to de-emphasize our Jewish background might have been motivated by a combination of shame, fear and trauma. But I certainly felt quite Russian — or, more accurately, Soviet. I grew up on allegorical cartoons that promoted the welfare of the proletariat and restaurants where expats danced to Russian pop music until 2 a.m. We had a Christmas tree in our apartment every December, and I could almost pass as Protestant to my array of WASPy elementary school friends. But instead of celebrating Christmas, we were commemorating Noviy God, the Soviet New Year’s celebration that had moved Christmas to New Year’s in a successful attempt to secularize the holiday. In the Soviet Union, Jews and Christians alike celebrated Noviy God. But try telling your elementary school friends that you’re a Jew whose grandfather dresses up as Ded Moroz, the Russian Santa Claus.

My Soviet identity was confusing enough to explain to my friends, most of whom came from Protestant backgrounds. I struggled too much with my linguistic and cultural identity to even begin to process my Jewishness, so, perhaps as my parents had desired, Judaism remained a latent facet of my identity. And boy, did I struggle with identity. My Russianness meant that I did not fit in with the American kids. My Judaism meant that I did not fit in with the Christian kids. My secular upbringing meant that I did not fit in with the Jewish kids. My Azeri roots meant that I did not fit in with the Russian kids. And somehow I still held an American passport.

Whenever I tell friends I’ve made within the last five years that I was deeply introverted growing up, they chortle in disbelief, but my identity confusion meant that I kept to myself and failed to find any space in which I belonged. I resonated most strongly with being Russian because it was the language we spoke at home, but I felt so alienated from every imaginable cultural space that I retreated into novels and found closer friends in literature than in high school. When I moved to Manhattan to attend Columbia University, I hoped to find community in the English literary scene, only to be thwarted once again as I became cognizant of my conservative political leanings (likely informed by my parents’ suffering under the communist system) within an overwhelmingly liberal space.

By junior year of college, I had given up on the concept of community. I had a sporadic array of friends I had met through clubs, events and classes, but no set group I could retreat to in times of distress. Given my political beliefs and my (perhaps self-inflicted) ostracism, I avoided larger social settings and continued to keep to my books. But during finals week that semester, a classmate I had met in a course called “Russian for Heritage Speakers” invited me to an evening of durak, a Russian card game I had grown up playing. Drawn by the desire to relive warm family memories, I left the library that evening and ventured to the campus Hillel, stepping inside the Jewish center for the very first time.

I sat next to a boy whose black curly hair looked just like my dad’s and who started speaking Russian to me the moment I looked his way. A dark-eyed girl from across the table introduced herself as Maya, the founder of the new Russian-Jewish club. Most of the club’s members spoke a sort of broken Russian that reminded me of my little brother, and they didn’t have a clue what prayers to sing over the menorah. We laughed about our Christmas trees on New Year’s Eve, and I learned that no one there was properly from Russia. The possibility of this sort of secular Judaism, embedded in old Soviet tradition, began to intrigue me.

I attended my first Passover seder at Hillel that April with my new Russian-Jewish friends and came home that spring break showing off my new Hebrew vocabulary to my parents. Maybe it was this accidental stumble upon Judaism that prompted my mother to invite me out to brunch on the cusp of my college graduation and divulge the story of my father’s imprisonment, or maybe she had been waiting for my 21st birthday all along, but either way, the events of that spring endowed me with a cohesive cultural identity: I was a Russian Jew, and the entire reason I existed as a citizen in the freest country on Earth was because of antisemitism. Because my dad had been chased out of his home country for being a Jew. Because I was a Jew.

Judaism, to me, is not so much a religion as it is a cultural identity and a beautiful set of values that have inspired me to always reach higher. It is an identity intertwined with the dictates of nostalgic Soviet traditions; it is a group of people who have never quite felt as if they belonged. The vast majority of Russian Jews faced persecution in the former Soviet Union for their Jewish identity and now reside in either America or Israel, where they are allowed to practice Judaism freely and rediscover their roots as I rediscovered mine.

So when my grandmother burst into tears upon seeing the hatred and violence at my alma mater two years back, I felt again what it meant to be a Russian Jew. “We left that country and came to this one,” she pronounced, “so that my grandkids would never feel unsafe or singled out as Jews, and I am ashamed that something I thought I’d never have to deal with again is happening in this country, too.”

Now I rush to every Russian-Jewish cultural event because I have lived vicariously through my father’s pain, and I hold my grandma close every time she is forced to relive what happened to my father through the aftermath of October 7. In my Russian-Jewish community, I have found a group of people who understand what it is like to be fervently connected to Jewish identity without keeping kosher or memorizing Hebrew prayers. Being a Russian Jew is a poignant reminder that we have never quite belonged, but that we find belonging amongst each other — and that no matter what, we must do everything in our power to allow the Jewish people to live on.

The best paper I ever wrote for my English classes at Columbia University was a final paper arguing that Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night was a proto-transgender text.

Well… best according to my professor, at least.

During my junior year of college, I enrolled in a Shakespeare seminar with a newer department hire taking over for renowned Shakespeare scholar James S. Shapiro. Shapiro was on leave that semester, and unbeknownst to me, I had chosen the worst possible time to dive into the works of the great Bard—under the tutelage of the worst possible professor.

The professor in question was in her early thirties and had just completed her PhD. Contrary to many other English department faculty profiles—which abound with descriptions of various mental illnesses—this professor’s profile seemed not only completely benign but surprisingly serious: her research interests included the “Renaissance / Early Modern Drama,” “Aesthetics,” the “History of Ideas,” and “Europe.” She had shoulder-length blonde hair, no apparent body piercings, and nothing else to suggest that she had sprouted from the garden of academic crazies.

So I took the chance—and was thwarted, as they say, by the hands of fate.

The first several lectures were nothing out of the ordinary: we learned about Shakespeare’s family history and the rise of drama as an art form before launching into our study of The Merchant of Venice. The professor went on about racism and xenophobia, yet because these themes do genuinely appear in the play, I didn’t initially think much of it. Similarly, our discussion of The Taming of the Shrew focused on gender roles and social class—an accurate reflection of the play’s themes.

Then things got a little weird.

Romeo and Juliet, said my professor, was a “staging of sex.”

I didn’t know what the hell that meant, but the following week, we were learning not only about how Shakespeare’s sonnets suggested that he was gay but also about how A Midsummer Night’s Dream was about queer desire.

Below are the actual notes I took during the lecture:

You can imagine how, from that moment on, it might have been difficult to take the class seriously.

Nevertheless, I resolved not to let my professor’s obsessions interfere with my enjoyment of Shakespeare. I studied hard for my midterm exams and had nearly committed Midsummer Night’s Dream to memory by the time I entered that classroom halfway through the semester, ready to wow the professor with my burgeoning knowledge of Shakespeare. Disregarding my professor’s BDSM fetish, I composed essays on the nature of Helena’s love for Demetrius and Titania’s famous prank on Oberon.

Several weeks later, I received the following comments on my two short midterm essays:

I had lost two points on an otherwise perfect exam because I had failed to mention—on two separate occasions—that A Midsummer Night’s Dream was about “queer desire.”

Embracing the absurdity of the class over the next several weeks, I wrote my final paper on the topic of Twelfth Night and transgenderism (because Viola dresses up as a man and so on).

I got an A+ not only on the paper itself but also for the entire course.

My college Shakespeare seminar has given me quite a story to tell, but it reveals a series of alarming truths about the poison that has taken over literary study in English departments across the Western world. In a word, English departments no longer teach literature proper but either a) focus on ideology or b) put a leftist spin on every work of classic literature ever to grace our civilization.

If you’d like to be entertained by further examples of radical leftist ideology in the Columbia English department, you can read some of my past essays here, but today, I’d like to explore how we got here—and why.

To answer that question, we must first understand the nature of literary study prior to the leftist takeover of the academy. And as it turns out, the idea of “the humanities” has remained largely unchanged for thousands of years.

Read more

I’ve written about many of these themes on Pens and Poison, and I’m excited to bring them to you today on the Andrew Klavan Show.

Watch the full episode here:

“Comrades!”

Scanning the first message I received in my Columbia University MA English group chat, I couldn’t believe my eyes.

“We need you guys trained and up to speed for the strike…”

This couldn’t be real.

Bookmarking my copy of Ayn Rand’s We the Living, a novel about the ills of post-Revolutionary Russia, I took a deep breath and recoiled. Reviewing the text, sent by a researcher of “imperial conspiracy” in a “postcolonial context,” I felt my vision blurring.

The text might as well have come from a Soviet labor camp leader.

But it was real.

My colleague had inadvertently verbalized the plague that had set over English departments across the nation: English is amongst the most left-leaning and pro-labor departments.

From the moment I stepped foot on campus to study English Literature at Columbia University, I felt that something was amiss. My freshman year of college, for instance, the university had removed Ovid’s Metamorphoses from an introductory freshman literature course called “Masterpieces of Western Literature” because several students had complained about its “graphic” (the work is far from graphic) depictions of rape.

The eighteen-year-old literature nerd in me couldn’t help but balk: the Metamorphoses, the largest Ancient collection of Greco-Roman myths in a single text, is arguably one of the most important works to the foundation of the Western canon.

Yet after speaking with several professors about this decision, I grew disheartened. These professors seemed convinced that “just because the Metamorphoses is on the syllabus,” as one professor put it to me, “does not mean that it is necessarily a valuable piece of literature.” The work that my favorite poet, T.S. Eliot, alludes to several times throughout his monumental 20th century poem, The Waste Land, was not important?

I didn’t know what these professors were on, but I intended to find out.

Over the next four years, I grew increasingly disheartened by the volume of literary theory assigned throughout my English classes. I had arrived at Columbia intending to become a humanistic scholar, which is what was advertised to me during my application process. Yet, I found the vast majority of critical theory readings not only biased but also far off the mark: I was asked to understand Jane Austen’s early 19th-century novel Mansfield Park under the 20th-century postcolonial lens of the notorious anti-Semite Edward Said, and I was fed Karl Marx in nine out of the sixteen literature courses that I took during my time as an undergraduate student.

Each winter break, I’d update my parents, who are Soviet expats who had come to America on refugee status, on every new Marxist text we had been assigned. In response, they’d nearly fly off their chairs, raising their voices in fulmination: “We did not leave that oppressive regime founded on Marxist-Leninst values just so that our daughter would be reading Marx for breakfast!”

As I prepared myself for graduate English applications, vowing to restore literary study back to its proper foundations—to explore the humanistic tradition—I wondered why English literature had become so forcefully seized by far-left ideologues. While one explanation might be that English professors, who work long hours and feel under-compensated for the value that they bring, are turning to Marxism to voice their grievances, the history of Marxism in the academy hits even deeper.

A New York Times piece from the late 1980s chronicles the “mainstreaming of Marxism” in the academy and argues that while Marxism had fallen out of vogue in terms of practical application—likely due to the imminent failure of the Soviet Union at the time—it has been co-opted in “the abstract world of literary criticism.” Where Marxists did not find a voice politically, they found it in the study of literature—a field so subjective that no one could call out these extremist takes as erroneous. It is no wonder that an increasing number of faculty members now identify as far-left and that these lopsided ideologies have found a home in English departments nationwide.

As a daughter of Soviet immigrants who personally suffered under Marxism, I understand the pitfalls of this noxious ideology and have been disheartened to see it prevail in the study of English literature. Yet while Marxist ideologues have indeed annexed literature, it doesn’t have to continue this way.

Throughout my years as a reader and literary scholar, I have witnessed countless works imprint themselves on my psyche as I have grown into a richer human being. Jane Eyre taught me the value of trust and persistence in the name of love. Notes from Underground provided me with a window into the human condition. East of Eden presented me with the nature of good and evil. In reminding ourselves that literature is a vehicle through which we can understand ourselves, we can focus on what we have in common as members of the human species rather than augment our differences.

Across American college campuses, English literature students are being taught that literary study must necessarily rest on the far-left ideologies of Karl Marx, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and others. As a result, literary fields such as publishing, academia, and journalism are increasingly becoming dominated by ideological extremists who are bringing the focus of literary study away from the humanistic tradition and towards their own political agendas.

It is unsurprising that in studying English, a field that claims to understand human beings through the written word, I was assigned more Karl Marx than Charles Dickens. If we continue to politicize literature to these extremes, it will die away, and then we will be left—dangerously—only with Marxism for its own sake.

To restore the true purpose of literature, we must promote the idea that literature is a work of art through which we can understand what makes us uniquely human—only thus can we begin to bridge our differences.