The best writing teachers are dead.

There’s a common misconception in the Substack world and certain other literary circles that the best way to learn to write is by enrolling in an expensive creative writing program, but I beg to differ. At the end of the day, writing is an art form, and like any art form, it can’t be taught in a classroom setting—at least not if your goal is to create an original work of art. After all, MFA programs and other creative writing classes are notorious for teaching students to all write in the same way.

But while I believe that writing can’t be taught in a university course by a jaded writing professor, I do believe that you can hone your existing writing skills by reading the literary greats.

Here are the writers who have been the most pivotal in my writing education—and what I learned from each.

1) FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY

HOW TO PHILOSOPHIZE (WITH OR WITHOUT A HAMMER)

Dostoyevsky is undeniably my biggest literary influence, and it’s regrettable that he’s often written off as a poor stylist by MFA snobs because the absence of Dostoyevsky in MFA classrooms is perhaps the biggest reason that contemporary novels have stopped chasing big ideas.

In my view, most great novels aren’t great because of style (though style can certainly be a plus!) but because of the philosophical ideas embedded in their pages.

When it comes to philosophizing, no one beats Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who explores big ideas by assigning distinct philosophical movements or systems of morality to each of his characters. In Crime and Punishment, for instance, Raskolnikov represents the materialist rationalist, while Razumikhin embodies classical humanism; from there, they engage in a battle of big ideas.

In many ways, Raskolnikov’s mind is the antithesis of Dostoyevsky’s own, yet what makes Dostoyevsky so brilliant is his unique ability to inhabit a mind completely unlike his own. In a world where “write what you know” prevails, Dostoyevsky reminds us that the best writers create novels that challenge their own worldviews.

2) T.S. ELIOT

A MASTERCLASS IN LITERARY ALLUSION

T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is rife with literary allusions—references to other works of literature that deepen our understanding of the greatest poem of the twentieth century.

Eliot wasn’t afraid to challenge the minds of his readers by peppering his manuscripts with obscure allusions because he recognized that these allusions not only enhanced his readers’ experience of his poems but also created a dialogue with other great minds of the Western literary tradition.

Eliot always reminds me to drop little references to other works of literature in my novels. Chapter 6 of my latest novel, The Brodsky Sisters, in fact, is one giant allusion to The Waste Land.

Read my Waste Land deep dive here.

3) SYLVIA PLATH

THE ART OF THE METAPHOR

Remember the fig tree metaphor from The Bell Jar? It’s one of literature’s most famous conceits and an elaborate case study in the power of figurative language.

In The Bell Jar, Plath’s Esther Greenwood imagines a fig tree. She writes,

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

Plath doesn’t explain her metaphor, nor does she shy away from somewhat obscure allusions; nevertheless, her message could not be clearer: the fig tree represents not only Esther’s personal indecision but also the terrifying experience of standing paralyzed in the face of choice.

In other words, Plath’s metaphor is powerful precisely because it’s universally recognizable.

I’ve seen literary agents actively discourage authors from populating their manuscripts with metaphors, but Sylvia Plath insists that we must capture our world in whimsical terms; in Plath, every literary moment is a poetic phenomenon, and every word takes on a double meaning as we enter the mind of her protagonist.

She’s my favorite poet-turned-novelist with a knack for unique descriptions.

4) THOMAS MANN

TURNING IDEAS INTO CHARACTERS

Though he’s not frequently compared to Dostoyevsky, Thomas Mann is perhaps the writer closest to the Russian literary giant when it comes to exploring big ideas. It’s no accident, then, that Mann is perhaps my favorite novelist after Dostoyevsky.

Thomas Mann is most famous for writing novels of ideas—a literary subgenre that explores philosophical questions, often through debates between characters.

Mann is sometimes criticized for writing ideas rather than characters (Nabokov famously called his books “topical trash”), but I believe that Mann’s characters are more brilliant and memorable because they each represent discrete philosophical ideas.

In many ways, my latest novel, The Brodsky Sisters, is structured like Mann’s The Magic Mountain in that each of my characters represents a distinct idea. The Brodsky Sisters explores the virtues and pitfalls of religious practice, and each of its three main characters—the three sisters—embodies a different intellectual strain: religious orthodoxy, agnosticism, and atheism. Like Mann, I explore different approaches to some of life’s biggest questions—such as whether meaning is inherent or manufactured—through the novel’s labyrinthine plot and discussions between characters.

Thanks, Mann!

5) J.D. SALINGER

ON THE POWER OF VOICE

My third novel, Blue Snow, was directly inspired by Catcher in the Rye—not necessarily thematically (though there is some thematic overlap) but certainly stylistically.

I’ve read Catcher in the Rye four times now, and every time I read it, I hear Holden’s voice playing in my head for weeks after I put the book down. I kept wondering why that was and concluded that J.D. Salinger is a master of literary voice—that nebulous term that always gets thrown around in publishing circles.

I like to think of “voice” as the translation of your character’s inner monologue to the pages of your novel; in this regard, we can define “voice” as a mode of writing that’s uniquely yours.

Given that everyone in the MFA world sounds exactly the same, it’s clear that for all the talk of voice, no one’s figured out how to write with voice after all, but you can.

Read J.D. Salinger and pay attention to the features that sound “Holden-esque.” You’ll be creating characters that sound distinctly like themselves in no time.

6) F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

SYMBOLS, SYMBOLS, SYMBOLS

What’s the greatest and most memorable symbol in all of Western literature? You probably said either Holden’s hunting hat (Salinger is also a master of symbolism) or Gatsby’s green light.

In literature, symbolism is a type of figurative language that uses objects, characters, or actions to illustrate a core idea. Symbols might not necessarily move the plot along, but their recurrence deepens our comprehension of a novel’s themes.

Accruing meaning through repetition and association, symbolism goes hand in hand with poetic language—such as in this beautiful example from The Great Gatsby:

Possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever. Compared to the great distance that had separated him from Daisy it had seemed very near to her, almost touching her. It had seemed as close as a star to the moon. Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.

Although the novel is filtered through Nick Carraway’s first-person narration, Fitzgerald’s gorgeous use of figurative language in this passage gives us a brief glimpse into the consciousness of Jay Gatsby. The diction surrounding the green light swells with longing, revealing Gatsby’s yearning for Daisy through metaphor (“as close as a star to the moon”).

Every time you encounter an object in The Great Gatsby, therefore, you know it’s going to mean something—and that’s why Fitzy is a master of symbolism. Gatsby’s yellow car, T.J. Eckleburg’s blue eyes, or the green light all represent values, desires, and psyches that enhance our experience of the Great American Novel.

Fitzgerald also has a way with colors.

7) HENRY JAMES

IT’S OKAY TO BE EXTRA

The average length of a sentence in contemporary literary fiction is 15–20 words.

The average length of a Henry James sentence is about 35–40 words.

In a society obsessed with terseness, Henry James is the welcome antidote to literary minimalism. His favorite punctuation mark is the comma, and he never shies away from interruptive subclauses.

Take this sentence, for one:

His cousin was a very brilliant girl, who would take, as he said, a good deal of knowing; but she needed the knowing, and his attitude with regard to her, though it was contemplative and critical, was not judicial.

There’s perhaps a more “straightforward” way to render this sentence, but the beauty of Henry James’ writing is that it accurately captures the non-linear machinations of the human mind: we don’t always think in straightforward sentences, nor should we write in that way.

James’ writing reminds us that the most straightforward approach is not always the best one—sometimes, the greatest literary feats are, indeed, the most convoluted. Because so is the human mind.

8) VLADIMIR NABOKOV

THE BEAUTY OF LANGUAGE

Vladimir Nabokov is undeniably the greatest stylist to have ever walked this planet.

Take this sentence from Pale Fire, for example:

“Would he ever come for me?” I used to wonder waiting and waiting, in certain amber-and-rose crepuscules, for a ping-pong friend, or for old John Shade.

I could write you an entire essay on why that one sentence is so brilliant (and maybe I will), but in the meantime, I’d like to simply call your attention to the sheer beauty of “certain amber-and-rose crepuscules.”

I’m still learning how to write like that, but the more I read Nabokov, the more I’m inspired to seek beauty in every sentence I write—and to push the boundaries of the English language to create something extraordinary.

9) LEO TOLSTOY

TEACHING WITHOUT PREACHING

If you’re a Tolstoy fan—and I mean a real Tolstoy fan—you’re probably either a conservative or a traditionalist, and that’s because the primary feature of Tolstoy’s greatest novels is morality.

In other words, Tolstoy’s novels—especially War and Peace and Anna Karenina—all have something to teach us. After all, great literature shouldn’t just tell a story but also cause us to reflect on our own lives.

But the beauty of Tolstoy is that he doesn’t shove his messages down our throats, nor does he pander directly to his audience. Instead, Tolstoy invites us to follow the lives of his characters—and to judge them for ourselves.

10) WILLIAM FAULKNER

HOW TO BREAK THE RULES

The reason that the MFA world drives me so crazy is that there are all these rules you learn to follow: “show don’t tell,” “don’t use a long word where a short one will do,” or “don’t use the passive voice.”

The brilliance of Faulkner is that he didn’t care about rules. He wrote exactly how he wanted to write and ended up creating some of the most brilliant works of Western literature.

The truth is there’s no one set “formula” that will yield a Great American Novel—or any other great novel, for that matter. On the contrary—the best writers always dare to play with form, experiment with style, and break all the rules in the book.

WANT TO LEARN TO REALLY WRITE?

While you might spend eons discussing “style” in your MFA seminar, you’ll rarely discuss big ideas, and that’s why contemporary literature is broken—and why it’s so important to learn from the literary greats.

The greatest novels, after all, aren’t just the books that are the most well-written but the books that prompt us to ask big questions about human existence.

That’s why the only way you’ll ever learn how to write is by reading classic literature.

So get to it!

Sally Rooney deserves to be taken off shelves, but not for the reasons you might think.

This past week, in full agreement with radical Marxist activist Sally Rooney, British publisher Faber & Faber—once home to literary giants such as T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, and Sylvia Plath—announced its decision to withdraw Rooney’s novels from British bookshop shelves. As to be expected, the news caused quite a stir amongst our leftist friends on X, who began parroting the usual talking points about book banning and censorship and how Zionists control the U.K. But as Hen Mazzig has rightfully observed, Rooney’s books are not being pulled, as the left has claimed, because of her views on Palestine—they are being pulled because “she has explicitly said that her profits would be donated to a proscribed terrorist organization.”

According to a report from The Telegraph, Rooney has been donating royalties to Palestine Action, a radical leftist “action network” with alleged ties to Iran. A designated terrorist group both in the U.K. and the U.S., Palestine Action has posed a significant threat to U.K. national security and, in 2025, moved to actively sabotage British military operations in Brize Norton, the largest station of the Royal Air Force.

But whether you agree with the U.K. terrorism ban or not, there’s a better argument at play here: Rooney deserves a taste of her own medicine. The Irish author, after all, is no stranger to literary boycotts, having orchestrated one of her own against Israeli voices and Jewish authors in the aftermath of October 7th. It would be hypocritical to defend her on the grounds of freedom of expression—she has been the prime advocate for censorship in the literary world for several years now.

The case of Sally Rooney, therefore, does not qualify as an attack on “free speech,” nor is it some sort of covert operation meant to silence pro-Palestinian voices. Ms. Rooney is free to hold whatever views she’d like, publicly or privately, but at a certain point, she must face the consequences of her own actions.

But all of that aside, Rooney’s books are just really, really bad.

Believe me, I’m no proponent of literary censorship, but I hope to convince you today that Rooney’s books are not only poorly written but are also devoid of all humanity—and are therefore not worth your time.

Because in my eyes, an author who strips her words of the human soul is no author at all.

To illustrate my point, let’s take a look at Sally Rooney’s Normal People—perhaps the worst novel of the past decade.

I have previously said that Normal People is Fifty Shades of Grey for overeducated college grads, and though my remark was made somewhat facetiously, I stand by it unapologetically. Move Fifty Shades to Ireland, replace the billionaire entrepreneur with a working-class intellectual, and throw in a few conversations about Marxism, and the result is Normal People by Sally Rooney—a novel about a socially awkward young woman who desires to be dominated by emotionally unavailable men.

The only difference, in fact, between the two novels is that no one is out here claiming that Fifty Shades of Grey is some sort of profound meditation on the human condition. Sally Rooney, on the other hand, has duped the entire universe into believing that her Fifty Shades of Grey retelling—spruced up with discussions of class consciousness and the occasional surface-level literary reference—is some sort of masterwork.

But Normal People is nothing more than Anastasia Steele with a Trinity College education—and just enough Marxist theory to make its readers feel intellectually superior for enjoying it.

To illustrate my point, I’d like to show you a passage from Normal People and one from Fifty Shades of Grey.

He takes hold of her hair, not pulling it, just holding it in his hand.

Whenever I want, really? he says.

You can do anything you want with me.

He makes a noise in his throat, leans into her a little harder. That’s nice, he says.

Her voice sounds hoarse now. Do you like me saying that? she says.

Yeah, a lot.

Will you tell me I belong to you?

What do you mean? he says.

She says nothing, just breathes hard into the quilt and feels her own breath

on her face. He pauses now, waiting for her to say something.

Will you hit me? she says.

For a few seconds she hears nothing, not even his breath.

No, he says.

I peek up at him, and he’s frowning, a bleak look in his eye. He runs both hands through his hair.

“How did you feel while I was hitting you and after?”

“I didn’t like it. I’d rather you didn’t do it again.”

“You weren’t meant to like it.”

“Why do you like it?” I stare up at him.

My question surprises him.

“You really want to know?”

“Oh, trust me, I’m fascinated.” And I can’t quite keep the sarcasm out

of my voice.

He narrows his eyes again.

“Careful,” he warns.

I blanch.

“Are you going to hit me again?” I challenge.

“No, not tonight.”

If I hadn’t told you that these excerpts came from two completely different novels written in two completely different genres by two completely different people, you might have reasonably concluded that these two passages came from the same book. But no—one is from Sally Rooney, and the other is from Fifty Shades of Grey, and I’m guessing that you couldn’t even tell me which is which. Both passages feature sparse sentences, flat dialogue, and minimal description—and both culminate in virtually the same exchange expressed in almost identical language.

Sally Rooney is not much more talented than E.L. James—and James might even be a better writer because someone taught her how to use punctuation marks in school.

But because Sally Rooney’s novel dresses up BDSM as some sort of philosophical idea, she has managed to convince the entire literary establishment to take her bad romance erotica seriously.

Consider the following passage, where Marianne and Connell discuss Marianne’s sexual perversions over cigarettes and coffee:

Are you serious? says Connell.

Well, he likes to beat me up. Just during sex, that is. Not during arguments.

She laughs, a stupid laugh that doesn’t suit her. Connell’s visual field shudders violently for a second, like the beginning of a gigantic migraine, and he lifts a hand to his forehead. He realises he is scared. Around Marianne he often feels somehow innocent, though really he’s a lot more sexually experienced than she is.

And you’re into that, are you? he says.

She shrugs. Her cigarette is burning out in the ashtray. She picks it up quickly and drags on it before stubbing it out.

I don’t know, she says. I don’t know if I really like it.

Why do you let him do it, then?

It was my idea.

Connell picks up his cup and takes a large mouthful of very hot coffee, wanting to do something efficient with his hands. When he replaces the cup it splashes up and spills over into the saucer.

What do you mean? he says.

It was my idea, that I wanted to submit to him. It’s difficult to explain.

Well, go on and try if you want. I’m interested.

She laughs again now. It’s going to make you feel very awkward, she says.

Okay.

She looks at him, maybe to see if he’s joking, and then she lifts her chin at an angle, and he knows she won’t back down from telling him about it, because that would be giving in to something she doesn’t believe about herself.

It’s not that I get off on being degraded as such, she says. I just like to know that I would degrade myself for someone if they wanted me to. Does that make sense? I don’t know if it does, I’ve been thinking about it. It’s about the dynamic, more than what actually happens. Anyway I suggested it to him, that I could try being more submissive. And it turns out he likes to beat me up.

Connell starts coughing. Marianne picks a small wooden coffee-stirrer out of a jar on the table and starts twisting it in her fingers. He waits for the coughing to subside and then says: What does he do to you?

Oh, I don’t know, she says. He hits me with a belt sometimes. He likes

choking me, things like that.

Right.

I mean, I don’t enjoy it. But then, you’re not really submitting to someone if you only submit to things you enjoy.

Have you always had these ideas? Connell says.

Throughout this entire passage, Rooney does not once offer any original insight into the relationship between love and submission, nor does she use Marianne and Connell’s exchange to explore larger questions about the nature of intimacy. Instead, through flat and perfunctory dialogue, she tells us outright that Marianne likes submissive sex because of childhood trauma (very original) and that Connell is disturbed by these predilections, continually equating psychological damage with psychological depth.

But it turns out that if you add coffee and cigarettes to any scene, you can pass off even the most trite ideas as profound revelations about the nature of human existence.

Even more egregious is Rooney’s continual attempt to tackle human relationships in the least “human” terms possible. She continually delivers information about her characters’ emotions without causing the reader to experience them, writing, for one, “He realises he is scared” to illustrate fear without bothering to figure out how to evoke fear. Rooney’s writing, therefore, is not only terse but lazy: rarely does she ground her characters and their actions in external experiences.

Indeed, Rooney’s scenes frequently remain completely abstract, such as in this passage here:

After Marianne left school in April, Connell entered a period of low spirits. Teachers spoke to him about it. The guidance counsellor told Lorraine she was ‘concerned’. People in school were probably talking about it too, he didn’t know. He couldn’t summon up the energy to act normal. At lunch he sat in the same place as always, eating sad mouthfuls of food, not listening to his friends when they spoke. Sometimes he wouldn’t notice even when they called his name, and they would have to throw something at him or clip him on the head to get his attention. Everyone must have known there was something wrong with him. He felt a debilitating shame about the kind of person he’d turned out to be, and he missed the way Marianne had made him feel, and he missed her company. He called her phone all the time, he sent her text messages every day, but she never replied. His mother said he was barred from visiting her house, though he didn’t think he would have tried that anyway.

For a while he tried to get over it by drinking too much and having anxious, upsetting sex with other girls. At a house party in May he slept with Barry Kenny’s sister Sinead, who was twenty-three and had a degree in Speech and Language Therapy. Afterwards he felt so bad he threw up, and he had to tell Sinead he was drunk even though he wasn’t really. There was no one he could talk to about that. He was excruciatingly lonely. He had recurring dreams about being with Marianne again, holding her peacefully the way he used to when they were tired, and speaking with her in low voices. Then he’d remember what had happened, and wake up feeling so depressed he couldn’t move a single muscle in his body

At no point in these descriptions do we ever get anything remotely close to figurative language or even a beautiful sentence. In fact, the most inventive description in this whole passage might be “sad mouthfuls of food,” which is a pretty “sad” example of a good description, to borrow a vocabulary word from Rooney. There’s no human emotion in any of these phrases—in fact, her reporting reads like it was clipped from a newspaper article: banal and sterile, with no attempt to capture the essence of the human spirit. We’re told that Connell entered a “period of low spirits” and is “so depressed he couldn’t move a single muscle in his body,” but we don’t feel that he’s depressed because we never get inside his head. Rooney’s prose often “tells” rather than “shows,” and while I’ve been a frequent proponent of the occasional moment of “telling,” a skillful author balances “telling” with adequate imagery and emotion.

I’m a writer, and I’ll tell you that the easiest part of novel-writing is creating stream-of-consciousness rants—after all, such writing is really just a replication of your inner voice. Similarly, you can master dialogue by paying attention to day-to-day conversations or by watching movies, but describing the physical world requires an entirely different level of literary craftsmanship that Rooney cannot and does not even bother to aspire to. Any kindergartener can write abstract sentences like hers, such as the ones from this scene here:

There were others at the beginning. Some friends of Elaine’s went with them from Berlin to Prague, and they met a few of Niall’s Engineering classmates in Bratislava before they crossed over to Vienna on the train. Hostels were cheap, and the cities they visited had a pleasantly temporary feeling about them. Nothing Connell did there seemed to stay with him. The whole trip felt like a series of short films, screened only once, and afterwards he had a sense of what they were about but no exact memories of the plot. He remembers seeing things out the windows of taxis.

Can you picture anything that happens here? We’re told that there’s a train and a hostel and cities, but we don’t know a single thing about what the trains look like, what the hostel smells like, or what Connell’s experience of these cities feels like. Comparing this experience to a film is not only ludicrous but offensive to short films, which typically contain visuals!

Then we get the laziest description of all: “He remembers seeing things out the windows of taxis.”

You can argue that the point of this entire scene is that Connell doesn’t remember anything about his trip, but that doesn’t excuse Rooney from providing the reader with even a few sparse details. After all, memories rarely disappear in their entirety, and were Rooney’s aim to convey the limitations of the human mind, she might have left in a detail or two or made the slightest effort to reproduce the ephemerality of memory through elevated language. Instead, she describes the absence of memory by giving the reader an absence of description.

That’s called lazy writing.

And even in passages where the intent is not to draw a complete blank, her language remains stunningly abstract:

Lately she and Connell have been seeing a lot of each other. In Dublin they can walk down long stately streets together for the first time, confident that nobody they pass knows or cares who they are. Marianne lives alone in a one-bedroom apartment belonging to her grandmother, and in the evenings she and Connell sit in her living room drinking wine together. He complains to her, seemingly without reservation, about how hard it is to make friends in Trinity. The other day he lay on her couch and rolled the dregs of wine around in his glass and said: People here are such snobs. Even if they liked me I honestly wouldn’t want to be friends with them. He put his glass down and looked at Marianne. That’s why it’s easy for you, by the way, he said. Because you’re from a rich family, that’s why people like you. She frowned and nodded, and then Connell started laughing. I’m messing with you, he said. Their eyes met. She wanted to laugh, but she didn’t know if the joke was on her.

There’s not a single image over the course of this entire paragraph. We don’t know what Dublin’s streets look like, how Marianne’s apartment is organized, or even what sort of wine they’re drinking. Every scene reads like a rant plucked directly out of a middle schooler’s diary. As a friend put it to me in a text, “I’m bored out of my mind because it’s just abstract dialogue spurts floating with no context. How about describe the room or the bed or something?”

But it’s clear that Sally Rooney has no interest in anything other than “abstract dialogue spurts floating with no context”—and, of course, haphazard observations about capitalism—such as in this exchange here:

This is probably three times the size of my house, he said. Would you say?

She felt foolish for not realising what he had been thinking about.

Probably, she said. I haven’t seen upstairs, obviously.

Four bedrooms.

Jesus.

Just lying empty, no one living in it, he said. Why don’t they give them away if they can’t sell them? I’m not being thick with you, I’m genuinely asking.

She shrugged. She didn’t actually understand why.

It’s something to do with capitalism, she said.

Yeah. Everything is, that’s the problem, isn’t it?

She nodded. He looked over at her, as if coming out of a dream.

Are you cold? he said. You look like you’re freezing.

She smiled, rubbed at her nose. He unzipped his black puffer jacket and put it over her shoulders. They were standing very close. She would have lain on the ground and let him walk over her body if he wanted, he knew that.

Well, at least Rooney got one thing right. Her characters don’t understand a thing about how capitalism actually works.

In fact, were it not for her repetitive, surface-level observations about BDSM and capitalism—the literary establishment’s two favorite topics—it’s possible this poorly written novel would have never gotten published in the first place. But Rooney gets away with writing stilted, unnatural dialogue just because her characters constantly come out with uninspired platitudes about capitalism:

It’s time you’ll never get back, Marianne adds. I mean, the time is real.

The money is also real.

Well, but the time is more real. Time consists of physics, money is just a social construct.

Yes, but I’m still alive at work, says Joanna. It’s still me, I’m still having experiences. You’re not working, okay, but the time is passing for you too.

You’ll never get it back either.

But I can decide what I do with it.

To that I would venture that your decision-making is also a social construct.

Marianne laughs. She wanders out of the freezer aisle and towards the snacks.

I don’t buy into the morality of work, she says. Some work maybe, but you’re just moving paper around an office, you’re not contributing to the human effort.

I didn’t say anything about morality.

Marianne lifts a packet of dried fruit and examines it, but it contains raisins so she puts it back down and picks up another.

Do you think I judge you for being so idle? says Joanna.

Deep down I think you do. You judge Peggy.

Peggy has an idle mind, which is different.

Marianne clicks her tongue as if to scold Joanna for her cruelty, but not with any great investment. She’s reading the back of a dried apple packet.

I wouldn’t want you to turn into Peggy, says Joanna. I like you the way you are.

Oh, Peggy’s not that bad. I’m going to the supermarket checkout now so I’m going to hang up.

Okay. You can call tomorrow after the thing if you feel like talking.

Thanks, says Marianne. You’re a good friend. Bye.

There was a great opportunity here to introduce an interesting conversation about capitalism or morality—or even the idea that “decision-making is also a social construct”—but because Rooney lacks the brain cells to push her thoughts in depth, her characters can only ever graze at the surface of big ideas before reprising their stilted discussion of trivialities.

Indeed, “stilted” is the best word for every sentence Rooney has ever penned—especially when it comes to dialogue. Think about the last phone call you had with your friend—or any phone call you’ve ever placed in your life. Have you ever once experienced anything remotely similar to “I’m going to the supermarket checkout now so I’m going to hang up.” That’s not how people talk to each other—and absolutely no human being has ever ended a phone call with, “You’re a good friend. Bye.”

If you’re going to write an entire novel that’s basically just dialogue, you have to at least be good at dialogue!

But the worst part of this book is its final page, which summarizes the point of the entire story in a formulaic conclusion paragraph that feels like it was written for a ninth-grade English class:

She closes her eyes. He probably won’t come back, she thinks. Or he will, differently. What they have now they can never have back again. But for her the pain of loneliness will be nothing to the pain that she used to feel, of being unworthy. He brought her goodness like a gift and now it belongs to her. Meanwhile his life opens out before him in all directions at once. They’ve done a lot of good for each other. Really, she thinks, really. People can really change one another. You should go, she says. I’ll always be here. You know that.

I’m not kidding: Normal People literally ends by stating its exact themes and resolution point outright. The reason, of course, that Rooney has to do this is because at no point does her resolution ever feel earned—she needs to tell us about Marianne’s relationship to self-worth because she’s failed to make us understand that change through Marianne’s actions.

And though many great novels end with a concrete message, rarely is that message delivered to us outright. Consider, for instance, the closing paragraph of Saul Bellow’s Herzog, the last novel I finished:

Perhaps he’d stop writing letters. Yes, that was what was coming, in fact. The knowledge that he was done with these letters. Whatever had come over him during these last months, the spell, really seemed to be passing, really going. He set down his hat, with the roses and day lilies, on the half-painted piano, and went into his study, carrying the wine bottles in one hand like a pair of Indian clubs. Walking over notes and papers, he lay down on his Recamier couch. As he stretched out, he took a long breath, and then he lay, looking at the mesh of the screen, pulled loose by vines, and listening to the steady scratching of Mrs. Tuttle’s broom. He wanted to tell her to sprinkle the floor. She was raising too much dust. In a few minutes he would call down to her, “Damp it down, Mrs. Tuttle. There’s water in the sink.” But not just yet. At this time he had no messages for anyone. Nothing. Not a single word.

Bellow is not just a superior writer to Rooney on the sentence level—though from this single paragraph it’s clear that Bellow’s command of the English language is about a thousand times better than Rooney’s. What makes the ending to Herzog so brilliant is that we’re given a clear resolution without being hit over the head with its point. Throughout the novel, Herzog expresses his insecurities through the act of writing letters; by the end of the book, we’re told he’s resolved to stop writing them, but we’re not told that Herzog is no longer insecure. We’re left as readers to consider the implications of what we’ve just read and to draw our own conclusions about Bellow’s intended message.

In Normal People, on the other hand, we’re left wondering absolutely nothing by the time we reach that final page. The novel offers no deeper message, no universal truth; it remains hyper-specific to Marianne and Connell, with no relevance to anyone who’s never developed a BDSM fetish following years of familial abuse. For a novel about human relationships, it reads as stunningly inhumane, depicting the journeys of two particular characters without once offering a clear insight into the machinations of the human mind.

But beyond its lack of a grand narrative, the novel doesn’t make us feel anything. A novel about relationships, after all, should make us laugh, smile, or even shed a tear. Rooney, however, delivers observations about human beings in a style that one might find in a medical brief—sterile and robotic, journalistic and observational. In sanitizing her characters’ emotions, she compels us all to feel anesthetized.

But, as I wrote last week, such is the state of the contemporary literary world, and as one of its most celebrated representatives, Sally Rooney certainly does a great job of making us feel lobotomized.

We can talk about the scandal of censorship of free speech, but the scandal here runs deeper: in creating the sort of literary culture that venerates emotional restraint, Rooney has deprived us of something far more important than freedom of expression.

In creating Normal People, Rooney has erased the human soul.

Contemporary literature is dying.

If you’ve been following me for a while, you’ll know that my favorite (somewhat cheeky) claim is that contemporary literature sucks, and, in many ways, it does. Ben Lerner is an emotionless hack, Ottessa Moshfegh’s writing has no soul, and Sally Rooney never graduated from kindergarten. Even sadder is the fact that these writers represent the supposed upper echelon of literary prowess—as BookTok romantasy girls will often remind us, it only goes downhill from there. But unlike most writers who make up the contemporary literary establishment, I am not a nihilist but an optimist—I believe in the power of humanity, and this (admittedly) naive outlook has convinced me time and time again that these writers deserve a chance. That is why I’ve actually subjected myself to literary abominations such as The Topeka School, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, and Normal People, among others: every time I dive into these novels, I hope to stumble on a gem that might restore my faith in the contemporary literary milieu.

That’s why this past weekend, I really tried to give Anne Carson a chance.

Unless you live under a rock, you’ve probably heard by now that this past Thursday, Canadian poet Anne Carson took home the Nobel Prize in Literature. Before the big news, I’d only ever read If Not, Winter—Carson’s translations of the poems of Sappho—so I went into our newest Nobel laureate’s work with an open mind—and trust me, I really wanted to like her. Her Wikipedia page, for one, paints her as a serious literary scholar—versed in the likes of Homer, Euripides, Sophocles, Emily Dickinson, and Franz Kafka—and in a recent viral interview with The New Yorker, Carson even states that she doesn’t read contemporary novels—she reads old books.

For a moment, I thought I’d found a kindred spirit in the literary world—or, at least, a rare anomaly: a classically educated writer who desires to preserve rather than to destroy the literary tradition—but after reading dozens and dozens of Carson’s poems, I was not merely disappointed but downright devastated. Carson’s literary talent was not at all commensurate with her rigorous literary background, and, in fact, I’d hesitate to call her writing “literary” at all—she produces the sort of minimalist slop we might expect from the likes of Sally Rooney or Katie Kitamura, but certainly not from a Nobel laureate.

In short, I was thoroughly nonplussed. How was this highly educated, well-read scholar—a woman who rightfully looks down on contemporary “literature” and seems to hold the classics in great reverence—even capable of producing such horrendously toneless aphorisms?

Before I propose some answers, let’s take a look at some of Carson’s poems.

Our first example is a poem called “Stanzas, Sexes, Seductions” published in The New Yorker in 2001:

It’s good to be neuter.
I want to have meaningless legs.
There are things unbearable.
One can evade them a long time.
Then you die.

The oceans remind me
of your green room.
There are things unbearable.
Scorn, princes, this little size
of dying.

My personal poetry is a failure.
I do not want to be a person.
I want to be unbearable.
Lover to lover, the greenness of love.
Cool, cooling.

Earth bears no such plant.
Who does not end up
a female impersonator?
Drink all the sex there is.
Still die.

I had to read this one several times over to make sure I wasn’t missing something, but each additional read only intensified my repulsion. This poem just isn’t… pretty. In fact, Carson’s words reminded me of the telescreen announcers from 1984 who spew Party slogans just to keep the masses compliant. That’s the best way to describe her poems—empty words that don’t mean anything.

A poet’s duty is both to deepen our understanding of the world around us and to evoke a beautiful scene as we contemplate the ecstasies and pitfalls of the human condition. In summoning the image of an ocean, for one, a good poet might compel us to visualize the rhythm of its waves or to experience the taste of saltwater on our tongues. Carson’s ocean, however, does neither—it appeals only to an abstract “green room” that means nothing to anyone but Anne Carson herself. Indeed, there are exactly zero images in this entire poem—the language remains not only minimalist but abstract, and the few concrete images throughout—the earth, the ocean, the plant—pass by wholly unembellished. We don’t know where we are or, worse, what we’re supposed to feel—we’re only told what we must believe about sex and death without being made to experience these uniquely human circumstances.

Neither does “Stanzas, Sexes, Seductions” sound beautiful when read out loud. On the contrary, it comes off as banal and choppy—maybe that’s the point, but I’ve always been taught that good writing—and especially good poetry—must sound beautiful when read out loud. After all, poetry originated as an oral form—and still is today.

And if our literary icons don’t aspire to weave beauty from a string of words—if they privilege summarizing and reporting over feeling and evoking—then how are they any different from that pesky AI notetaker that nags you in your Zoom calls?

Here’s another example from a poem called “Clive Song,” published in Poetry Magazine in 2024:

He laughs.
His current client, a Moroccan man,
has been cleared for release
and also informed
he will never leave.
Clive, a lawyer, questions the logic of this. 
"I shouldn't laugh."
He tells more stories.
"Evidence" at Guantanamo comes often from snitches.
When the same snitch brought evidence
against 300 different people,
Clive wondered about motive
and did some research. The fact was,
each time the guy snitched
he got a free pass to "the love shack"
where the Americans show porn.

If I hadn’t told you that this poem was written by a Nobel laureate, I guarantee you that you would have concluded that you were reading the idle musings of the aforementioned AI notetaker: “He laughs.” “He tells more stories.” “Clive wondered about motive and did some research.”

I don’t think I’m hallucinating here—these fragments really do sound like an AI summary of a corporate brief—or one of those pesky AI synopses always popping up in Gmail. But poetry isn’t supposed to read like a series of meeting notes from a high school student council meeting, nor should it sound ugly on purpose. And while there’s an argument to be made for the occasional simple line in an otherwise beautiful poem—T.S. Eliot has several of them in The Waste Land—such simplicity only works when it conveys tonal variation—not when an entire poem is replete with laconic garbage. A poet is supposed to take the ordinary world and render it in terms of the extraordinary—Anne Carson’s phrases, on the other hand, are not only uninspired but downright lazy.

“Clive Song,” furthermore, contains no broader commentary on the human condition. The poem summarizes an interaction without inviting us to consider its broader implications, and unlike the great poems of the Western literary tradition, which offer a new understanding of the world on every additional read, “Clive Song” leaves no stone unturned.

If not for Carson’s Nobel Prize win, it would have already been forgotten.

Carson’s “The Glass Essay,” which also appeared in Poetry Magazine, paints a similar emotionless picture of Carson’s passionless, bland universe:

I can hear little clicks inside my dream.
Night drips its silver tap
down the back.
At 4 A.M. I wake. Thinking

of the man who
left in September.
His name was Law.

My face in the bathroom mirror
has white streaks down it.
I rinse the face and return to bed.
Tomorrow I am going to visit my mother.

I don’t know if I have anything to add beyond what I’ve already said. These poems don’t play with language in any unique or otherwise enticing fashion, nor do they compel you to think more deeply about the world around you. They’re just dull and boring—they evoke no emotion and seem to be crafted exclusively for the TikTok era—though this particular poem was, surprisingly, published back in 1994.

In a word, Anne Carson’s poems are really, really bad.

So how did Ms. Carson—out of the millions of talented writers who populate our society—win the most prestigious literary award on planet Earth?

The answer is simple. The literary establishment no longer cares for the features you or I may find enthralling in a great work of literature—in fact, it openly denounces feeling, emotion, craft, beauty, truth, and—most importantly—meaning, opting instead for simplicity and emotional restraint.

But in a society that continually writes off beauty as “relative” or insists that sincerity is “cringe,” how could it be otherwise?

Just take a look at the sort of books winning our culture’s most prestigious literary prizes—such as David Szalay’s Flesh, which won the Booker Prize in 2025:

He was sitting at her kitchen table eating Somloi galuska while she put the groceries away and then, when she had finished doing that, she asked him if he wanted to see them and he said yes, and she just showed them to him—standing there in the kitchen she took off first her shirt and then her bra. It’s the memory of her doing that that turns him on, as much as what they actually looked like.

What they actually looked like seems almost irrelevant. Or that they were weird and slightly disgusting might even have had the effect of turning him on more.

When he had finished the Somloi galuska, they went to the sofa and kissed for a while and then she undid his trousers and sucked him off again.

Then he left.

If not for the subject matter, you’d assume our narrator was a six-year-old. The excerpt above contains no subtext, no syntactic variation, and no words an elementary schooler would not understand. But Szalay’s most egregious offense is not even his minimalism but the soullessness inherent in his scenes: he describes sex—one of the most meaningful encounters of the human soul—with the same emotional detachment one might use to describe a trip to the DMV. And even if we were to suppose that he wanted to convey the total lack of emotion between these two people, then one might expect even a hint of sadness or discomfort—anything to convince us that we’re reading about two human beings rather than a pair of robots.

Unfortunately, however, this lackluster, emotionless writing style is not unique to Szalay or Carson, nor is it an accident that two of our culture’s most prestigious prizewinners have elected to write in this way—this lobotomized writing style perfectly conforms to the demands of the literary establishment, which wants you to talk about human emotions… with no emotions.

Take this excerpt, for instance, from my archenemy Sally Rooney:

It’s cool you’re playing a gay character, Bobbi was saying to Nick.

Is Brick gay? he said. I think maybe he’s just bisexual.

Don’t say “just bisexual,” she said. Frances is bisexual, you know.

I didn’t know that, Melissa said.

I chose to drag on my cigarette for a long time before saying anything. I knew that everyone was waiting for me to speak.

Well, I said. Yeah, I’m kind of an omnivore.

Melissa laughed at that. Nick looked at me and gave an amused smile, which I looked away from quickly and pretended to take an interest in my glass.

Me too, Melissa said.

Remember the penultimate scene from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, where McMurphy’s lying in his bed, helpless and lobotomized? Jack Nicholson puts more emotion into his portrayal of a lobotomized McMurphy than Sally Rooney puts into her description of human conversation. Stripped of all tonal variation, her language feels strangely anesthetized; the prose describes and summarizes without evoking, and at no point—in any of her nearly identical and jejune novels—does Rooney ever bother to capture the ineffable experience of being human. Like Szalay and Carson, she actively rejects beauty, meaning, and the human soul—and then gets showered with our culture’s most prestigious literary accolades. That’s because the literary establishment doesn’t care for characters who feel anger or self-loathing or even rapture or joy—it cares for minimalism and emotional restraint, and it wants you, the reader, to feel similarly drained.

And that is why, this year, the Nobel Prize in Literature went not to Thomas Pynchon or Salman Rushdie or Haruki Murakami but to Anne Carson—a woman whose writing makes you feel absolutely nothing. The problem, then, with our literary culture is not that we’ve run out of talented writers but that we’ve declared an active war on the ones who dare to speak candidly of the human condition.

The literary establishment wants you to feel lobotomized. The “cool kids,” after all, have always been suave, emotionless, and unperturbed—and in our cigarette-smoking, lowercase-letter, fedora-wearing, black-and-white-Polaroid literary culture, the worst thing you can do is to imbue your writing with a bit—or even a lot—of feeling.

But great literature has always made us feel things—and many of our literary geniuses have never known a thing of emotional restraint. They may not be as “polished” as David Szalay or as restrained as Anne Carson, but they’ll remind you what it’s like to be a human—and maybe even make you shed a tear or two.

Dostoyevsky might just be the greatest novelist ever to have walked this earth—and I can prove it.

I’ve previously written about how to choose the best Dostoyevsky translation, what you might be missing in your reading of Crime and Punishment, and what most people get wrong in their interpretation of Raskolnikov. But today, I’d like to discuss why I believe Crime and Punishment is the second-best novel ever written (after The Brothers Karamazov, of course).

Before we dive into Crime and Punishment’s philosophical underpinnings, we must first understand Dostoyevsky’s roots.

Dostoyevsky’s Early Days

As a child, Dostoyevsky attended a French boarding school, where he developed a penchant for both French literature and philosophy. His first major literary project, in fact, was not a novel of his own making but a translation of Honoré de Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet. One can imagine that Dostoyevsky’s interest in the French intellectual world made him a natural candidate for the Petrashevsky Circle, a literary group composed of progressive intellectuals not unlike today’s New Yorker crowd. Of particular interest to both young Fyodor and his intellectual compatriots were Charles Fourier and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon—a leading utopian socialist and the father of anarchism, respectively. The young Fyodor, in fact, was so taken by Fourier and Proudhon’s missions to create a better and more just world that he spent his days debating political reform in Petrashevsky’s home, and, eventually, joining a more radical and bloodthirsty offshoot of the organization.

That is, of course, until his actions caught up to him.

In 1849, Tsar Nicholas I, alarmed at the possibility of a revolution, arrested the members of the Petrashevsky Circle and sent them to Semyonov Place for execution. But as the prisoners stood before the firing squad, praying for a miracle, a messenger ran in with notice of a reprieve, and Dostoyevsky was granted life.

The entire execution, of course, was a set-up, but for young Dostoyevsky, that moment meant everything.

There’s a passage in The Idiot where Prince Myshkin recalls the experience of a man sentenced to death by firing squad. One can imagine that it accurately sums up Dostoyevsky’s own brief encounter with death:

“What if I were not to die! What if life were given back to me—what infinity! And it would all be mine! then I’d turn each minute into a whole age, I’d lose nothing, I’d reckon up every minute separately, I’d let nothing be wasted!”

After staring death right in the face, Dostoyevsky found a new meaning in his life—and an extraordinary sense of meaning, at that. We know from a letter written to his brother on the day of his pardon that Dostoyevsky developed not only a renewed sense of gratitude but also an intense spirituality that would stay with him for the rest of his life:

When I look back at the past and think how much time has been wasted in vain, how much time was lost in delusions, in errors, in idleness, in ignorance of how to live, how I did not value time, how often I sinned against my heart and spirit, — my heart bleeds. Life is a gift, life is happiness, each minute might have been an age of happiness. Si jeunesse savait! Now, changing my life, I am being reborn into a new form. Brother! I swear to you that I shall not lose hope, and shall preserve my spirit and heart in purity. I shall be reborn to a better thing. That is my whole hope, my whole comfort!

Dostoyevsky went on to spend the next decade in Siberian exile, but like Raskolnikov, he didn’t seem to mind it much—in fact, it was in exile that Dostoyevsky revised many of his left-wing convictions and began to ask what really gave human beings meaning.

These musings gave birth to several of the Western world’s greatest literary creations.

Demons was inspired by Dostoyevsky’s early revolutionary days; Notes from Underground, written shortly before Crime and Punishment, challenges utopianism by arguing that human beings deliberately act against their own interests. In fact, one might trace Dostoyevsky’s lifelong interest in psychology to his determination to debunk the radical left-wing ideologies that had led him astray as a young man: turning to the darker side of human psychology, Dostoyevsky created one of the first-ever novels to probe the depths of the human psyche.

That novel was Crime and Punishment.

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2026 might just be the year of atrocious book-to-movie adaptations.

Back in February, we were subjected to the revolting BDSM fantasy that, for whatever reason, bore the title “Wuthering Heights” (the film, I assure you, has no relation to Brontë’s monumental Gothic novel of the same name). Several months ago, we all became embroiled in an Internet battle over the merits (or lack thereof) of Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey (see my personal stance here). X has already been seething over Greta Gerwig’s anticipated Narnia adaptation, which has apparently cast none other than feminist advocate Meryl Streep as Aslan—AKA the voice of Jesus Christ (the Lewis family is rightfully upset).

But no cinematic assault on classic literature is perhaps as egregious as Netflix’s new adaptation of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden.

I first read East of Eden when I was sixteen years old. I had dragged my family out to Boston for the nerdiest reason you could possibly imagine: I wanted to see a plaque on The Anderson Memorial Bridge in Cambridge dedicated to my favorite literary character, Quentin Compson. Unfortunately, however, the plaque had been taken down for renovation that year, and a disheartened teenage Liza would not set eyes on it for another decade (I finally scouted it out last year). But our trip did not go to naught: while in Cambridge, I picked up a copy of Steinbeck’s longest novel, East of Eden, from the Harvard bookstore.

I’ll admit, I had low expectations. I think I gave Of Mice and Men two stars on Goodreads after reading it for the first time during my freshman year of high school, and I was not particularly moved by The Grapes of Wrath (it’s objectively a great work of literature, but I am not a personal believer in the whole “the American Dream is broken” narrative). I didn’t love The Pearl, and I even left Cannery Row unfinished.

I was what you might call an “unlikely Steinbeck fan,” and several chapters into East of Eden, I remained unmoved by the intergenerational saga introducing the Trask family. In fact, I’m positive that sixteen-year-old Liza only kept reading because there was a character named Liza (though I’m sure she pronounces her name differently). I’d also just finished Henry James’s A Portrait of a Lady, so I welcomed Steinbeck’s terse, straightforward sentences after weathering weeks of James’s more meandering prose.

Then, I hit Chapter 8.

I remember exactly where I was that afternoon thirteen years ago. We had just gotten back from a college visit to Tufts and were strolling around Northeastern’s campus following a quick trip to Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. We had an hour or so to spare before dinner, and I dashed into a public library to squeeze in some reading.

That was when I met Cathy Ames—and from the moment she pranced onto the page, I couldn’t help but be obsessed.

“I believe there are monsters born in the world to human parents.”

What a powerful way to introduce one of literature’s most memorable antagonists.

But what was it about Cathy that made her so demoniacal? After all, when we first meet her, she’s just a baby, then just a kid.

Nevertheless, the narrator tells us that Cathy was “not like other people, never was from birth,” and as I learned more about this uncanny portrait of a subhuman woman, I found myself nodding along to the chapter’s thesis that “just as there are physical monsters,” there are also “mental or psychic monsters” among us. We are told that Cathy is “a liar” who “made people uneasy.” She is “not like other children” yet “could enter no room without causing everyone to turn toward her.”

Cathy Ames was born with a “malformed soul.”

“There was a time,” the narrator continues, “when a girl like Cathy would have been called possessed by the devil.” Indeed, in a letter to a family friend, Steinbeck once wrote that Cathy is supposed to be “representative of Satan.”

That’s no exaggeration—Cathy commits her first act of evil at the ripe age of ten.

It’s a spring morning when her mother finds her in a carriage house alongside two fourteen-year-old boys. There’s a “murmur of voices,” but Cathy isn’t engaged in some innocent game: she’s lying on the floor “naked to the waist” with her “skirts pulled up,” her wrists tied with a “heavy rope.” The boys insist that Cathy had paid them each to be there—and that she had tied her hands herself. Cathy’s mother, of course, is in disbelief—especially because her daughter, the ever-manipulative liar, feigns what her doctor calls “shock” and refuses to talk.

We are never told whom to believe, but the implication is that ten-year-old Cathy has just framed the boys for rape.

Cathy doesn’t stop there, of course. At fourteen, she has an affair with her Latin teacher, whom she quickly drives to suicide, and at sixteen, she burns her parents alive in her own childhood home.

And all over the course of a single chapter.

I stayed up late that night zipping through the next two hundred pages of the novel, captivated by Steinbeck’s depiction of unadulterated evil. With the exception of, perhaps, Othello, I’d never read anything like it. There seemed to be no logical explanation for Cathy’s misdeeds. She was evil because… she wanted to be.

Maybe that was the point.

Indeed, by the time we reach Chapter 24, there is no question not only that Cathy Ames is evil—and that she’s evil simply because she wants to be.

The novel’s most famous chapter introduces us to the Hebrew term timshel—or “Thou mayest”—which summarizes East of Eden’s moving thesis: no matter who you are or where you come from, you have the power to choose good over evil. And that’s exactly how we know that Cathy’s misdeeds are not the result of trauma or suffering but the consequence of personal choice. Cathy chooses evil because she wants to be evil.

Hollywood, however, has a different interpretation.

In a recent interview with The Atlantic, actress Florence Pugh, who portrays Cathy in the new miniseries, states that writer “Zoe [Kazan] wasn’t interested in making [Cathy Ames] just a monster. She was interested in understanding her.” In fact, Pugh wants us to “sympathize and maybe fall in love with [Cathy] a little bit.”

Really? Sympathize with a woman who burns her parents alive in their house—just for fun?

Writer Zoe Kazan seems to think so. In a recent interview with Good Morning Washington, she defended her choice to make Cathy Ames into a sympathetic character in the following terms:

“I’m just really curious about, like, well, what if we think of [Cathy] not as the embodiment of evil but as a person who does really bad things? … And I think we learn more about ourselves if we don’t think about evil people as being that different from us.”

If evil people aren’t that different from Zoe Kazan, then perhaps we can conclude that Zoe Kazan might just be evil.

At the very least, she hasn’t read the book. Earlier in the same interview, she states, “[Steinbeck] is riffing on the story of Adam and Eve and the fall of man.”

Wrong story, honey. East of Eden retells the story of Cain and Abel—not that of Adam and Eve. Steinbeck derives his title, in fact, from Genesis 4:16: “So Cain went out from the Lord’s presence and lived in the land of Nod, east of Eden.”

It seems that no one at Netflix understood or even tried to understand Steinbeck’s fundamental message, but there’s a reason for that. In fact, Kazan gives away the name of the game in another one of her recent interviews:

“I think that Cathy is the most extraordinary character,” she explains. “To see a girl and then a woman who has no care but her own autonomy and gain, who is not doing anything for anyone else’s benefit, it was bracing... I felt, like, re-atomized by it or something.”

In other words, Kazan reinterprets Cathy’s sins in a positive light—and in doing so, she represents the dogma currently at the heart of our artistic institutions: the obliteration of objective morality in our art.

Our art was once bold enough to portray its characters in morally unambiguous terms. Voldemort, for instance, is purely evil—so is Iago, and so, too, is Cathy Ames. But when you create a culture that no longer believes in morality, a character like Lord Voldemort becomes impossible: without objective morality, nothing can be inherently evil. As a result, when evil does dare to exist in our art, it is always either downplayed or tempered by some heart-wrenching backstory.

That is why today, every villain on our screens seems to have a traumatic past. Take a look at the difference, for instance, between the original Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and the 2005 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory remake. In the 1972 film—and, indeed, in Roald Dahl’s original novel—Willy Wonka was just sinister, and no one sat around wondering why. We didn’t need a trauma story to explain why he chooses to blow up Violet Beauregarde—he just does. Tim Burton’s 2005 reinterpretation, however, gave Wonka a tragic backstory in an attempt to explain why he had ended up that way. The result is a more sympathetic, and, indeed, a less evil antagonist.

In other words, the theory in vogue in the art world is that all evil has a clear origin—and that evil, therefore, can always be excused. The problem with such a mentality is that it obscures the reality that many evils ought to be taken at face value. Try explaining, for one, why Adolf Hitler decided to kill six million people simply for being born a certain way.

You just can’t.

But Hollywood wants to—and it’s not just Hollywood. Our entire society seems to have lost sight of good and evil.

Daily Wire co-founder Ben Shapiro often says that “culture is upstream of politics”: our society’s beliefs and values shape our laws and current events. If we choose to excuse evil in our art, then we begin to excuse evil in our society.

This past month, we witnessed mobs of women expressing solidarity for Lindsay Clancy; similarly, back in 2023, influencers flooded TikTok to “understand” where Osama bin Laden might have been coming from. These events did not spring out of a vacuum—they are the logical culmination of decades of what Gad Saad has called “suicidal empathy,” and it begins with our art.

East of Eden creators want you to “fall in love with Cathy” because as a society, we have stopped believing in personal agency. We excuse Lindsay Clancy on the basis that she was not responsible for her crime. We sympathize with Osama bin Laden because he was simply “driven” by “external events” to orchestrate one of the deadliest terror attacks in human history.

And the moment we start telling ourselves these lies is the moment that our society begins to crumble.

As a literature nerd, I am veritably more annoyed by the bowdlerization of East of Eden than perhaps anyone else on the Internet—and, in fact, I was almost singlehandedly responsible for the “backlash” on X against Zoe Kazan (sorry, not sorry, Zoe)—but Netflix’s new adaptation should worry us all. The reimagining of Cathy Ames as a sympathetic character is not just a case of “the movie got it wrong”—it is a moral catastrophe with repercussions for a society that is quickly losing its grasp on good and evil.

That is why great literature is and always will be one of our society’s most precious artifacts. I have said many times—and I will continue to maintain—that great literature is not defined by a writer’s command of prose or his ability to tell a good story. Great literature must contain a moral vision. And that is why East of Eden is by far Steinbeck’s greatest literary accomplishment. The Grapes of Wrath may observe our society—and it does a damn good job of it—but East of Eden offers a solution to its problems. That is why it is the second greatest novel ever written about the power of personal agency: it reminds us that when faced with evil, we have the power to choose good no matter what we may have gone through in our past.

That power is timshel.

Thou mayest.

Perhaps it is time we remembered what it means.

This past week, the National Book Award released its 10 longlist picks—and we need to stage an intervention.

This year’s longlisted novels—ranging from autofiction by autistic trans they/thems to autofiction by gay black men (“range” is perhaps not the best word here)—not only expose some of our society’s most atrocious writing but also reveal a pattern in what our literary establishment looks for in a novel.

As I see it, there are three primary features the establishment rewards today.

The first is the abundance of vague, imprecise language. The second is the presence of overt moralizing written from the author’s own perspective. The third is shock value—especially when it comes to explicit sexual themes.

Let’s go through each of them and demonstrate why you should stay away from contemporary fiction.

The Cult of Obscurity

As a society, we seem to have become so categorically allergic to precise, imagistic prose that we’ve chosen to dole out prizes to vague, choppy writing that sounds like it was written by a high school emo kid on his first acid trip.

Many of these writers simply can’t write, but because we’ve become so averse to hurting people’s feelings, we not only allow them to continue writing but also shower them with participation trophies in the form of literary “awards,” insisting that vagueness is not only permissible but also deep!

During my short-lived tenure in the academy, I learned that people who can’t write will often hide behind obscurantism and then insist that if you have trouble following their train of thought, it’s simply because you’re not smart enough. This is the Ben Lerner tactic I discussed last week, and it’s unfortunately ubiquitous in the sorts of books we choose to publish today.

Let’s take a look at the examples from the National Book Award, starting with Edwidge Danticat’s Dèy, a novel about “trauma, mourning, and joy” through a Haitian migrant lens.

The public address system, through which instrumental versions of popular tunes are usually piped, crackles as though it is the apparatus that is clearing its throat rather than the man using it.

I edit college essays for a living. The excerpt above looks exactly like the sort of sentence a high schooler might write in a weak attempt to impress admissions officers with his or her command of “figurative language.” Danticat has created what we call a pleonastic sentence, wherein our metaphor surrenders its impact to a spate of extraneous words and thereby complicates rather than elucidates our understanding of the image in question. It’s maddening that not a single editor thought to even cut the words “that is” right after “apparatus”—such an edit wouldn’t have entirely redeemed our sentence, but at least it would have made it slightly less clunky.

It would have taken Danticat about forty seconds to rewrite the sentence like this, streamlining the flow of ideas while preserving all relevant information:

The public address system, which usually pipes instrumental versions of popular tunes, crackles as though to clear its throat.

Danticat continues with the following:

A communal moan passes through the room, along with gasps and breakouts of “Oh God!” leading into Hail Marys and other liturgy being recited in more languages than I recognize, all with this cadence between desperation and hope, the oral version of rocking oneself.

If anyone has Kamala Harris’s phone number, please let me know. We need to call her up and ask her to surrender her Word Salad Award to Edwidge Danticat.

Listen, I love long sentences as much as the next guy, but a long sentence must be both focused and precise. What is “the oral version of rocking oneself” or “this cadence between desperation and hope”? No one knows other than our friend Edwidge. Her prose continually attempts to explain itself because she knows that no reader will be able to parse exactly what’s going on.

Let’s take a look at another example—this one from Paradiso 17 by Hannah Lillith Assadi, which follows the life of a Palestinian man mourning his home following the 1948 Nakba (very original).

Later, when the French officers at the refugee camp in Syria asked about Sufien’s date of birth for his Document de Voyage (Pour les Réfugiés Palestiniens), Amal, now called Um Sufien, replied that it was in the time of year of their savior’s birthday, remembering the hills of Safad disappeared by mist that first day nursing Sufien, how the land itself looked like it was dreaming in that season, and remembering so vividly the music of those bells.

I don’t know why these “writers” believe that composing an extremely pretentious sentence automatically makes you sound deep. Like Danticat, Assadi buries what could have been a beautiful image beneath vague language bordering on obscurantism.

Elsewhere in the text, we get the following description of the same hills:

Sufien would later religiously mark the dusk, marvel at the colors of the end of daylight, and that fateful April evening, he watched it too, wrapping its hues around the hills of his city like a yearning refrain.

What does it mean for a land to “look like it was dreaming” or for colors to wrap themselves around hills in a “yearning refrain”? This woman has strung over a hundred words together in a shoddy attempt to describe a hillside, yet after reading these passages, I have no idea what her setting looks like. There’s an emphasis on colors wrapping themselves around these hills, but we aren’t even told what colors!

Great descriptions should compel us to immediately visualize a scene. The only thing I’m visualizing here are my brain cells getting ready to go on strike from being thus abused.

The Political Sermon

We now come to the second problem with contemporary writing. The few writers who actually can write use their talent to promote ideological garbage; fundamentally incapable of telling a good story, these writers turn to fiction as a means of covertly pushing indefensible ideological messages for nefarious aims. As a result, their novels read more like polemics—or, perhaps, unhinged rants on X—than actual works of art.

The best example from this year’s National Book Award comes courtesy of Morgan Thomas, an autistic man on estrogen who uses his novel Mad Eden to argue that we should be administering hormone therapy to children—and that a failure to do so is somehow an impingement on his personal “joy”:

We had decided it solemnly, we were of an age where such a decision had to be made. If we wanted to wait, things needed to be frozen, some part of us held still in time. And there was hate, of course, that constant. Or prejudice, whatever word you prefer, there was plenty of it that summer and more would come. The governor was trying to shut down R House, and we were no longer using public restrooms, and Liam had canceled a workshop at a local youth center—the organizers were worried about it drawing the wrong sort of attention—and the paper I’d cowritten with several colleagues on intersex considerations in gender-affirming care for minors was pulled from an academic journal after being accepted, edited, and proofed, a decision, they explained in a terse email, they’d made to safeguard the journal’s reputation, and this doesn’t sound like joy, perhaps it is gauche to say that joy came from this, what joy could come, but there was joy, somehow, in our surviving in this place that intended to be inhospitable to us, I felt it sometimes when biting into a slice of garden-grown cucumber marinated in balsamic or diving into the ever-cool waters of the spring, how the state mounted a threat to our joy, how the state seemed increasingly to want to destroy it, and how we, therefore, guarded the joy more steadfastly.

On second thought, Thomas is not a particularly gifted writer—the first few sentences here are also somewhat clunky—but he’s certainly more accomplished than either Danticat or Assadi. The problem with his writing is that if I hadn’t told you that we’d just read an excerpt from a novel, you’d have assumed that we were thrust into a personal essay or even an op-ed. The entire essay—we shall henceforth call it an “essay” because it’s not really fiction—tells us exactly what to believe without room for interpretation: it introduces a political claim followed by a list of supporting examples before veering into a tenuous conclusion. Even the passage’s few vivid images—the cucumber in balsamic (I’ll admit, I like this one) and the spring water—are subsumed under a ridiculous political thesis about “the state” threatening his “joy.”

But the worst part is that Mad Eden (I’m certainly mad that the sacred name “Eden” has been profaned in this way) disparages everyone who doesn’t believe that we should be administering “gender-affirming care” to minors, insisting that such a stance—shared by the majority of Americans—somehow undermines his personal capacity for joy!

I mean, if you want to tell me about threats to joy, this book might be the biggest offender.

Vulgarity and Transgression

Our last example is not necessarily poorly written—this author at least has a personality—but it’s certainly transgressive for transgression’s sake. I’ve written previously about the vulgarization of literature, and it’s a shame that so much of contemporary literature features frequent forays into our bedrooms. Such writing is not only an assault on my eyes but also a slap in the face of Beauty—and the literary establishment routinely eats it up.

Here’s one such example from a novel called The Disappearers, which The New York Times recently praised as “the novel of the decade, if not the century”:

Okay, I should put this down. One time I was in Mummy and Daddy’s room. I was sitting on the bedhead, looking straight at the mirror facing the bed. My shorts and briefs were already down at my ankles and just looking at the mirror was making me hard. I was beating off with Mummy’s cocoa butter when my sister walked in like how any little child walks into a room.

“The fuck!” I cupped my cock and balls instead of pulling up my shorts.

“What you doing?” she asked.

“I...I...Iooking for something,” I said. We both looked at each other through the mirror. I didn’t know what to say next. A cut on my inner thigh that had pus. A mole that might be a wart.

Something, some boy thing to disgust her quick. It’s not like I was babysitting, but the parents did leave me alone with her. We stood there looking at each other through the mirror until her child brain got bored and she walked out.

I can watch myself in the mirror while jacking off. Am I so gay that I turn myself on? Something about it feels nastier than porn, not self-incest, which sounds like something an idiot preacher would say.

This writer is certainly the most technically accomplished of the lot (which isn’t saying much), but let’s look at the substance of his prose. It’s just... vulgar. There’s nothing inherently wrong with writing about sex, but simply making a passage graphic or transgressive doesn’t make it “deep” in any meaningful way. At the very least, I’d hesitate to call this book “the novel of the decade,” much less the century.

Maybe the point is to be repulsive, but I suspect that this person wouldn’t have scored a publishing deal if he weren’t out spouting this drivel. We learn nothing about this character from his rant other than the fact that he’s an arrogant prick, and that’s because there’s nothing deeper beneath the shock factor—after all, simply probing the depths of the human mind doesn’t automatically make you “deep.” The human mind is full of shallow garbage, and one must be selective with what makes it onto the page.

Lest you think that’s just an isolated instance of vulgarity, here’s a completely unrelated passage from a later chapter in The Disappearers:

Penis. Cock. Mine is not the only hand to have touched my cock. There have been five others, which given where I live and who I live with and what I have to live with, is damn well something. I already talked about that in this journal and I can’t think of any detail I left out. But this is an exercise, at least that is what I think it is. Watch, observe, report. This might as well be a report for social studies class back in grade school. Maybe I should talk about it like it’s somebody else’s cock. It’s darker than my palms but lighter than my face. I see shows on TV where every athlete is supposedly naked in the locker room, and can’t imagine me surviving that, especially since this is the first time I’m not being labeled one of the school fags. At the same time I wish I was at an American university to see boys walking around jiggling their American cocks while they talk football scores. Or girls. I wonder if they ignore how talking about pussy is getting them hard, or if that is just how it goes in my mind’s porn movie. It’s not the biggest cock I have ever seen, on-screen or in person. But hey, when it’s hard it reaches my navel, which must mean it’s big enough. Is it weird to say that it looks like the cock a person like me is supposed to have?

I don’t even have an analysis of the passage above. It’s just stupid. The only thing I’ve learned from it is that the author clearly wants us to know how big his cock is, which is messed up on many different levels. He deserves no more of my time.

I apologize to the gentlemen on my mailing list. I will make it up to you one of these days by writing an essay about Nabokov’s beautiful prose.

Ideological Capture in Publishing

So why are these books getting published in the first place?

It’s true that we can excuse even the greatest writers for a few bad sentences, but there’s something else going on here: the publishing industry has become ideologically captured.

The National Book Foundation describes this year’s fiction longlist in terms of queer identity, homophobia, migration, Palestine and the Nakba, Haiti and diaspora, displacement, race, and belonging. That’s not to say that books on these subjects shouldn’t exist, but you’d be hard-pressed to find a book about conservatives or Europeans or Israelis on these award lists—even if some of these books might be well-written.

But because the literary establishment rewards a narrow band of subjects—all of them relating to leftist identity politics—books that don’t conform to the status quo disappear from our shelves, and, worse, terribly written books get rewarded simply for tackling particular subjects.

Pandering to radical leftists cannot rescue bad prose, but these judges sure as hell want you to think so. And that is precisely why so many of the National Book Award picks are simply bad. We’ve started to mistake ideology for quality, and our literary culture has suffered as a result.

It’s up to us to save it by reading great literature.

Well, sirs and mesdames, there you have it—an overview of the National Book Award picks. I almost regret writing this essay because I’ve given these people free publicity, but at least my readers will know never to give a penny to any of these “writers” again (though we really need to come up with a new word for contemporary “writers” because whatever these people are doing, they’re certainly not writing).

Many of you know that I rarely subject myself to the agony of reading contemporary literature—frankly, even doomscrolling on X is a better use of my time (more people on there know how to construct a sentence than in a Sally Rooney novel), but I have fallen into the misfortune of forging a career out of critiquing contemporary “literature” and must therefore periodically survey the literary landscape and decide which contemporary “novel” to torment myself with next. I’ve previously surrendered brain cells to Normal People, Yesteryear and My Year of Rest and Relaxation, and my latest foray into our culture’s literary idiocracy comes courtesy of Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School.

I know I’m about six years late with this review, but I’m still catching up on building out my contemporary fiction literacy because prior to starting Pens and Poison in 2024, I had no reason to read this soulless slop.

And boy, is it soulless.

Let’s first get the setup out of the way. The novel follows the young Adam Gordon, a senior in high school, as he competes in various debate tournaments. His father Jonathan is a psychologist, and his mother Jane—also a psychologist—has lots of trauma from her past (wow, original). They frequently steal the narration from Adam in alternating POV chapters, though I’m not quite sure what purpose the alternating POV serves—as we’ll see in just a moment, our narrators all sound exactly the same.

To Lerner’s credit, he’s a much better writer on the syntactical level than Rooney, Burke, or Moshfegh (though that’s not a difficult bar to clear), and unlike members of the Rooney-Burke-Moshfegh coalition, he’s at least graduated from reading picture books. His sentences evince a level of smoothness that you’d be hard-pressed to find anywhere amid Rooney’s jagged phrases or Burke’s TikTok-inspired paragraphs, but Lerner’s greatest asset is unfortunately also his greatest weakness. In fact, Lerner’s sentences flow so well that reading The Topeka School felt like watching water tumble down a pipe: his prose is frictionless to the point of feeling entirely mechanical.

Let’s take a look at an example.

Then we arrived before Duccio’s Madonna and Child, where we stood for several minutes, my jaw clenching and unclenching involuntarily as we looked. Old paintings usually bored me; this one stopped me cold. The foreknowledge in the woman’s expression, as though she could anticipate a distant recurrence.

I remember rereading this passage several times because I couldn’t believe my eyes. The narrator, Jonathan Gordon, is literally standing in front of a painting depicting the Virgin Mary, and his reaction is that “the woman”—some unspecified woman, never mind who—“could anticipate a distant recurrence.” The language here is so abstract that I’m not quite sure what “could anticipate a distant recurrence” is supposed to mean in this context. We have several words strung together without actually telling us anything of substance, and while we can perhaps forgive Kamala Harris for such a sin—to my knowledge, she hasn’t been prancing around the MFA stage for the past decade—Lerner is a writer with actual awards!

Well, you’ll say, maybe that’s the point. Maybe the narrator isn’t particularly moved by the painting and therefore describes it in meaningless phrases to convey his detachment from religion and everything else that makes art worthwhile. That would be fine if we weren’t literally told later in the paragraph that he was “moved” by the painting.

But what really fascinated me, really moved me, wasn’t in the painting: it was how the bottom edge of the original frame was marked by candle burns. Traces of an older medium of illumination, the shadow of devotion. The wall text claimed the painting helped inaugurate the Renaissance because Duccio reimagined the Madonna and Christ in terms taken from life.

Do these sound like the words of someone who’s moved by a work of art?

Lerner’s language is so detached that I feel like I’m reading a corporate email rather than the experience of someone who has just been touched by a sacred experience. In fact, I’d venture to surmise that Sam Altman and his friends must have trained ChatGPT on Lerner’s writing—the latter half of the paragraph sounds exactly like the sort of word salad you’d get if you prompted an AI chatbot to give you a description of the painting.

Let’s read it again.

But what really fascinated me, really moved me, wasn’t in the painting: it was how the bottom edge of the original frame was marked by candle burns. Traces of an older medium of illumination, the shadow of devotion. The wall text claimed the painting helped inaugurate the Renaissance because Duccio reimagined the Madonna and Christ in terms taken from life.

If I didn’t know that Ben Lerner had written these words, I’d probably suspect that I’d just been handed the midnight musings of everyone’s arch-frenemy Claude Fable. The formula is surprisingly consistent with that of AI prose: “What fascinated me wasn’t [vague meaningless phrase], it was [vague meaningless phrase],” followed by “[abstract sentence fragment]” and “[word salad].”

Lerner’s prose is vague and detached to the point of eliciting no substantial emotion from his readers, but as a reader, I want to feel something from reading a work of fiction. Great writing should inspire us to feel the same emotions as our characters; when reading The Brothers Karamazov, for instance, I often find myself crying alongside Alyosha. When reading Lerner’s prose, I find myself crying over the bleak future of the human race—especially if this is our idea of great art.

I’ll admit that I was perhaps personally more offended by Lerner’s soulless word salad than his average victim because I felt I had a personal stake in The Topeka School’s Jewish themes: as someone who also frequently explores Judaism in my writing, I really wanted to feel as if I were in a Philip Roth novel or an Isaac Babel story, flung inside an overtly Jewish world without necessarily being fed an explicitly Jewish story. But The Topeka School’s few mentions of Judaism served only as pretext for Lerner’s various uninspired exegeses:

When the Nazis came to power, they sought an authentically German worldview that could supplant physics, which was tainted by Jews and their notions of relativity. Hörbiger’s theory, which already had a popular following, offered Himmler and Hitler a way to cleanse their Weltanschauung of Jewish science. The World Ice Theory was taught in schools, incorporated into textbooks.

One might imagine that such a piece of Holocaust history might have been a great way to introduce readers to Adam’s world, but instead of soulful characterization—this is the Holocaust we’re talking about!—we get arbitrary references—Hörbiger’s theory, Weltanschauung, The World Ice Theory—that tell us absolutely nothing about how any of these characters feel when confronted with their fraught history.

But “arbitrary references” is the name of Lerner’s game. The Topeka School is littered with abstruse allusions that serve no purpose beyond repeatedly demonstrating how smart Lerner thinks he is. Listen—I’m all for literary allusion. My favorite poet is T.S. Eliot, for God’s sake, and I’d go so far as to say that allusion is my favorite literary device; when done well, in fact, a literary allusion is bound to produce a work of art as great as The Waste Land. But the genius of Eliot’s monumental poem is that every single reference enhances our experience of the poem rather than detracts from it—in other words, an allusion has to mean something within the context of the story in order to earn its place there. Lerner, on the other hand, compulsively peppers his manuscript with allusions for the sake of proving that he knows some fancy names.

Here’s one such example:

In Nevada and New York, psycholinguists are trying to teach chimps to sign—believing them capable of language, although physically unable to produce a sufficient range of voiced sounds—but in Topeka, in Berlin, “a large chimpanzee blinked at him, gave him a good-natured nod, and said in a deep voice: ‘How goes it, brother?’” It’s going pretty well; ARPANET has adopted TCP/IP, enabling the Internet; Trump Tower just opened on Fifth Avenue, the first commercial cellular telephone call was made from the parking lot of Soldier Field in Chicago; Alexander Graham Bell’s great-grandson took the call in Germany, the Germany of Wilhelm II, whose newspaper picture Elke is cutting up in her small flat for a collage, his mustache replaced with a wrestler’s legs; for the only time, Freud is in America; in earnest, Proust has started La recherche, will, with the old technology of prose, describe his first phone call, first encounter with an airplane, what the motorcar does to the landscape. “Have you ever stopped to think that, through all the countless thousands of generations that preceded this century, not even the most powerful kings on earth could have owned one like it?”

I have a hunch that none of these allusions mean anything—especially not in quick succession like this—but let’s stick with the one I’m most familiar with—the work of Marcel Proust. I have no idea what the mention of In Search of Lost Time accomplishes other than to tell readers that Ben Lerner has read Proust (though he most certainly hasn’t because reading Proust teaches you how to write with emotion).

Here’s another Lerner word salad with an allusive cherry on top:

Watching Adam compete, Jonathan and I had been both fascinated and unnerved by his fluency, his dominance; the young Evanson embodied what disturbed us—the choreographed spontaneity, all in the service of manipulation, of winning. But the little gesture Evanson was trying to edit out stood for something else. It was like Glenn Gould’s humming in The Goldberg Variations. It was a sign that the artist was alongside an art that exceeded him. Except, instead of engaging Bach, these kids were arguing about the viability of a European currency.

By the time we reach the reference to the Goldberg Variations, we are so lost as readers trying to parse the “embodiment” of “choreographed spontaneity” in “the service of manipulation” that it’s difficult to envision exactly how the teenage Adam resembles Gould and his compulsive humming. Is Adam physically humming? Doesn’t seem like it. The reference seems to be telling us something about Adam’s inadequacy in the face of debate, but it isn’t quite clear what. The Goldberg Variations themselves, furthermore, never come up again in the text, and only one other mention of Bach is made in another unnecessary non-sequitur:

But also certain kinds of genius parrots. African gray parrots are as smart as anything. They can sing opera. They can sing Bach, which is classical music.

One more example of Lerner’s intellectual arrogance:

I’m going to go first to the Rawlsian framework, then to the Marxist analysis; then I’ll offer a Utilitarian counter-framework I think is superior for this debate, and from there I’m going to enumerate the consequences—moral and empirical.

Lerner’s Adam chapters get so lost in the weeds of debate rhetoric that as readers, we quickly lose interest in Adam’s quest to reach the debate championships. We simply don’t care about utilitarianism or Rawls because these ideas have no further relevance to the plot.

Speaking of plot—claiming that this book has any sort of plot is generous. Again—I’m all for plotless ramblings in literature. Dostoyevsky pulled it off masterfully in Notes from the Underground, and so did Sartre in Nausea, but plotless ramblings must either (a) cohere around several consistent themes or (b) reveal something fascinating about the character delivering them. The Topeka School gives us nothing beyond the precise sequence of leftist tropes that I would have included in a novel satirizing contemporary leftist literature: Jane was sexually abused by her dad as a kid, Jonathan is cheating on Jane, and Adam struggles with masculinity. The rest of the “plot” features an unrelated catalogue of musings lifted directly from Lerner’s own life—such as this wonderfully detached description of Adam’s migraines:

Then there were the migraines, their increasing frequency and severity. He would be looking at a page of text or a sign on a wall and suddenly find it impossible to read, letters like twigs floating away on water. Then large blind spots, as though he’d looked at a bright light. Then large tracts of peripheral vision fell away. Fast on the optical symptoms, on the sudden illiteracy, would be numbness in the hands, parts of the face, sometimes the tongue, which would cause him to slur his speech. Photosensitivity so severe that a little sun entering around the blackout blinds was a flashlight in his eyes, phosphenes loosed upon the world. He would have the sensation that his limbs were out of joint, that he could not control them; he would reach for a glass of water and miss it by a few inches or knock it over. When he pressed the Imitrex cartridge against his leg to give himself an injection, he could not tell leg, hard plastic, and hand apart; they were all dumb alien objects; the medicine did very little, maybe nothing.

I quote this passage because I, too, suffer from this exact variation of migraine, and as someone who has felt the unadulterated agony of beating my fist against my pillow in the hopes that something—anything—would make the pain of feeling like you’re being hit in the head with a mallet go away, I wanted to experience what it was like for Adam to live through the terror of his neurological affliction. Instead, I don’t give two shits—in fact, if I didn’t suffer from migraines myself, I wouldn’t have felt anything reading these descriptions because I can read them all on WebMD. Lerner’s description of human pain is so painless and emotionless that I feel like I’m reading the diary of someone the day after their lobotomy.

Thomas Mann has a much better depiction of migraines in Doktor Faustus:

“The stomach, my dear, is mostly not the stomach at all, it’s the head, the delicate, overtaxed head, that has such powerful influence over the stomach, even when there’s nothing wrong with it,” as everyone knew from seasickness and migraine headaches .... Aha, so he had the migraine sometimes, and right nasty, too? She had thought so! She had indeed thought so just now up in the bedroom, when he had checked the shutters to see how dark he could get the room; for darkness, lying in the dark, night, black, with no light whatever in the eyes, that was just the thing, as long as the misery lasted, plus real strong tea, made real sour with lots of lemon.

See the difference? Mann’s prose is far less detailed on the symptomatic level, but we feel as if we’re there with Adrian Leverkühn in that dark room—and we immediately apprehend his misery!

It’s ironic to think that Adrian is actually the character that’s traded his soul to the devil—when held up to Adam Gordon, he’s the most soulful character you’ve ever met.

And it’s not just Adam who’s soulless—his parents are equally as robotic. In fact, Lerner makes no attempt to differentiate between the distinct souls of his characters, nor does he seem to comprehend that there are people in the universe who aren’t Ben Lerner. Every character is so clearly a stand-in for his own psyche that it’s a wonder he even felt the need to switch between them in the first place.

Here’s what Jane and Jonathan’s narration looks like side by side, for instance:

Jane:

She and I went on talking about our fathers in particular and fathers in general, but it wasn’t until a couple of years later that the deep past reasserted itself. My father had a stroke in Phoenix and we flew out there; I guess you were five or six—you were in Randolph, not Bright Circle. I remember you were really freaked out by how his face was a little paralyzed, the right side, by how he looked the same but different as a result of that, like he’d been replaced by his doppelgänger; you wouldn’t go near him at first, not that he was the kind of grandparent a kid would ever run toward. The stroke turned out not to be that severe, but it was the beginning of the long process of trying to figure out how to deal with aging parents, so there was a lot of tension in the air. And then these two things happened with my mom. Nobody used the word “triggering” back then.

Jonathan:

Jane and I went to the Met. The odor and taste of Sima was in my sinuses, would not be dislodged. I was aware my speech was manic; I kept telling myself to slow down or shut up. I found myself describing to Jane the only existing film of my mom. Kodachrome, 1960. She was on horseback, or maybe it was a pony. It was at some kind of festival or carnival outside of Taipei. I remembered shooting this film very clearly, I explained to Jane. It was the first time I ever held a camera. I remembered it as the origin of my interest in the medium. But just a few months before, I told her, I’d found the reels in the attic and brought them to the Foundation to watch. It was just as I recalled, except in washed-out color, not in black-and-white; silent, of course. She was smiling, a little off balance, wind blowing her hair into her face, the bored pony or small horse being led around by a long purple ribbon.

Though these two narrators tackle different subjects, they sound exactly the same when they talk. The closest we get to pathos in Jane’s memory of her father suffering from a stroke is “I remember you were really freaked out,” which tells us nothing about how Jane herself feels about the misfortune. Similarly, when Jonathan tells Jane about the only existing film of his mother, we have no idea how he feels about it! Swap out the biographical details, in fact, and the texture of the prose—bland and clinical—remains exactly the same. Every character, in other words, is just Ben Lerner writing in his detached water-pipe style.

Great art is supposed to move us—often to tears!—and inspire us to feel something for characters oftentimes unlike ourselves. The only thing I felt from reading The Topeka School is that Ben Lerner wants you to know how awesome he is, and that’s not surprising—soullessness and egoism often go hand in hand.

I mean, just look at this!

Given that I was famous in Topeka (Jonathan said “Famous in Topeka” would be a great name for a band), that I was outspoken about gay and lesbian rights, given that I was Jewish, that I worked at the Foundation, I should have been one of the Phelpses’ primary targets… And yet when they recognized me—if they saw me at an event or spotted me in the car at a corner where they’d gathered—their way of mocking me was strangely gentle, almost flattering. “Oh, here is the Brain,” they would say sarcastically. (They had preprogrammed chants and taunts for particular “fag-loving” Topekans.) “Here is the brilliant Dr. Gordon.”

The level of arrogance in this passage is truly unparalleled by anything I’ve ever seen in my life except, perhaps, in Bluesky posts. And that’s no accident—Ben Lerner is the exact sort of person—the morally self-righteous liberal—you’ll typically find on Bluesky—and I can’t believe how perfectly he embodies the stereotype. Look at me! I’m outspoken about gay and lesbian rights, so I should be the target of evil homophobes! But I’m not! Because I’m Smart! I’m the Brain!

This is the first time we’ve gotten any sort of emotion from any of these passages, by the way—when Jane tells us how smart and morally righteous she is.

Wow, how deep!

“But maybe the book is written like this on purpose!” Lerner defenders will scream (or rather, say, because the only people defending Lerner are robots who have never felt an ounce of passion in their lives). “Maybe the reason that the language is ‘clinical’ is to prove a point about the world Adam comes from with his psychologist parents and their emotional detachment.”

Fair enough, but in that case, we’d expect such an idea itself to be embedded in the fabric of the novel itself—and we’d expect Adam to want to escape that world by the novel’s conclusion. But the language remains consistent even after Adam has escaped the world of Topeka—even when he moves out to New York and lands himself at a protest in 2019.

This brings us to the novel’s overall message (if such a thing can be said to exist in this completely pointless book). The message, of course, is that conservatives are bad, and the only reason anyone would ever possibly become a conservative is because of alienation and trauma.

Darren, the weird kid who’s a patient of Adam’s father, appears towards the end of the novel in a MAGA hat:

Now I am going to show you a picture of one of the protesters. Darren is heavier than the last time you saw him, bearded, almost certainly armed, although no printing is visible in the photograph; he is wearing the red baseball cap, holding his sign in silence. If your eyes were to meet, only the little mimic spasms would indicate recognition.

And it’s no accident that this paragraph comes on the heels of another paragraph where Adam refers to himself as a “well-known poet.” The contrast is clear: Adam has done the Morally Good Thing™ of becoming a “well-known poet” (not just a poet but a well-known one), and his classmate Darren—because of his trauma—turns to the dark side and becomes MAGA.

Come on.

Then the book segues into its final scene and ends on—I kid you not—an anti-Trump ICE protest. And in case you haven’t gotten The Message™ by now, Lerner makes sure to deliver it to you on a silver platter in the novel’s final two paragraphs:

“The protesters nearby started cheering as the group that had occupied the building emerged. Luna stopped drawing and pulled on my shirt: Let’s go clap for Mom. The younger boy also stopped and joined us. Then they held their chalk out to the cop as though he’d been asking for a turn.

We found Natalia, and Luna hugged her and asked her to lift her up onto her shoulders, which Natalia did. One of the organizers stood on a stone bench and yelled, “Mic check,” and we all yelled it back. The “human microphone,” the “people’s mic,” wherein those gathered around a speaker repeat what the speaker says in order to amplify a voice without permit-requiring equipment. It embarrassed me, it always had, but I forced myself to participate, to be part of a tiny public speaking, a public learning slowly how to speak again, in the middle of the spread.”

So what have we learned? Cops—and specifically ICE agents—are bad, and the voice of the people is good. We’re hit over the head with the classic New York Times commentary on an über-specific political moment: when the police threaten to silence us all, progressives must learn “how to speak again” to save us.

In other words, The Topeka School reveals a problem that is not exclusive to Lerner’s auto-fictional creations but pervades nearly every single work of “literature” thrust onto our shelves today: contemporary “literature” addresses the weeds of hyper-specific cultural moments rather than daring to explore universal human truths.

I have always said—and I will continue to maintain—that great literature should tell us something universal about the human condition. Reading Ben Lerner’s novel, however, I came away learning nothing about anyone around me other than Donald Trump (who is evil) and Ben Lerner (who is good).

I have the same complaint about The Topeka School that I did several months ago about Yesteryear—these novels are so self-righteous and topical no one is going to care about them in a decade. I mentioned at the beginning of this piece that I’m six years late to critiquing this novel, and that mentality itself points to a greater problem with the way that we’ve begun to treat our literature—we review books as they come out (every other review I could find of The Topeka School was from 2019 or 2020 at the latest), and then we discard them by the following news cycle. That’s not to say that we shouldn’t discard these particular books—the faster we discard them, the better, I say—but the problem is that the newest generation of fiction is written precisely to be discarded! They tell us nothing about anything beyond the latest drama in The Washington Post.

In many ways, these books are like newspaper articles in their own right, and, indeed, they often read like newspaper articles—or, to be more generous, like think pieces in The New Yorker. Indeed, many of these novels are written as fodder for New Yorker reviewers—such as this recent review of Rachel Cusk’s The Life of M—rather than as works of literature in their own right. The fact is that few writers today actually care about preserving a rich literary tradition or contributing to a longstanding discussion about what it means to be human—instead, they care only about acting morally superior to everyone else while jerking off to one another’s stories. That is why you probably haven’t read Ben Lerner or Rachel Cusk and why no one outside of MFA circles has ever heard of these people either. Their books create a self-referential dialogue with each other but have no bearing on the general human population because these books simply aren’t human—they’re soulless, detached, flat, and robotic, and, frankly, I would rather doomscroll on X than read another one of these contemporary “literary works”—because at least on X you only encounter the occasional bot rather than having to endure back-to-back sentences by one!

Like Lerner’s other novels, The Topeka School will sink into oblivion—and, indeed, it already has. I’m probably the only person who reviewed it this year, and I’m probably the only person to have read it in the last six months. Because you can’t just throw leftist tropes and robotic sentences into a cauldron and expect to concoct an enduring commentary on the human condition. Maybe Lerner thinks so, but I don’t even believe he does—even a terrible attempt to comment on the nature of humanity would have had more soul than these lobotomized paragraphs, and even ChatGPT knows more about what it’s like to be a human being than Ben Lerner ever will.

Well, that was painful. I’m off to read The Brothers Karamazov to remember what it’s like to read a sentence that is capable of moving you to tears. If you have any other godawful “literary” novels that you’d like me to review, drop them in the comments—I probably won’t read them, but if I do, expect another wrathful essay soon.

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.

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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!