Reality seems to have this incorrigible habit of refusing to conform to ideologies (and, similarly, to tidy, boxed, tied in a bow theological systems). True art always reflects the maddening, inextricable complexities, incongruities, paradoxes, ambiguities, contradictions, inconsistencies, and irrationalities of real life as it is actually experienced; manifestos dressed up as stories do not.
The left is now fully nihilist. That is, the left rejects all facts which clash with leftist ideology and all human values,, honesty, competence, integrity, excellence, beauty, etc. as such. The direct result is that leftist literature is boring as hell since values are omitted with prejudice in favor of dreary left wing angst. The same is true to some degree of films but there the left cannot completely ruin the situation because movies still have to make money. I think literature can come back. It will require a lot of individualism on the part of young people, thinking about what they want from life and pursuing it, rather than becoming left wing robots.
“The left rejects all facts which clash with leftist ideology and all human values,, honesty, competence, integrity, excellence, beauty, etc. as such.“
I’ll push back on this. The right rejects facts the same way. Trump and MAGA have been anti-honesty and competence and excellence and beauty since day one.
“The same is true to some degree of films but there the left cannot completely ruin the situation because movies still have to make money.”
Books don’t?
I’ve worked in both industries to some extent. They’re much more alike than you think, especially in the last 20 years.
“ It will require a lot of individualism on the part of young people, thinking about what they want from life and pursuing it, rather than becoming left wing robots.”
Or right-wing robots.
Let’s just say ideologue robots. They’re on every side.
Submission (Soumission) by Michel Houellebecq (2015)
The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst (2004)
The Awakening of Miss Prim by Natalia Sanmartin Fenollera (2013)
The Mandibles: A Family, 2029–2047 by Lionel Shriver (2016)
The Terminal List by Jack Carr (2018)
Monster Hunter International by Larry Correia (2009)
The Road by Cormac McCarthy (2006)
Skylark Farm by Antonia Arslan (2007)
Declare by Tim Powers (2000)
But, after having answered that very easy question, I wonder what it has to do with the OP, which never made a claim about fiction publishing specifically. Talk about rejecting facts and not having a logical ideology!
I have to be careful what I say here. I hope to be published soon.
I am very middle of the road when it comes to politics and can often see and understand both sides.
As a novelist trying to get published, I am told by too many agents: "It's very good", or "I know the right agent is out there for you, but it's not a fit for me right now," and my editor telling me, "It will be a niche agent that takes you on because you don't explore the current topics."
This is frustrating for me because my current novel has a young black man, a gay man and a woman trying to find her independence in midcentury America, but because my characters "don't explore (certain) struggles, and I refuse to preach, my story isn't a 'fit'.
I will continue to write real stories about real people I knew and the lives they lived, even if it doesn't get published.
But I'm sad that as a writer I am expected to lecture, rather than just tell a story that can be interpreted and explored by the reader.
I agree with the depoliticisation of literature but you have lost me with the narrative that left has hijacked the reading community and ruined it. You talk about depoliticisation yet you frame it as a left right issue when it’s really about reading has been turned into a prop and the culture currently doesn’t reward reading anymore. People do still read Shakespeare and other classics ,and analyse its works. In fact, just awhile ago I wrote a review on Great Gatsby. Maybe the reason why those reading communities are closed off to other political orientations is because people end up calling “woke nonsense “ and put it down. It seems unfair to bash every contemporary literature because of a few bad apples. While the publishing industry isn’t without its own pitfalls (I am sorry they treated you like that), just grouping everything as a left or right issue will isolate you further.
It would be interesting to have a breakdown of what kind of books are read. Romance? Westerns? Science fiction? Mysteries? Thrillers? Literature? Are some books bought for their cachet but never read? The Goodreads app might be a place to start. Meanwhile, my comments on reading in general are below.
1) College (especially at community college) & high school level English classes are often taught by non-English majors. My children's teachers had degrees in Women's Studies or Sociology or some other "Studies" program. But not English. Their reading lists reflected this. So did their writing assignments.
2) In my experience, those of us who read for pleasure have always been something of a minority. Until recently, books themselves and the leisure time to read them were luxuries for the average working class person. Books were read aloud by one person while the rest of the family mended clothes or tools, knit, or did other hand work. Radio programs in the 1920's & 1930's replaced reading aloud, then came television, and now personal devices. Listening to audiobooks while commuting or doing chores is a throwback to the reading aloud tradition.
3) At least two generations, if not three, were taught to read using the "See/Say" method, which made the skill more difficult than it needed to be. It's much easier to watch "The Odyssey" than read it. This group might benefit from audiobooks; although podcasts are popular and are competition.
Somewhere I saw a review of or a description or summary of a work that treats the great endeavor of reading that British working-class people in the U.K. had used to engage in because they had found reading "great" and classic books to be richly rewarding. I forget the historical timing for when such British men and women had been doing that. But I think it had been well before the late 20th Century--so, maybe, in the mid- to late 19th to early 20th centuries? I don't recall where I saw that history described, though, unfortunately.
Sam Rinko of Substack has now posted a long post on August 13, 2026 that describes the phenomenon from the late 1800’s to early 20th Century in Britain.
The point of the story was that they were reading what were condidered classics, such as Shakespeare--not contemporarily published books only produced in their own times. I wish I could remember where I saw the story published. I think I read about it somewhere on Substack.
In the American West/pioneer towns many folks were functionally illiterate but traveling acting troupes would perform bowlderized versions of Shakespeare's plays or other classics. Think of the Duke and the Count in "Huckleberry Finn." So even if the general populace couldn't read--or didn't have access to printed copies--they were familiar with many of stories now co sidered classics, especially Shakespeare and the Bible.
I've just finished a novel I've been working on for twenty-five years. I'm hoping to have it out for sale before Christmas! As a teen and in my early twenties, I grew up through the turbulent sixties and early seventies, and hung around university with the Marxist intellectuals of the time and the more ideologically driven part of the hippie movement.
I'd grown up in a remote country town, in the grounds of a large milk processing factory built by a multinational company. My parents were outsiders in the town, and hardly knew each other when we moved there with me as a newborn. All I could think of as a child was to escape! My mother would always say to me, "Whatever you do, don't get a local girl pregnant!" She felt as trapped as I did.
I thought I'd find my tribe at university. It fell a little short of that, I regret to say. But I was at least free to make myself into whatever I wanted.
Later, I became involved in the environmental movement, lobbying politicians and working with groups who actually achieved some great wins for nature. I also witnessed the gradual degradation of the Green movement, as it became increasingly wrapped up in lifestyle and symbolic politics, mirroring the general failure of the left.
In the late seventies, I built a house on what we called 'Hippie Hill' in our area, one hundred or so kilometres from the city. We tried to pursue the 'Alternative' lifestyle, but it blew up in all of our faces. And since then, I've watched as my contemporaries strayed into nutcase politics, which any intelligent outsider could see was going to go nowhere.
All through this time, the broader culture has morphed into its present state. In everything: music, writing and visual arts, it's been the story of a great culture in decline.
I decided to write a story which would show a world just beyond our own, where all of our overblown fantasies of doom or stupendous abundance had finally died. What would life be like in this world? I set some rules. No new gee-whiz inventions. No hand-wringing about the evils of this or that. No utopian visions. No compulsory incest, or trans nonsense, or identitarian idiocy. Just a story of a whole lot of different characters making their way through life. Because it's largely set in Australia, the characters are from wildly different backgrounds, but none of that governs the underlying dynamic.
I try to show what AI will amount to, and where current demographics will lead. I show the inner and outer lives of a cast of characters, from the very bottom of society to the very top, from all kinds of nationalities and backgrounds. I'm fortunate enough to have met all these people and have got to know them well, from suicidal junkies to world leaders, from country bumpkins to sophisticated celebrities, so I haven't needed to invent very much.
I've also delved into the deepest motivations (or lack thereof) of these characters. It's been a lot of fun! If my novel sells, it will attract the lightning bolts of condemnation from all sides. I've taken the precaution of joining our local free speech union, because although I'm temperate when I write, I tend to blurt things out when I speak, so I may need legal muscle to protect me during my publicity phase!
Since you've been in lots of English Lit classes with Leftists, I wondered if you can answer a question: why do Leftists read literature at all?
Andrew Pudwah (IEW writing curriculum guy) has a saying: "The authors your children read are the teachers at whose feet they are sitting; choose carefully." Traditionally, that's what literature is for -- to place you into contact with the mind and world of the author, hopefully to learn something from the experience.
However, liberals generally believe the past was bigoted and racist and sexist and has nothing to teach them (other than what NOT to do.) So why bother reading literature (sitting at any author's feet) at all? This is a serious question, and I'm hoping you can give me some insight into the college-liberal mindset on this.
Note: reading among conservatives is not dead. My wife's book club just selected The Odyssey (Fagles verse translation) for next month's reading. I was both shocked and impressed.
Sweet summer child, literature was always political.
It's a bit "funny" that people only notice the politics when it is different from their values or perceptions, while not seeing stuff that confirm their values and perception as political.
Even your beloved dostoyevski is making social commentaries, criticising the political realities of those times. He was censored in tsar russia.
With self-publishing people are free to publish whatever they want. They have an easier way to reach a lot of people using their means. No one is gonna take down your own website (but the thing might be taken down if you publish on someone elses site as their site - their rules).
As for no one reading. Reading was always a way to pass time. And if people in those times had more interesting things to do - they also would not have read the books. Part of the problem is that a lot of people nowadays are intorduced to reading through school, so reading is associated with a chore and not fun. It is hard to read for fun and immerse in the book when you have been trained to have to analyse whatever you read. When i was a kid there was a lot of nationalistic themes in our reading and you got in trouble if you had a different thought. Noting has change only the dominant narrative has changed. And some people can't deal with when their narrative is no longer dominant.
In my childhood barely anyone read the 20 books we had as summer reading to prepare for the next years literature classes. We had better things to do than read books that weren't an interest to us (especially when you could sum up all the books into "village life and suffering".). We just read the excrepts in the textbook that we had to analyse.
There is also the thing with classics that they have survivorship bias. They are the 1% of books from their time. The rest of 99% didn't survive. It might seem that a lot of books are crap, but because you are aware of the 100% of books of our times and not the 1%. And a lot of the classics became classics because some academic found it and manage to convince people that the book is valuable. So the classics can be seen as artificially inflated. The whole "everyone is discussing literature in depth" is a fantasy that might have been created by the media. You can't look at the top 1% and think that everyone was like that.
Corporations made the observation that left-ish spheres of thought were congregating on social media platforms and made the bet that those are profitable demographics to be tapped, and that those people weren’t actually left enough to radically change the world, but that they appreciated the aesthetic of corporate revolution. Yes, mediocre liberal women tend to buy the most contemporary big 5 fiction. I’ll tell ya, that’s not the commies taking over, it’s good business and if I’d had the foresight to notice what was happening, I would have done exactly what those publishing houses did. You are griping about capitalism’s many masks, this one being neoliberalism.
Have not the Left also been putting U.S. academia and U.S. higher education themselves into danger? Into danger of becoming irrelevant? Or, at least much of it, with some exceptions?
That is, academia's and higher education's problems in the U.S. include more than only high costs and ever-rising tuitions, don't they? They also include the fact that many many U.S. colleges and universities (outside of community colleges, apparently, and some other exceptions) have adopted as their missions to engage in politics, is that not true? No matter whatever their publicly stated missions might be?
While I believe that not all of U.S. academia is uninterested, today, in true education (or in true scholarship, perhaps we might need to add?), much of it apparently is.
I wonder if liberals are more likely to lie about reading books... It's being seen as a virtue signal, and virtue signaling being itself primarily a phenomenon of the left. It wouldn't surprise me if that sort of poll was simply inaccurate.
Reality seems to have this incorrigible habit of refusing to conform to ideologies (and, similarly, to tidy, boxed, tied in a bow theological systems). True art always reflects the maddening, inextricable complexities, incongruities, paradoxes, ambiguities, contradictions, inconsistencies, and irrationalities of real life as it is actually experienced; manifestos dressed up as stories do not.
Well-said. Most modern fiction does not address the messiness of everyday life.
Why on earth would any fiction address the messiness of life. That is called modernism. I loathe it.
The left is now fully nihilist. That is, the left rejects all facts which clash with leftist ideology and all human values,, honesty, competence, integrity, excellence, beauty, etc. as such. The direct result is that leftist literature is boring as hell since values are omitted with prejudice in favor of dreary left wing angst. The same is true to some degree of films but there the left cannot completely ruin the situation because movies still have to make money. I think literature can come back. It will require a lot of individualism on the part of young people, thinking about what they want from life and pursuing it, rather than becoming left wing robots.
“The left rejects all facts which clash with leftist ideology and all human values,, honesty, competence, integrity, excellence, beauty, etc. as such.“
I’ll push back on this. The right rejects facts the same way. Trump and MAGA have been anti-honesty and competence and excellence and beauty since day one.
“The same is true to some degree of films but there the left cannot completely ruin the situation because movies still have to make money.”
Books don’t?
I’ve worked in both industries to some extent. They’re much more alike than you think, especially in the last 20 years.
“ It will require a lot of individualism on the part of young people, thinking about what they want from life and pursuing it, rather than becoming left wing robots.”
Or right-wing robots.
Let’s just say ideologue robots. They’re on every side.
Yep. Both sides do the same thing. The only difference is the stuff they focus on. Both sides want their narrative to be dominant.
You appear to have no understanding of MAGA, or conservatism in general. Either that, or you are willfully lying about them.
Please identify any novels other than leftist that have been published by the major NY publishers.
Netherland by Joseph O'Neill (2006)
Laurus by Eugene Vodolazkin (2012)
Submission (Soumission) by Michel Houellebecq (2015)
The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst (2004)
The Awakening of Miss Prim by Natalia Sanmartin Fenollera (2013)
The Mandibles: A Family, 2029–2047 by Lionel Shriver (2016)
The Terminal List by Jack Carr (2018)
Monster Hunter International by Larry Correia (2009)
The Road by Cormac McCarthy (2006)
Skylark Farm by Antonia Arslan (2007)
Declare by Tim Powers (2000)
But, after having answered that very easy question, I wonder what it has to do with the OP, which never made a claim about fiction publishing specifically. Talk about rejecting facts and not having a logical ideology!
I have to be careful what I say here. I hope to be published soon.
I am very middle of the road when it comes to politics and can often see and understand both sides.
As a novelist trying to get published, I am told by too many agents: "It's very good", or "I know the right agent is out there for you, but it's not a fit for me right now," and my editor telling me, "It will be a niche agent that takes you on because you don't explore the current topics."
This is frustrating for me because my current novel has a young black man, a gay man and a woman trying to find her independence in midcentury America, but because my characters "don't explore (certain) struggles, and I refuse to preach, my story isn't a 'fit'.
I will continue to write real stories about real people I knew and the lives they lived, even if it doesn't get published.
But I'm sad that as a writer I am expected to lecture, rather than just tell a story that can be interpreted and explored by the reader.
I agree with the depoliticisation of literature but you have lost me with the narrative that left has hijacked the reading community and ruined it. You talk about depoliticisation yet you frame it as a left right issue when it’s really about reading has been turned into a prop and the culture currently doesn’t reward reading anymore. People do still read Shakespeare and other classics ,and analyse its works. In fact, just awhile ago I wrote a review on Great Gatsby. Maybe the reason why those reading communities are closed off to other political orientations is because people end up calling “woke nonsense “ and put it down. It seems unfair to bash every contemporary literature because of a few bad apples. While the publishing industry isn’t without its own pitfalls (I am sorry they treated you like that), just grouping everything as a left or right issue will isolate you further.
It would be interesting to have a breakdown of what kind of books are read. Romance? Westerns? Science fiction? Mysteries? Thrillers? Literature? Are some books bought for their cachet but never read? The Goodreads app might be a place to start. Meanwhile, my comments on reading in general are below.
1) College (especially at community college) & high school level English classes are often taught by non-English majors. My children's teachers had degrees in Women's Studies or Sociology or some other "Studies" program. But not English. Their reading lists reflected this. So did their writing assignments.
2) In my experience, those of us who read for pleasure have always been something of a minority. Until recently, books themselves and the leisure time to read them were luxuries for the average working class person. Books were read aloud by one person while the rest of the family mended clothes or tools, knit, or did other hand work. Radio programs in the 1920's & 1930's replaced reading aloud, then came television, and now personal devices. Listening to audiobooks while commuting or doing chores is a throwback to the reading aloud tradition.
3) At least two generations, if not three, were taught to read using the "See/Say" method, which made the skill more difficult than it needed to be. It's much easier to watch "The Odyssey" than read it. This group might benefit from audiobooks; although podcasts are popular and are competition.
Somewhere I saw a review of or a description or summary of a work that treats the great endeavor of reading that British working-class people in the U.K. had used to engage in because they had found reading "great" and classic books to be richly rewarding. I forget the historical timing for when such British men and women had been doing that. But I think it had been well before the late 20th Century--so, maybe, in the mid- to late 19th to early 20th centuries? I don't recall where I saw that history described, though, unfortunately.
Did they read the books that were classics at their time or the books that are contemporary, but became classics at our time?
Not to mention that a lot of working class people could not read.
Sam Rinko of Substack has now posted a long post on August 13, 2026 that describes the phenomenon from the late 1800’s to early 20th Century in Britain.
The point of the story was that they were reading what were condidered classics, such as Shakespeare--not contemporarily published books only produced in their own times. I wish I could remember where I saw the story published. I think I read about it somewhere on Substack.
Or, perhaps that could really have possibly been going on in the U.K. even up to the mid-20th Century?
In the American West/pioneer towns many folks were functionally illiterate but traveling acting troupes would perform bowlderized versions of Shakespeare's plays or other classics. Think of the Duke and the Count in "Huckleberry Finn." So even if the general populace couldn't read--or didn't have access to printed copies--they were familiar with many of stories now co sidered classics, especially Shakespeare and the Bible.
I've just finished a novel I've been working on for twenty-five years. I'm hoping to have it out for sale before Christmas! As a teen and in my early twenties, I grew up through the turbulent sixties and early seventies, and hung around university with the Marxist intellectuals of the time and the more ideologically driven part of the hippie movement.
I'd grown up in a remote country town, in the grounds of a large milk processing factory built by a multinational company. My parents were outsiders in the town, and hardly knew each other when we moved there with me as a newborn. All I could think of as a child was to escape! My mother would always say to me, "Whatever you do, don't get a local girl pregnant!" She felt as trapped as I did.
I thought I'd find my tribe at university. It fell a little short of that, I regret to say. But I was at least free to make myself into whatever I wanted.
Later, I became involved in the environmental movement, lobbying politicians and working with groups who actually achieved some great wins for nature. I also witnessed the gradual degradation of the Green movement, as it became increasingly wrapped up in lifestyle and symbolic politics, mirroring the general failure of the left.
In the late seventies, I built a house on what we called 'Hippie Hill' in our area, one hundred or so kilometres from the city. We tried to pursue the 'Alternative' lifestyle, but it blew up in all of our faces. And since then, I've watched as my contemporaries strayed into nutcase politics, which any intelligent outsider could see was going to go nowhere.
All through this time, the broader culture has morphed into its present state. In everything: music, writing and visual arts, it's been the story of a great culture in decline.
I decided to write a story which would show a world just beyond our own, where all of our overblown fantasies of doom or stupendous abundance had finally died. What would life be like in this world? I set some rules. No new gee-whiz inventions. No hand-wringing about the evils of this or that. No utopian visions. No compulsory incest, or trans nonsense, or identitarian idiocy. Just a story of a whole lot of different characters making their way through life. Because it's largely set in Australia, the characters are from wildly different backgrounds, but none of that governs the underlying dynamic.
I try to show what AI will amount to, and where current demographics will lead. I show the inner and outer lives of a cast of characters, from the very bottom of society to the very top, from all kinds of nationalities and backgrounds. I'm fortunate enough to have met all these people and have got to know them well, from suicidal junkies to world leaders, from country bumpkins to sophisticated celebrities, so I haven't needed to invent very much.
I've also delved into the deepest motivations (or lack thereof) of these characters. It's been a lot of fun! If my novel sells, it will attract the lightning bolts of condemnation from all sides. I've taken the precaution of joining our local free speech union, because although I'm temperate when I write, I tend to blurt things out when I speak, so I may need legal muscle to protect me during my publicity phase!
I occasionally solicit plugs from Conservative outlets, but right here I can see a problem. I'm selling books.
The modern politicization of literature can be likened to shooting an albatross out of the sky
Did AI write this?
Chat gpt 1.9
I’m pretty sure I could handle a course in critical theory without giving up reading lol
Since you've been in lots of English Lit classes with Leftists, I wondered if you can answer a question: why do Leftists read literature at all?
Andrew Pudwah (IEW writing curriculum guy) has a saying: "The authors your children read are the teachers at whose feet they are sitting; choose carefully." Traditionally, that's what literature is for -- to place you into contact with the mind and world of the author, hopefully to learn something from the experience.
However, liberals generally believe the past was bigoted and racist and sexist and has nothing to teach them (other than what NOT to do.) So why bother reading literature (sitting at any author's feet) at all? This is a serious question, and I'm hoping you can give me some insight into the college-liberal mindset on this.
Note: reading among conservatives is not dead. My wife's book club just selected The Odyssey (Fagles verse translation) for next month's reading. I was both shocked and impressed.
Sweet summer child, literature was always political.
It's a bit "funny" that people only notice the politics when it is different from their values or perceptions, while not seeing stuff that confirm their values and perception as political.
Even your beloved dostoyevski is making social commentaries, criticising the political realities of those times. He was censored in tsar russia.
With self-publishing people are free to publish whatever they want. They have an easier way to reach a lot of people using their means. No one is gonna take down your own website (but the thing might be taken down if you publish on someone elses site as their site - their rules).
As for no one reading. Reading was always a way to pass time. And if people in those times had more interesting things to do - they also would not have read the books. Part of the problem is that a lot of people nowadays are intorduced to reading through school, so reading is associated with a chore and not fun. It is hard to read for fun and immerse in the book when you have been trained to have to analyse whatever you read. When i was a kid there was a lot of nationalistic themes in our reading and you got in trouble if you had a different thought. Noting has change only the dominant narrative has changed. And some people can't deal with when their narrative is no longer dominant.
In my childhood barely anyone read the 20 books we had as summer reading to prepare for the next years literature classes. We had better things to do than read books that weren't an interest to us (especially when you could sum up all the books into "village life and suffering".). We just read the excrepts in the textbook that we had to analyse.
There is also the thing with classics that they have survivorship bias. They are the 1% of books from their time. The rest of 99% didn't survive. It might seem that a lot of books are crap, but because you are aware of the 100% of books of our times and not the 1%. And a lot of the classics became classics because some academic found it and manage to convince people that the book is valuable. So the classics can be seen as artificially inflated. The whole "everyone is discussing literature in depth" is a fantasy that might have been created by the media. You can't look at the top 1% and think that everyone was like that.
Is the left in the room with us right now?
Corporations made the observation that left-ish spheres of thought were congregating on social media platforms and made the bet that those are profitable demographics to be tapped, and that those people weren’t actually left enough to radically change the world, but that they appreciated the aesthetic of corporate revolution. Yes, mediocre liberal women tend to buy the most contemporary big 5 fiction. I’ll tell ya, that’s not the commies taking over, it’s good business and if I’d had the foresight to notice what was happening, I would have done exactly what those publishing houses did. You are griping about capitalism’s many masks, this one being neoliberalism.
Yep. The publishers look at the trends and sell stuff that they predict would sell the most.
Have not the Left also been putting U.S. academia and U.S. higher education themselves into danger? Into danger of becoming irrelevant? Or, at least much of it, with some exceptions?
That is, academia's and higher education's problems in the U.S. include more than only high costs and ever-rising tuitions, don't they? They also include the fact that many many U.S. colleges and universities (outside of community colleges, apparently, and some other exceptions) have adopted as their missions to engage in politics, is that not true? No matter whatever their publicly stated missions might be?
While I believe that not all of U.S. academia is uninterested, today, in true education (or in true scholarship, perhaps we might need to add?), much of it apparently is.
It's nonsense that conservatives don't love literature (I have a podcast where literally all we do is discuss books!)
We also love classical music, something else that has been (seemingly) hijacked by the left.
I wonder if liberals are more likely to lie about reading books... It's being seen as a virtue signal, and virtue signaling being itself primarily a phenomenon of the left. It wouldn't surprise me if that sort of poll was simply inaccurate.