The Plight Of The White Male Novelist | Defector
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In July of 2022, Joyce Carol Oates tweeted that her literary agent friend told her editors are no longer interested in reading first novels by young white male writers, “no matter how good.” She was saying this in support of an article by former New York Times columnist Pamela Paul, who argued that the publishing […]

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The basic argument being that, no, men are not being pushed out of the traditional publishing houses by “woke-ass DEI feminazis,” but rather that the overall decline of publishing as a business, and particularly of serious literary publishing, has meant that people with lower cachet in the workforce (i.e. women) are the ones willing to do the work for less money, and also that modern opportunities tend to go to aspiring authors who are willing to build an audience on their own, generally online, and then take their brand to a publisher with a built in floor of book buyers. Again, the need for “hustle” and enduring public scrutiny and largely unpaid creative labor is more likely to be done by people who sense they have fewer options in the “traditional” business world.

The gruff but masculine “man of letters” who’s too proud to promote himself is no longer able to bully his way into publishing houses by the sheer force of his brilliance and persistence (and contacts and privilege), so he ends up whining and letting his misogyny flag fly instead of burying it in subtext.

  • pendant@sh.itjust.works
    3·
    2 days ago

    This is a bad article. It starts off by referencing a tweet:

    (a friend who is a literary agent told me that he cannot even get editors to read first novels by young white male writers, no matter how good; they are just not interested. this is heartbreaking for writers who may, in fact, be brilliant, & critical of their own “privilege.”)

    It tries to make the claim that the reason is “more a matter of the industry’s collapsing social value than it is of feminist or woke ideology”, but never disputes the referenced tweet.

    The article wants to sneer but just ends up being petty and pointless.