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Holy shit these look almost like his head is shopped on to some C-list body builder my sides
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YABookgate
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Good question. I was asking myself much the same thing after attempting to process this tidal wave of excrement.
Favorite line:
The Heart of the Trouble / Archive
By Emma Garman August 12, 2021
Arts & Culture
Gwendoline Riley. Photo: Adrian Lourie / Writer Pictures. Courtesy of Granta Books.
In 2007 Gwendoline Riley, then age twenty-eight and already the author of three acclaimed novels, described her writing life as lacking “any tremendous triumph or romance—I feel like I’m just always trying to be accurate, to get everything in the correct proportion.”
As literary aspirations go, it sounds modest. And by superficial measures, Riley’s novels are unambitious: light on conventional plotting, narrow in scope, and told from the perspectives of women close to herself in age and background. Riley has tried using the third person, she said in 2012, but it “always sounds so false.” As for adopting a male point of view: “Ugh, men’s brains! That vipers’ nest? No.” Her protagonists are writers, too, encouraging the frequent assumption that she draws directly from life. But to regard Riley’s fiction as titivated memoir is to misperceive what beguiles her readers: not barely mediated personal experience but its sedulous transmutation by a strange, rare talent. As Vivian Gornick wrote after reading the letters of Jean Rhys, a novelist with whom Riley shares some kinship: “The letters are the life, and the novels—there’s no mistaking it—are the magic performed on the life.”
Nor does Riley write autofiction, if authors in that contentious category aim to replicate the texture of life by dispensing with, in Rachel Cusk’s now famous words, the “fake and embarrassing” architecture of novels. When Riley makes you squirm with recognition, it’s not because of any explicit overlap between author and protagonist or winking acknowledgment of the writing process. Her uncannily observed female character studies, with their bracing emotional clarity, ruthlessly crafted scenes, and consummate use of the telling detail, belong instead to a certain feminist-existentialist tradition of realism. Literary forerunners to Riley’s work include Rhys’s interwar novels of female alienation, as well as Margaret Drabble’s groundbreaking early novels, in which intellectual young women grapple with the hazards and potentials of their desires, thus dramatizing, as the writer Jennifer Schaffer aptly put it, “a fighting urge to disturb the mold of one’s life, as it sets.” Yet what sets Riley apart from even these noble antecedents is her unshrinking determination to contemplate the unseemly, the discordant, and the unsolvable, without ever straying into despair or the maudlin.
Riley, who was born in London and grew up in Merseyside, published her Betty Trask Award–winning debut, Cold Water, in 2002, when she was twenty-two. Given her age, not to mention the gorgeous nouvelle vague–ish author photo adorning advance copies, some preconceived skepticism about the novel’s merit might have been forgivable. Forgivable, but unwarranted, because Cold Water is an understated classic. Our heroine in holey All Stars and a dress over jeans is twenty-year-old Carmel McKisco, a barmaid of a “downbeat disposition” who works in a low-lit Manchester dive, dreams of moving to Cornwall, and nurses an obsession with a failed musician whose band she loved when she was fourteen. Charting Carmel’s poetic musings and alcohol-fueled gadding about, this wistful little ballad of a novel captures with great verve and originality the bittersweet exhilaration of youth, with its various diverting limerences that, in the big picture, shouldn’t matter. “But, you see,” Carmel explains,
the point is, I’m not in the big picture. I’m in Manchester, and I can’t afford to leave just yet … For now I walk around through the scraping wind, through puddles full of brick dust, often with my feet so cold and sodden; the flesh of my toes like soaked cotton wadding spun round the bones.
In Cold Water, rain-bleared Manchester is seen through an artist’s eye. The lights in Piccadilly Gardens cast “an eerie medical glow against the smudge-grey sky.” Some “ragged carnations the color of evaporated milk and tongue” remind Carmel “of the old recipe cards in the back of a kitchen draw at my mum’s.” This light-handed imbrication of visual and emotional detail to conjure atmosphere, a hallmark of Riley’s early novels, makes for the kind of immersive, effortless read that’s often underrated as easy to write. Here’s the short story writer Esther, in 2004’s Sick Notes, describing her roommate’s bedroom:
There’s a duvet cover, framed postcards on the wall, ornaments even: dried up sea urchins, a crouching child figurine, a tiny pair of painted wooden clogs, a ship in a bottle and a Russian doll flanked by the two rubber ducks I got her for her last birthday. Also a plain brass photo frame holding a picture of a small girl standing by a piano. The kid’s on tiptoe, reaching up to jab at the keys. The curtains behind her and the jumper underneath her dungarees are in sour seventies colors. Her facial expression is kind of sour too.
Esther, back in Manchester after a stint in the U.S., is poised restlessly between an unhappy childhood and an uncertain future. The disorder of her own bedroom, with its cardboard boxes and unfinished books “resting open on my bed like pitched roofs, like dead birds,” semaphores her emphatic itinerancy. She drifts around the city with a biro in her ponytail, thinking of “ways to describe the sky, the clouds, the light,” while dodging the perils of intimate connection. An idyllic romantic encounter with Newton, a touring American musician, affects Esther so deeply that she longs to somehow purge herself of it; the push-pull of her impulse to call him is the current around which the narrative swirls. In another writer’s hands, it would be a thin premise. But Esther’s chafing self-awareness as she wallows, postures, and seeks distraction is too convincing to ever feel trivial. “I have this monstrous self-pity in me,” she declares, “and this monstrous self-love.”
Riley’s sixth novel, My Phantoms, was published in the UK in April and hailed, with every justification, as a masterpiece. (Bafflingly, it has no U.S. publisher.) In this portrait of a fraught mother-daughter relationship, the author has elevated her gift for psychological verisimilitude to astonishing tragicomic effect. Sixty-something Hen (short for Helen), separated from her second husband and retired, pursues an elusive sense of belonging via constant outings: Wine Circle, Victorian Society, festivals, film screenings, gallery evenings. “I’m putting myself out there,” she tells her daughter Bridget, whose suggestions that she has a night in are met with a firm “No.” Over years of dutiful phone calls, lunches, and dinners, Bridget alternates between humoring Hen—managing to “put a penny in the right slot”—and trying to reconcile her with some version of reality. Hen is in determined flight from reality, as the dramatic crux of the novel underscores. Desperate to meet Bridget’s boyfriend, Hen badgers her about it until Bridget loses patience:
“Do you want me to tell you why, Mum?” I said. “Why I have to keep things separate?” She didn’t answer. “How many sentences do you think you could take on the subject? Three? Four? One? Could you consider and acknowledge one sentence?”
Haunting them both is Bridget’s late father, Lee, a mostly taboo subject. “It wasn’t me who was horrible,” Hen protests, “it was your dad. It wasn’t me.” During Bridget’s childhood, when she and her sister were legally mandated to spend every Saturday with Lee, Hen had recourse to a regular refrain: “There’s no point in provoking him, is there?” In Riley’s merciless characterization, Hen’s lexicon of well-worn phrases is a buffer against an intimidating world, the next best thing to silence, to risking no provocation at all.
The novel’s depiction of Lee, as filtered through Bridget’s forensic recollection, is a graphic testament to the terroristic legacy of petty, small-minded bullies, its unflinching realism unparalleled in anything I’ve read. A ceaseless fount of humiliations and mortifications, “needlings and exhortations,” Lee would dismiss his daughters’ interests—playing football, vegetarianism—with the remark: “No one’s impressed with your recent behavior.” Reading a book was “posing” or “bluffing”; a new haircut brought the inevitable query: “Did they catch whoever did that?” In Lee’s self-mythology he was, Bridget reflects, “a sort of beloved outlaw; an admired one-off.” To her, he was less a person than a formidable and relentless phenomenon: “A gripper of shoulders. A pincher of upper arms. If I was wearing a hat, a snatcher of hats. If I was reading a book, a snatcher of books. Energized bother, in short.”
Iterations of this character, equally unpleasant but not quite as sharply focused, appear throughout Riley’s work. Novelist Aislinn, in 2012’s Opposed Positions, is estranged from her father but must contend with a sinister barrage of his unanswered emails. “Showing off again are we?” he writes. Then, alongside four transcribed quotes from her novel: “Oh dear! Oof! Posing! Er, what?” One of the most appalling moments in 2017’s First Love, a novel full of jaw-dropping moments, is when the narrator, Neve, recalls being at her father’s house as a teenager. In front of his male friend, he ordered her to “clean up” the bathroom she’d just used. She was perplexed, but on close examination she found two pinpricks of blood on the toilet bowl. “Women just aren’t naturally clean, are they?” her father said to the friend. These are not operatic accounts of abuse à la Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life; Riley’s register is scrupulously uncathartic. Along with Neve, Aislinn, and Bridget you feel, deep in your guts, the banal unassuageable horrors they’ve endured.
First Love, which won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and was short-listed for the Women’s Prize and the Goldsmiths Prize, saw Riley begin to pare back her already stripped-down style to examine, at unsparing close range, an intermittently poisonous marriage. Neve’s older husband, Edwyn, who has a debilitating chronic illness and is prone to ferocious outbursts, casts their fighting as a replay of the rancor she had with her father. “You hated him, he was cruel to you, that’s the only relationship you understand. A man being horrible to you and you being vicious back.”
We don’t witness any viciousness from Neve, who prides herself on being “warm, attentive, mild,” and yet her relationship with Edwyn is evidently one of complicated codependence. He claims to have married her because she needed to be taken care of; she likens the process of keeping him calm by saying the right thing to “throwing some sausages at a guard dog”: a basic trick for someone who grew up walking on eggshells, when a wrong word “unlatched a sort of chaos.” The wry rhythm of Riley’s prose, which anatomizes this commonplace folie à deux with alarming efficiency, holds the reader in a helpless thrall.
Our thrall is all the tighter for the glimpses we get of Neve and Edwyn’s sincere affection and closeness, their silly, tender pet names (“lovely Mr. Pusskins,” “little compost heap”) and his habit of kissing her “repeatingly, and with great emphasis, in the morning.” Not for Riley the convenient narrative inexorability of the couple’s breakup, nor the readerly consolation of their reaching a better place (a phrase beneath Neve in its triteness, apart from anything else). As in Riley’s Somerset Maugham Award–winning third novel, Joshua Spassky, also a story of irresolute true love, romantic redemption is not even permitted chimerical status. “When you hold on to another person,” Joshua Spassky’s Natalie says to her titular lover, “I think you’re only ever really holding onto your own fathomless situation.”
Or, as Riley said a few years ago: “Human beings are incorrigible. This is a source of humor and pain.” Her alchemizing of this wellspring has created an extraordinary body of work, especially for an author scarcely over forty. Happily for literature, Riley seems monogamously bound to fiction as a form. She has expressed a disinclination for all other kinds of writing and doesn’t use social media, a choice befitting her austere mystique. We can hope, then, for many more novels whose quietly splendid triumph is, in the words of Neve: “To get to the truth, to the heart of the trouble.”
Emma Garman has written about books and culture for Lapham’s Quarterly Roundtable, Longreads, Newsweek, The Daily Beast, Salon, The Awl, Words without Borders, and other publications. She was the first writer of the Daily’s Feminize Your Canon column.
Arts & Culture
Gwendoline Riley. Photo: Adrian Lourie / Writer Pictures. Courtesy of Granta Books.
In 2007 Gwendoline Riley, then age twenty-eight and already the author of three acclaimed novels, described her writing life as lacking “any tremendous triumph or romance—I feel like I’m just always trying to be accurate, to get everything in the correct proportion.”
As literary aspirations go, it sounds modest. And by superficial measures, Riley’s novels are unambitious: light on conventional plotting, narrow in scope, and told from the perspectives of women close to herself in age and background. Riley has tried using the third person, she said in 2012, but it “always sounds so false.” As for adopting a male point of view: “Ugh, men’s brains! That vipers’ nest? No.” Her protagonists are writers, too, encouraging the frequent assumption that she draws directly from life. But to regard Riley’s fiction as titivated memoir is to misperceive what beguiles her readers: not barely mediated personal experience but its sedulous transmutation by a strange, rare talent. As Vivian Gornick wrote after reading the letters of Jean Rhys, a novelist with whom Riley shares some kinship: “The letters are the life, and the novels—there’s no mistaking it—are the magic performed on the life.”
Nor does Riley write autofiction, if authors in that contentious category aim to replicate the texture of life by dispensing with, in Rachel Cusk’s now famous words, the “fake and embarrassing” architecture of novels. When Riley makes you squirm with recognition, it’s not because of any explicit overlap between author and protagonist or winking acknowledgment of the writing process. Her uncannily observed female character studies, with their bracing emotional clarity, ruthlessly crafted scenes, and consummate use of the telling detail, belong instead to a certain feminist-existentialist tradition of realism. Literary forerunners to Riley’s work include Rhys’s interwar novels of female alienation, as well as Margaret Drabble’s groundbreaking early novels, in which intellectual young women grapple with the hazards and potentials of their desires, thus dramatizing, as the writer Jennifer Schaffer aptly put it, “a fighting urge to disturb the mold of one’s life, as it sets.” Yet what sets Riley apart from even these noble antecedents is her unshrinking determination to contemplate the unseemly, the discordant, and the unsolvable, without ever straying into despair or the maudlin.
Riley, who was born in London and grew up in Merseyside, published her Betty Trask Award–winning debut, Cold Water, in 2002, when she was twenty-two. Given her age, not to mention the gorgeous nouvelle vague–ish author photo adorning advance copies, some preconceived skepticism about the novel’s merit might have been forgivable. Forgivable, but unwarranted, because Cold Water is an understated classic. Our heroine in holey All Stars and a dress over jeans is twenty-year-old Carmel McKisco, a barmaid of a “downbeat disposition” who works in a low-lit Manchester dive, dreams of moving to Cornwall, and nurses an obsession with a failed musician whose band she loved when she was fourteen. Charting Carmel’s poetic musings and alcohol-fueled gadding about, this wistful little ballad of a novel captures with great verve and originality the bittersweet exhilaration of youth, with its various diverting limerences that, in the big picture, shouldn’t matter. “But, you see,” Carmel explains,
the point is, I’m not in the big picture. I’m in Manchester, and I can’t afford to leave just yet … For now I walk around through the scraping wind, through puddles full of brick dust, often with my feet so cold and sodden; the flesh of my toes like soaked cotton wadding spun round the bones.
In Cold Water, rain-bleared Manchester is seen through an artist’s eye. The lights in Piccadilly Gardens cast “an eerie medical glow against the smudge-grey sky.” Some “ragged carnations the color of evaporated milk and tongue” remind Carmel “of the old recipe cards in the back of a kitchen draw at my mum’s.” This light-handed imbrication of visual and emotional detail to conjure atmosphere, a hallmark of Riley’s early novels, makes for the kind of immersive, effortless read that’s often underrated as easy to write. Here’s the short story writer Esther, in 2004’s Sick Notes, describing her roommate’s bedroom:
There’s a duvet cover, framed postcards on the wall, ornaments even: dried up sea urchins, a crouching child figurine, a tiny pair of painted wooden clogs, a ship in a bottle and a Russian doll flanked by the two rubber ducks I got her for her last birthday. Also a plain brass photo frame holding a picture of a small girl standing by a piano. The kid’s on tiptoe, reaching up to jab at the keys. The curtains behind her and the jumper underneath her dungarees are in sour seventies colors. Her facial expression is kind of sour too.
Esther, back in Manchester after a stint in the U.S., is poised restlessly between an unhappy childhood and an uncertain future. The disorder of her own bedroom, with its cardboard boxes and unfinished books “resting open on my bed like pitched roofs, like dead birds,” semaphores her emphatic itinerancy. She drifts around the city with a biro in her ponytail, thinking of “ways to describe the sky, the clouds, the light,” while dodging the perils of intimate connection. An idyllic romantic encounter with Newton, a touring American musician, affects Esther so deeply that she longs to somehow purge herself of it; the push-pull of her impulse to call him is the current around which the narrative swirls. In another writer’s hands, it would be a thin premise. But Esther’s chafing self-awareness as she wallows, postures, and seeks distraction is too convincing to ever feel trivial. “I have this monstrous self-pity in me,” she declares, “and this monstrous self-love.”
Riley’s sixth novel, My Phantoms, was published in the UK in April and hailed, with every justification, as a masterpiece. (Bafflingly, it has no U.S. publisher.) In this portrait of a fraught mother-daughter relationship, the author has elevated her gift for psychological verisimilitude to astonishing tragicomic effect. Sixty-something Hen (short for Helen), separated from her second husband and retired, pursues an elusive sense of belonging via constant outings: Wine Circle, Victorian Society, festivals, film screenings, gallery evenings. “I’m putting myself out there,” she tells her daughter Bridget, whose suggestions that she has a night in are met with a firm “No.” Over years of dutiful phone calls, lunches, and dinners, Bridget alternates between humoring Hen—managing to “put a penny in the right slot”—and trying to reconcile her with some version of reality. Hen is in determined flight from reality, as the dramatic crux of the novel underscores. Desperate to meet Bridget’s boyfriend, Hen badgers her about it until Bridget loses patience:
“Do you want me to tell you why, Mum?” I said. “Why I have to keep things separate?” She didn’t answer. “How many sentences do you think you could take on the subject? Three? Four? One? Could you consider and acknowledge one sentence?”
Haunting them both is Bridget’s late father, Lee, a mostly taboo subject. “It wasn’t me who was horrible,” Hen protests, “it was your dad. It wasn’t me.” During Bridget’s childhood, when she and her sister were legally mandated to spend every Saturday with Lee, Hen had recourse to a regular refrain: “There’s no point in provoking him, is there?” In Riley’s merciless characterization, Hen’s lexicon of well-worn phrases is a buffer against an intimidating world, the next best thing to silence, to risking no provocation at all.
The novel’s depiction of Lee, as filtered through Bridget’s forensic recollection, is a graphic testament to the terroristic legacy of petty, small-minded bullies, its unflinching realism unparalleled in anything I’ve read. A ceaseless fount of humiliations and mortifications, “needlings and exhortations,” Lee would dismiss his daughters’ interests—playing football, vegetarianism—with the remark: “No one’s impressed with your recent behavior.” Reading a book was “posing” or “bluffing”; a new haircut brought the inevitable query: “Did they catch whoever did that?” In Lee’s self-mythology he was, Bridget reflects, “a sort of beloved outlaw; an admired one-off.” To her, he was less a person than a formidable and relentless phenomenon: “A gripper of shoulders. A pincher of upper arms. If I was wearing a hat, a snatcher of hats. If I was reading a book, a snatcher of books. Energized bother, in short.”
Iterations of this character, equally unpleasant but not quite as sharply focused, appear throughout Riley’s work. Novelist Aislinn, in 2012’s Opposed Positions, is estranged from her father but must contend with a sinister barrage of his unanswered emails. “Showing off again are we?” he writes. Then, alongside four transcribed quotes from her novel: “Oh dear! Oof! Posing! Er, what?” One of the most appalling moments in 2017’s First Love, a novel full of jaw-dropping moments, is when the narrator, Neve, recalls being at her father’s house as a teenager. In front of his male friend, he ordered her to “clean up” the bathroom she’d just used. She was perplexed, but on close examination she found two pinpricks of blood on the toilet bowl. “Women just aren’t naturally clean, are they?” her father said to the friend. These are not operatic accounts of abuse à la Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life; Riley’s register is scrupulously uncathartic. Along with Neve, Aislinn, and Bridget you feel, deep in your guts, the banal unassuageable horrors they’ve endured.
First Love, which won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and was short-listed for the Women’s Prize and the Goldsmiths Prize, saw Riley begin to pare back her already stripped-down style to examine, at unsparing close range, an intermittently poisonous marriage. Neve’s older husband, Edwyn, who has a debilitating chronic illness and is prone to ferocious outbursts, casts their fighting as a replay of the rancor she had with her father. “You hated him, he was cruel to you, that’s the only relationship you understand. A man being horrible to you and you being vicious back.”
We don’t witness any viciousness from Neve, who prides herself on being “warm, attentive, mild,” and yet her relationship with Edwyn is evidently one of complicated codependence. He claims to have married her because she needed to be taken care of; she likens the process of keeping him calm by saying the right thing to “throwing some sausages at a guard dog”: a basic trick for someone who grew up walking on eggshells, when a wrong word “unlatched a sort of chaos.” The wry rhythm of Riley’s prose, which anatomizes this commonplace folie à deux with alarming efficiency, holds the reader in a helpless thrall.
Our thrall is all the tighter for the glimpses we get of Neve and Edwyn’s sincere affection and closeness, their silly, tender pet names (“lovely Mr. Pusskins,” “little compost heap”) and his habit of kissing her “repeatingly, and with great emphasis, in the morning.” Not for Riley the convenient narrative inexorability of the couple’s breakup, nor the readerly consolation of their reaching a better place (a phrase beneath Neve in its triteness, apart from anything else). As in Riley’s Somerset Maugham Award–winning third novel, Joshua Spassky, also a story of irresolute true love, romantic redemption is not even permitted chimerical status. “When you hold on to another person,” Joshua Spassky’s Natalie says to her titular lover, “I think you’re only ever really holding onto your own fathomless situation.”
Or, as Riley said a few years ago: “Human beings are incorrigible. This is a source of humor and pain.” Her alchemizing of this wellspring has created an extraordinary body of work, especially for an author scarcely over forty. Happily for literature, Riley seems monogamously bound to fiction as a form. She has expressed a disinclination for all other kinds of writing and doesn’t use social media, a choice befitting her austere mystique. We can hope, then, for many more novels whose quietly splendid triumph is, in the words of Neve: “To get to the truth, to the heart of the trouble.”
Emma Garman has written about books and culture for Lapham’s Quarterly Roundtable, Longreads, Newsweek, The Daily Beast, Salon, The Awl, Words without Borders, and other publications. She was the first writer of the Daily’s Feminize Your Canon column.
A white woman who writes about white women who are proxies for the author who obsess endlessly about their relationships. And the prizes roll in.
Kiwisee
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Apr 15, 2021
- Joined
- Nov 15, 2016
Is there any way to verify that this nutjob actually went to Columbia? I guess you can be crazy and attend an Ivy League school, but he also honestly just doesn't come across as very bright. And at one time their Journalism program was supposed to have been the best in the US, though that might only have been at the graduate level.
The only way I saw was to contact the registrar. They haven't digitized yearbooks yet. Too bad, because I'm curious too.
- Joined
- Oct 21, 2019
The only thing worse than literature is literature criticism.
- Joined
- Jan 2, 2017
Skimmed it a bit since I don't have the time right now to read it fully, but:
The bolded right there is the uncomfortable truth that adults invaded a teen space created by a teen (and not an adult this time around like magazines) because they haven't grown up. Maybe they were trying to live vicariously through a young novice writer, but there was no reason for them to be there. The blog was created with a teen audience in mind, and yes, periphery demographics are important, but why the fuck were they there in the first place? It may have led to somewhat of a career due to the connections she made, and yet that doesn't make it any less suspicious.
I get it, it was a different world back then (God, we're getting old, guys), it's just too vibrant of a red flag to ignore.
The same can be said for regular fiction, too, not just YA literature. Adult rugged heroes can still be inspiring like the young wide-eyed idealist heroes.
Yeah, it's almost disheartening. I still want to write the stories I want to write, but I fear the thought of having to say at least one of those stories counts as YA just because the protagonists are teenagers. The #OwnVoices shit is irritating as well because they scream and cry for diversity, but then don't allow it in books written by white people (and even POCs at this point) and then they scream and cry some more over there being no diversity in their stupid stories and it just makes me glad that I can hide true diversity into what I wanna write. Some of the protagonists aren't actually white themselves, but the real diversity is in their lifestyles (particularly their religion or lack thereof) and how it plays into their growth as characters. Those who screech about it not being diverse will have revealed themselves to not be actual readers (which is literally 99.9% of the time anyway) and I haven't trained in the art of shitposting for nothing.
Then I remember that A Series of Unfortunate Events is actually a children's book series, and it gives me small encouragement to lean more into that direction to avoid YA altogether. Self-publishing is also a very viable approach if niche publishing houses don't do it for me, it's just I unfortunately need to work on my networking skills. But I have time to write; hopefully by then things will have unfucked themselves enough that I won't have to resort to tactical trolling methods just to show off my love for literature and the inspirations I wish to give back to.
Just wanted to add a bit to this. I feel there's a reason why Harry Potter, Twilight, Hunger Games, and yes...Percy Jackson will continue to have people of all ages forever read their books is because the authors had unabashedly wrote the stories without caring too much about diversity or looking woke. They just wrote the story that came to their mind, and felt that teenagers and young adults could enjoy reading them.
Now whenever I go view the YA section on goodreads I couldnt help but wonder who the audience are? If teenagers are actually reading these books that seem more interested in being woke than tell a good story? Its almost reeks of middle age suburban moms clustering amongst each other, bolstering how much "diversity" they had added into their own stories. And I guarentee you that nearly half of them dont actually read the books their purchase, instead using as a prop to look cool amongst their social groups. Young adult used to be a place for young teens to read books that fit their age, with protagonist who are at a similar age dealing with the same issues that a teen would typically face in that stage of their life. Now its more about whose banging who and making strawmen characters out of bigots.
I truly do think YA has lost its way, and I feel with the way things are right now that its only going to get worse. Still I have a bit of faith that people will wake up and realize what is actually happening and try to change things around.
- Joined
- Feb 3, 2013
Is it limited to YA though, or is genre fiction for adults headed the same way? Are there nonsensically woke thrillers, mysteries, and so forth? Fantasy/sci-fi has of course already become a self-parody, and I assume romances play by their own set of rules.
I've heard theorizing (from "Comics Zack" and others) that most of the demand for YA dreck is actually driven by librarians, but I have no idea how true that is.
- Joined
- Jan 12, 2017
If there are, we don't hear about it because the harpies screeching about woke shit on Twitter only read YA due to being a bunch of womanchildren pussies.
- Joined
- Nov 15, 2016
Missed completely Philip Pullman getting cancelled on Twitter last week for being a racist Hatey McHater. This pompous jackass getting eaten by his own (however temporarily) for basically nothing is kind of a thing of beauty.
There's a good write up in the KF Social Justice Warriors megathread, including links to other posts in the same thread. The tl;dr is that the more he kowtowed, the more rabid twitter got. Seems to have mostly died down, alas.
Or you can read the incisive, balanced, nuanced and totally objective coverage found in the Mary Sue/Archive. First paragraph alone:
How long until they can program a 'bot to write this sort of thing?
There's a good write up in the KF Social Justice Warriors megathread, including links to other posts in the same thread. The tl;dr is that the more he kowtowed, the more rabid twitter got. Seems to have mostly died down, alas.
Or you can read the incisive, balanced, nuanced and totally objective coverage found in the Mary Sue/Archive. First paragraph alone:
How long until they can program a 'bot to write this sort of thing?
- Joined
- Mar 17, 2019
For mysteries, while there are some more politially edged stories around, they're not the majority. You maybe wouldn't expect Scandic mysteries, which are the most popular in my part of the world, to be lacking in that department, but the authors mostly like to write stuff people would actually want to read, not boring wokefests. You have your exceptions ofc, but that's to be expected; I'd say then they fall more under the "thriller" category. Romance is such a big genre you can't really say anything too generalised about it. It honestly doesn't seem that bad there tho, as far as I have seen. You're more likely to run into the "strong female"(tm) character on a more constant rate, but considering they're always getting hot white men thrown at them, it all evens out. I see more stupid shit in the self-publishing area for romance and ofc the (thankfully not too common) flavour-of-the-month wokefest that paid a lot of money to get shilled by celebs - who I doubt even read the thing - and journalists. I've read very little modern sci-fi so I can't comment too much on that, but the few I did have been boring and far too brief for their more interesting set-ups. Modern fantasy imho might just as well merge with YA, there's nothing good to find anymore.
Rotter
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Oct 23, 2020
Children's book The Tiger Who Came To Tea 'could lead to rape and harassment' because it reinforces gender inequality that causes violence against women, campaigner claim
updated 10:43 BST 24 Aug 2021
- Book was dubbed 'problematic' by Rachel Adamson from Zero Tolerance charity
- She said the Judith Kerr classic featured an 'old fashioned' portrayal of women
- Ms Adamson did not call for banning book but said it could 'raise a conversation'
It may have delighted generations of children, but The Tiger Who Came To Tea reinforces gender inequality which causes violence against women and girls, a campaigner said yesterday.
Rachel Adamson, of Zero Tolerance, a charity working to end men's violence against women, said Judith Kerr's 1968 classic was 'problematic' because of its 'old fashioned' portrayal of women and family dynamics.
The book sees an uninvited tiger join a young girl and her mother for tea before eating all the food in the house, drinking everything, running the taps dry and leaving.
The girl's father then comes home and takes her and her mother to a cafe.
Miss Adamson did not call for the book to be banned but said it could be used to 'raise a conversation' in nurseries.
She told BBC Radio Scotland: 'We know that gender stereotypes are harmful and they reinforce gender inequality, and that gender inequality is the cause of violence against women and girls, such as domestic abuse, rape and sexual harassment.'
Adamson questioned the tiger's gender and why he was not female or gender neutral.
She also highlighted the 'old fashioned, stereotypical' ending in which the father comes home from work and 'saves the day' by taking his family to a cafe.
She said: 'We need to recognise these aren't just stories… I know this will make a lot of people unhappy, but one of the books is The Tiger Who Came to Tea... Judith Kerr is a wonderful author.
'However, it is reflective of a society that we need to think more closely about.'
Kerr was born in Berlin and settled in London in 1936 aged 13 after fleeing Germany before the Nazi party took over. She died in 2019, aged 95.
The Tiger Who Came To Tea was born out of conversations at home with her two small children when they were bored.
She said: 'We'd go for a walk and have tea, and that was it really. And we wished someone would come. So I thought well, why not have a tiger come?'
She denied that there was a darker meaning to the story, such as that the tiger represented the Nazis, saying the creature was meant to be harmless.
It is thought the book has sold more than five million copies worldwide since 1968.
Meghan Gallacher, the Scottish Conservatives' spokesman for children and young people, told The Daily Telegraph: 'While attitudes understandably change over time, parents will be left bemused at some of these claims by Zero Tolerance.
'This sort of language is completely unhelpful as we try to educate children about much-loved publications from days gone by.
'There are far better ways for this publicly funded group to go about changing attitudes, rather than simply calling for these books to be banned from nurseries.'
Tiger Who Came To Tea 'could lead to rape and harassment'
Rachel Adamson, of Zero Tolerance, said Judith Kerr's 1968 classic The Tiger Who Came To Tea was 'problematic' because of its 'old fashioned' portrayal of women and family dynamics.
- Joined
- Mar 12, 2021
I'll allow this canceling. COMPLETE jackass.Missed completely Philip Pullman getting cancelled on Twitter last week for being a racist Hatey McHater. This pompous jackass getting eaten by his own (however temporarily) for basically nothing is kind of a thing of beauty.
There's a good write up in the KF Social Justice Warriors megathread, including links to other posts in the same thread. The tl;dr is that the more he kowtowed, the more rabid twitter got. Seems to have mostly died down, alas.
Or you can read the incisive, balanced, nuanced and totally objective coverage found in the Mary Sue/Archive. First paragraph alone:
How long until they can program a 'bot to write this sort of thing?
- Joined
- Aug 29, 2017
The woke nonsense hasn’t hit horror too hard. Most horror authors are progressive but mostly keep it out of their books except Stephen King.
There are some that cry about not enough representation but they’re mostly ignored.
- Joined
- May 25, 2013
A quick word about non-YA literary Twitter: the press release for Jonathan Franzen’s next novel described him as “the unquestioned master novelist of our time” or something like that, and it caused a bunch of people to flip their shit, mostly because Franzen has the gall to be a white male who has a large audience. Franzen is also wisely not on Twitter, so he doesn’t have to witness the pathetic spectacle of jealous losers offering a veritable “who the fuck are they” alternatives.
- Joined
- Nov 15, 2016
I'd never even heard of this guy before. Turns out his last published novel was in 2013, apparently at the end of his self-described "twinkhood." Weird how he felt "chased out" of YA by "screenwriters," though.
HELP! I COULDN'T STOP WRITING FAKE DEAR PRUDENCE LETTERS THAT GOT PUBLISHED (Gawker 2.0 or whatever)
archive.md
HELP! I COULDN'T STOP WRITING FAKE DEAR PRUDENCE LETTERS THAT GOT PUBLISHED (Gawker 2.0 or whatever)
Help! I Couldn't Stop Writing Fake Dear Prudence Letters That Got Pub…
archived 14 Sep 2021 06:06:33 UTC
It was a fulfilling creative outlet, until one got featured on Tucker Carlson.
Sometime at the tail end of 2018, shortly after abandoning yet another draft of what was supposed to be my fifth Young Adult novel, I took up a different form of fiction: I started writing fake letters to Dear Prudence, Slate’s long-running advice column.
Part of the reason for this change was that I was getting too old for young adults. As the sun set on my twinkhood, the teenage characters in my unfinished drafts had become suspiciously middle-aged in their preoccupations. They were jaded about sex, fretful about the effectiveness of their skincare routines, and clumsy in their use of emojis. Maybe worse, in the time that I had been writing YA, the once pleasantly eccentric corner of book publishing had become a stronghold for cynical opportunists and people who seemed to despise the very idea of literature. It was all fucking with my head, and while I couldn’t imagine giving up on fiction entirely, I was starting to think that what I had spent my career doing wasn’t working anymore.
Writing fake letters to advice columns could not be considered a good career move; after all, it was unpaid and I wouldn’t even get a byline out of it. On the other hand, it was easy and creatively fulfilling. In my anonymous, fabricated letters to Prudence, I could follow the most demented threads of my imagination without having to anticipate the omnivalent flavors of opprobrium that might rain down on me from YA’s brigade of cultural revolutionaries.
The world of “agony aunts” was not new to me. In my childhood, I would take the Washington Post and the local Montgomery Journal with my after-school snack, and while I’d tried to cultivate an interest in the news of the day, the advice columns were what really spoke to me. Part of this was personal. It was family legend that my grandmother had been published in the 1970s by Ann Landers, sincerely asking if she should divorce my grandfather for his secret smoking habit. Ann had advised her to chill, and they remained married, so I felt that in some way I owed her for my existence. (Then again, my grandfather eventually died from the cigs, so maybe Ann was to blame for that too.) In my pre-teen mind, Ann Landers and her sisters (Dear Abby was, in fact, her actual sister!) were figures similar to the Fates. To contemplate the ways in which their pronouncements had altered the course of history was to stare down a dizzying kaleidoscope of Quantum Leap what-ifs.
I was also intrigued by the question of fakes, for which Ann was always on alert. She operated under the thinking that Yale undergrads were the most common perpetrators of fabulist letters, and, for a time, refused to publish any letter bearing a New Haven postmark. This suggested to me an erotic glamor: I imagined dormitories full of muscular undergrads lounging around in their undies and collaborating on phony scenarios before hitting the showers together to celebrate their labor. It was with this dream in mind that I approached my task.
Over the next couple of years, I used burner email accounts to submit around 25 letters to Dear Prudence, at least 12 of which were answered on either the printed column or the podcast.
Though Dear Prudence has run in Slate since 1997, the role of Prudie was assumed in 2015 by Daniel Lavery — co-founder of the feminist website The Toast and author of a book about famous literary characters texting — who transformed the column into something of a tribunal, doling out po-faced judgment to guilty white cishets for crimes of allyship. Was it wrong for a letter-writer to call the cops when she saw a home invasion taking place on her street? (“You can’t go back in time and undo what you did, of course,” an unamused Prudie tsked.) Would it be morally acceptable for another to steal their parents’ phones and secretly delete objectionable content from their Facebook feeds? (“Go ahead and unsubscribe them with my blessing,” Prudie advised.)
More than being an heir to Ann and Abby, this incarnation of Prudie felt like an heir to Judith Martin’s Miss Manners, whose adjudications on minor questions of polity were, in their own way, more titillating than the seamier stuff offered up in more generalist columns. But rather than looking to Emily Post, Lavery’s Prudie was guided by the convoluted pieties of Twitter. This was fertile soil for the themes that I was interested in, which included Disney monomania, semantic disputes in queer relationships, and paralyzing anxieties around Brooklyn-style social mores.
After a few false starts, I learned that a good letter is defined by two opposing values: it must be plausible, but it must also be ridiculous. This is a delicate equilibrium to manage, and one that I botched frequently. Help! My Friend Thinks I Am Stealing Vaccines From African-American Grandmothers To Attend Sex Resorts ran, but was a disappointment; it needed another flourish of insanity to justify its existence. My Family Used to Call Me Auntie Christmas. Now They Call Me the Christmas Karen! was a personal favorite that never got published, likely because it failed on plausibility — I had miscalculated the relative ages of the characters, and the whole thing fell apart upon examination.
My biggest weakness was dialogue. I was always tempted to include fabricated direct-quote diatribes in my letters, even knowing they would raise red flags. In Help! I Refuse to Return My Lesbian-Identifying Ex-Lover’s Moose-hide Vest, I couldn’t bring myself to kill the line where a crusty lesbian elder traumatizes a roomful of young tenderqueers by demanding that they “belly up to the beaver buffet!” This one, sadly, never saw the light of day.
When they did run, my letters were often edited in ways that I didn’t care for. Spelling or usage errors and malaprops were key to the voice of my characters, but they usually got corrected before publication. Help! My Husband and I Can’t Agree On What To Name the Baby We Might Get! was a pleasant exception: it was important to the story that this fictional couple was “getting” rather than “having” or “adopting” a baby, and my word choice was thankfully allowed to prevail.
But sometimes my work was altered in ways that changed its substance. In My Daughter Is Pretending to Be Demonically Possessed… and I Can’t Take It Anymore!, I’d made a point of establishing that the advice-seeker fears dampening her daughter’s creative spirit by scolding her for crab-walking around the house and spitting on her family members. When the letter finally made an appearance on Prudie’s podcast, it had been stripped of its caveats to allow Prudie to deliver a sermon about nurturing childhood creativity. (“This child is perfect, and has a great big imagination.”) I don’t have a child, much less one who’s a vessel for a demon; nevertheless, I felt misunderstood.
Prudie’s advice often missed the point in favor of discursing on pet topics. In Help! My Sister Is Convinced She’s an Unrecognized Genius, and It’s Tearing My Family Apart!, a woman has turned into a monster after getting a perfect score on the type of Facebook quiz that asks users to identify sushi’s country of origin. “IQ. Fake and racist,” Prudie responded. True, but what did that have to do with anything?
Occasionally, though, Prudie praised me: My Mother Is Trying To Convince the Guests At My Gay Wedding To Come Dressed As Disney Characters was, in the columnist’s words, a “beautifully written” letter in which “every turn of phrase was a joy.” The pride I took in such accolades was, I’ll admit, rather unseemly. I couldn’t handle the scoldy gaze of the Young Adult Goodreads machine, but I had missed the bright lights of the trade reviews and their attendant stars. I would take what I could get.
Though I assumed that thousands of people were reading my Dear Prudie letters, I received little in the way of feedback, other than from the small but prolific group of weirdos that populated the comments section of the site and a few close friends who mostly seemed confused about what I was doing with my life. It was the sound of one hand clapping.
It was ironic, then, that the letter that received the most attention was also my final one. The evening after Help! My Husband Won’t Remove His Mask, Even For Sex! ran, I was on my first margarita at a Mexican restaurant when a colleague texted me that it was getting traction on Twitter. I was on my second when another friend alerted me to the fact that the letter had been picked up by Tucker Carlson on Fox News. In a segment with Clay Travis — Rush Limbaugh’s replacement — Carlson read smirkingly from my work over a chyron that read TERRIFIED LIBERALS KEEP THEIR MASKS ON DURING SEX.
The attention was obviously thrilling, but it also made me uneasy. I had meant the letter as a mild comedy of manners set in the neurotic milieu of the Brooklyn middle class — a milieu that was, of course, my own. While part of me was excited to have duped a dweeb like Tucker Carlson with such an obviously phony scenario, I was disturbed to have provided chum for the pro-Covid, bleach-drinking lunatics in his audience. And unless I decided to remove my own “smelly and soiled” mask and reveal myself, no one would ever even know that Carlson had been taken in.
This bittersweet success came at a moment when I was already contemplating retirement. Daniel Lavery had hung up his Prudence hat after taking a $430,000 advance to write about geese on Substack in early 2021, and the news depressed me. I had come to see Lavery as something of a Javert figure (or was he Valjean?), and I was uncertain whether my game would be any fun without my familiar nemesis. On top of that, fake scenarios had started to feel passé. On Twitter, a steady stream of artlessly ludicrous Am I the Asshole? crossposts from Reddit regularly garnered thousands of faves, making me feel undervalued in my own labors. I had grown disillusioned with YA after it had been invaded by an army of carpetbagging would-be screenwriters, and my replacement hobby was being similarly colonized by people who didn’t seem to take any of it very seriously. Now, Tucker Carlson made me consider that what I thought of as harmless trolling might actually have evil consequences.
So I quit the game. Or, at least, I’ve yet to submit a letter to the new Prudence, Jenée Desmond Harris. Maybe I’ll get back to it someday, or maybe I’ll find undiscovered territory from which to operate in a new kind of obscurity. Several friends have suggested that I gather all my work into a collection, but I don’t see the point: when the fakery is advertised, it loses its power. Maybe I’m the only one who thought it had any power to start with.
I wonder often about others like me. I know they’re out there — I can spot a fake from a mile away, but not having gone to Yale, I have no way of connecting with this secret brotherhood. Who are they and what do they care about? Why undertake this calling? I can speak only for myself: at a moment when stories increasingly serve as delivery mechanisms for moral and political messaging, it felt like a tiny form of resistance to engage in fiction that was at its heart completely pointless. At least it was meant to be. I did it neither for money, nor for glory, but for love.
Bennett Madison is the author of several novels for young people, including September Girls and The Blonde of the Joke.
Sometime at the tail end of 2018, shortly after abandoning yet another draft of what was supposed to be my fifth Young Adult novel, I took up a different form of fiction: I started writing fake letters to Dear Prudence, Slate’s long-running advice column.
Part of the reason for this change was that I was getting too old for young adults. As the sun set on my twinkhood, the teenage characters in my unfinished drafts had become suspiciously middle-aged in their preoccupations. They were jaded about sex, fretful about the effectiveness of their skincare routines, and clumsy in their use of emojis. Maybe worse, in the time that I had been writing YA, the once pleasantly eccentric corner of book publishing had become a stronghold for cynical opportunists and people who seemed to despise the very idea of literature. It was all fucking with my head, and while I couldn’t imagine giving up on fiction entirely, I was starting to think that what I had spent my career doing wasn’t working anymore.
Writing fake letters to advice columns could not be considered a good career move; after all, it was unpaid and I wouldn’t even get a byline out of it. On the other hand, it was easy and creatively fulfilling. In my anonymous, fabricated letters to Prudence, I could follow the most demented threads of my imagination without having to anticipate the omnivalent flavors of opprobrium that might rain down on me from YA’s brigade of cultural revolutionaries.
The world of “agony aunts” was not new to me. In my childhood, I would take the Washington Post and the local Montgomery Journal with my after-school snack, and while I’d tried to cultivate an interest in the news of the day, the advice columns were what really spoke to me. Part of this was personal. It was family legend that my grandmother had been published in the 1970s by Ann Landers, sincerely asking if she should divorce my grandfather for his secret smoking habit. Ann had advised her to chill, and they remained married, so I felt that in some way I owed her for my existence. (Then again, my grandfather eventually died from the cigs, so maybe Ann was to blame for that too.) In my pre-teen mind, Ann Landers and her sisters (Dear Abby was, in fact, her actual sister!) were figures similar to the Fates. To contemplate the ways in which their pronouncements had altered the course of history was to stare down a dizzying kaleidoscope of Quantum Leap what-ifs.
I was also intrigued by the question of fakes, for which Ann was always on alert. She operated under the thinking that Yale undergrads were the most common perpetrators of fabulist letters, and, for a time, refused to publish any letter bearing a New Haven postmark. This suggested to me an erotic glamor: I imagined dormitories full of muscular undergrads lounging around in their undies and collaborating on phony scenarios before hitting the showers together to celebrate their labor. It was with this dream in mind that I approached my task.
Over the next couple of years, I used burner email accounts to submit around 25 letters to Dear Prudence, at least 12 of which were answered on either the printed column or the podcast.
Though Dear Prudence has run in Slate since 1997, the role of Prudie was assumed in 2015 by Daniel Lavery — co-founder of the feminist website The Toast and author of a book about famous literary characters texting — who transformed the column into something of a tribunal, doling out po-faced judgment to guilty white cishets for crimes of allyship. Was it wrong for a letter-writer to call the cops when she saw a home invasion taking place on her street? (“You can’t go back in time and undo what you did, of course,” an unamused Prudie tsked.) Would it be morally acceptable for another to steal their parents’ phones and secretly delete objectionable content from their Facebook feeds? (“Go ahead and unsubscribe them with my blessing,” Prudie advised.)
More than being an heir to Ann and Abby, this incarnation of Prudie felt like an heir to Judith Martin’s Miss Manners, whose adjudications on minor questions of polity were, in their own way, more titillating than the seamier stuff offered up in more generalist columns. But rather than looking to Emily Post, Lavery’s Prudie was guided by the convoluted pieties of Twitter. This was fertile soil for the themes that I was interested in, which included Disney monomania, semantic disputes in queer relationships, and paralyzing anxieties around Brooklyn-style social mores.
After a few false starts, I learned that a good letter is defined by two opposing values: it must be plausible, but it must also be ridiculous. This is a delicate equilibrium to manage, and one that I botched frequently. Help! My Friend Thinks I Am Stealing Vaccines From African-American Grandmothers To Attend Sex Resorts ran, but was a disappointment; it needed another flourish of insanity to justify its existence. My Family Used to Call Me Auntie Christmas. Now They Call Me the Christmas Karen! was a personal favorite that never got published, likely because it failed on plausibility — I had miscalculated the relative ages of the characters, and the whole thing fell apart upon examination.
My biggest weakness was dialogue. I was always tempted to include fabricated direct-quote diatribes in my letters, even knowing they would raise red flags. In Help! I Refuse to Return My Lesbian-Identifying Ex-Lover’s Moose-hide Vest, I couldn’t bring myself to kill the line where a crusty lesbian elder traumatizes a roomful of young tenderqueers by demanding that they “belly up to the beaver buffet!” This one, sadly, never saw the light of day.
When they did run, my letters were often edited in ways that I didn’t care for. Spelling or usage errors and malaprops were key to the voice of my characters, but they usually got corrected before publication. Help! My Husband and I Can’t Agree On What To Name the Baby We Might Get! was a pleasant exception: it was important to the story that this fictional couple was “getting” rather than “having” or “adopting” a baby, and my word choice was thankfully allowed to prevail.
But sometimes my work was altered in ways that changed its substance. In My Daughter Is Pretending to Be Demonically Possessed… and I Can’t Take It Anymore!, I’d made a point of establishing that the advice-seeker fears dampening her daughter’s creative spirit by scolding her for crab-walking around the house and spitting on her family members. When the letter finally made an appearance on Prudie’s podcast, it had been stripped of its caveats to allow Prudie to deliver a sermon about nurturing childhood creativity. (“This child is perfect, and has a great big imagination.”) I don’t have a child, much less one who’s a vessel for a demon; nevertheless, I felt misunderstood.
Prudie’s advice often missed the point in favor of discursing on pet topics. In Help! My Sister Is Convinced She’s an Unrecognized Genius, and It’s Tearing My Family Apart!, a woman has turned into a monster after getting a perfect score on the type of Facebook quiz that asks users to identify sushi’s country of origin. “IQ. Fake and racist,” Prudie responded. True, but what did that have to do with anything?
Occasionally, though, Prudie praised me: My Mother Is Trying To Convince the Guests At My Gay Wedding To Come Dressed As Disney Characters was, in the columnist’s words, a “beautifully written” letter in which “every turn of phrase was a joy.” The pride I took in such accolades was, I’ll admit, rather unseemly. I couldn’t handle the scoldy gaze of the Young Adult Goodreads machine, but I had missed the bright lights of the trade reviews and their attendant stars. I would take what I could get.
Though I assumed that thousands of people were reading my Dear Prudie letters, I received little in the way of feedback, other than from the small but prolific group of weirdos that populated the comments section of the site and a few close friends who mostly seemed confused about what I was doing with my life. It was the sound of one hand clapping.
It was ironic, then, that the letter that received the most attention was also my final one. The evening after Help! My Husband Won’t Remove His Mask, Even For Sex! ran, I was on my first margarita at a Mexican restaurant when a colleague texted me that it was getting traction on Twitter. I was on my second when another friend alerted me to the fact that the letter had been picked up by Tucker Carlson on Fox News. In a segment with Clay Travis — Rush Limbaugh’s replacement — Carlson read smirkingly from my work over a chyron that read TERRIFIED LIBERALS KEEP THEIR MASKS ON DURING SEX.
The attention was obviously thrilling, but it also made me uneasy. I had meant the letter as a mild comedy of manners set in the neurotic milieu of the Brooklyn middle class — a milieu that was, of course, my own. While part of me was excited to have duped a dweeb like Tucker Carlson with such an obviously phony scenario, I was disturbed to have provided chum for the pro-Covid, bleach-drinking lunatics in his audience. And unless I decided to remove my own “smelly and soiled” mask and reveal myself, no one would ever even know that Carlson had been taken in.
This bittersweet success came at a moment when I was already contemplating retirement. Daniel Lavery had hung up his Prudence hat after taking a $430,000 advance to write about geese on Substack in early 2021, and the news depressed me. I had come to see Lavery as something of a Javert figure (or was he Valjean?), and I was uncertain whether my game would be any fun without my familiar nemesis. On top of that, fake scenarios had started to feel passé. On Twitter, a steady stream of artlessly ludicrous Am I the Asshole? crossposts from Reddit regularly garnered thousands of faves, making me feel undervalued in my own labors. I had grown disillusioned with YA after it had been invaded by an army of carpetbagging would-be screenwriters, and my replacement hobby was being similarly colonized by people who didn’t seem to take any of it very seriously. Now, Tucker Carlson made me consider that what I thought of as harmless trolling might actually have evil consequences.
So I quit the game. Or, at least, I’ve yet to submit a letter to the new Prudence, Jenée Desmond Harris. Maybe I’ll get back to it someday, or maybe I’ll find undiscovered territory from which to operate in a new kind of obscurity. Several friends have suggested that I gather all my work into a collection, but I don’t see the point: when the fakery is advertised, it loses its power. Maybe I’m the only one who thought it had any power to start with.
I wonder often about others like me. I know they’re out there — I can spot a fake from a mile away, but not having gone to Yale, I have no way of connecting with this secret brotherhood. Who are they and what do they care about? Why undertake this calling? I can speak only for myself: at a moment when stories increasingly serve as delivery mechanisms for moral and political messaging, it felt like a tiny form of resistance to engage in fiction that was at its heart completely pointless. At least it was meant to be. I did it neither for money, nor for glory, but for love.
Bennett Madison is the author of several novels for young people, including September Girls and The Blonde of the Joke.
- Joined
- Jan 12, 2017
What a faggot, giving in to the "No Fun Allowed" mentality. I think it's nice to have confirmation that that letter was fake (it really sounded too good to be true, but this is Clown World), but to then freak the fuck out and decide to cork his pen and give up on his hobby of duping Slate and its readerbase because there were "evil consequences" (lolwut) is a sign of a weak will. Should've just continued to write more over-the-top stuff for right-wing talk shows to gobble up and then get the last laugh.
- Joined
- Apr 13, 2021
@Elwood P. Dowd
You know what i would actually be interested if he self published all of the OG letters these actually sound kinda fun to read.
You know what i would actually be interested if he self published all of the OG letters these actually sound kinda fun to read.
- Joined
- Jul 30, 2017
What did a bot do to deserve that?
And you wonder why we try to kill all humans...
- Joined
- Apr 13, 2021
This article showed up in my feed:
www.wired.com
Has anyone heard of her? And what are your thoughts?
Her books sound frightfully dull like the ideals of wokeness made into a story, where theres no plot because it might send someone into a panic attack theres no conflict because someone might be offended just a nagging tension, thats what i imagine being woke is like.
Is Becky Chambers the Ultimate Hope for Science Fiction?
Her gentle, heartwarming stories seek to soothe our troubled souls. They also aim to blow up the entire genre.
Has anyone heard of her? And what are your thoughts?
Her books sound frightfully dull like the ideals of wokeness made into a story, where theres no plot because it might send someone into a panic attack theres no conflict because someone might be offended just a nagging tension, thats what i imagine being woke is like.
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