Many neomasculine men are aware of the backlashes to the depredations of cultural Marxists on video games (i.e. Gamergate) and science fiction (i.e. Sad Puppies). Yet literary fiction has already been so compromised that the prospects for change are about as good as those of a secular-humanist revolution sweeping through Saudi Arabia. One should not simply balk, understandable though the urge may be, that literary fiction is just flowery, solipsistic indulgence—for that would be dismissing some of our greatest thinkers, from Cervantes to Tolstoy to Beckett, due to our modern emasculated writers and the prattle of the social justice class.
To be clear, making it onto the NY Times bestseller list or getting published by Random House is brutally hard for anyone not writing crime, vampire or chick-lit novels. But the obstacles that non-leftist men face in an industry where 80% of executives are women are soul-crushing. This article will examine the current literary world—centered around New York publishing and MFA (Master of Fine Arts) programs—the SJW stranglehold thereof, the literary men of today vs. yesterday, and a prognosis for modern literature.
New York, New York
First things first: New York is publishing. If you haven’t spent a year riding the N-train between Brooklyn and Manhattan attending readings and expos, sucking up to magazine editors and readers (i.e. those who read submissions), and building contacts, then you’re like a goldfish swimming with sharks. If you want to make it in literary publishing, which means signing a deal with a New York agent and publisher, then the only excuse you have for not living there is if you attend a respectable MFA program outside the city.
The recent mushrooming of these programs—where writers workshop their stories and study craft while escaping from the daily grind—has resulted in more perfectly cut gems of sentences, more aesthetic groupthink and conformity, and a literary class system, where an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop opens many doors and an MFA from a lesser program opens none.
Landing a book deal or finding an agent is far easier with a publication record, meaning having placed stories and essays in prestigious literary magazines. But a litmag might publish four issues per year, each with 10 poems, 5 stories, and 2 essays. Two of these story slots (of interest to would-be Ernest Hemingways) are reserved for contributing editors, 2 are given to established writers whose names will boost the magazine’s profile, and 1 will be given to a newish writer—maybe. And if the choice comes down to you, an unknown male with a possibly white-sounding name from the Midwest, and the painter girl with 2000 Twitter followers who the editors party with in Bushwick, who do you think they’ll choose?
An internship paradox exists in literary publishing, where in order to get a book deal, you need a reputation, and in order to get a reputation, you need publications, and in order to get publications, you need a reputation. Two factors explain the existence of the literary class system as a substitute for talent. First, it’s hard for a magazine or agent to make value judgments between two solid pieces of work based on reading them for 5 minutes. Whereas listening to two musicians for 5 minutes each could deliver in-your-face impressions, browsing two stories often won’t. With most agents and magazines inundated with submissions, there’s no time to read everything and so they choose the person with the top MFA, the New York connections, and the five-digit Twitter followers.
The second reason for the literary class system relates to the economics of literary fiction. Though agents want to find and sell the next Great American Novel, the reality is that most books, authors, editors, and agents make no money. While the literati gloat that the industry is unique in standing outside the profit motive—as if it purely serves the human imagination—this lack of market orientation can be disorienting.
Most small magazines have no expectation of a large readership and no real business model, surviving instead on local arts council handouts. As such, considering that almost no one reads literary magazines (besides The New Yorker or Harper’s) and that they’re not appealing (or readable) to anyone but a tiny in-group of museum-going, naval-gazing yuppies, a magazine will leverage the literary class system and throw in some high-profile Iowa MFA writers in order to justify itself as not completely disappearing up its own ass. It needs to lend legitimacy to its drivel, which was never designed to appeal to anyone but the Brooklyn literati — or wannabe Brooklyn literati (the border is porous).
Think of the literary class system as a sort of coupon system in a communist state.
The SJW Takeover
So far, my intention has been to disillusion anyone who hopes otherwise as to the patent falsehood that what you write is half as important as your membership in the New York literary class. While an outsider can’t count on agents and editors reading their work for more than two minutes upon submission (unless they’re a card-carrying Park Slope resident with an MFA), there is one other way you can try to jostle your way into the Communist Politburo of Books: leftist virtue signalling.
I am not joking when I say that one of the best possible investments in your writing career, as a straight male who wants to get published, would be to hire a fat transgender “woman” of color and simply ghostwrite for “her,” or else acquire pictures of one and add “agoraphobic” to your Twitter resume of socially appealing forms of oppression—so no one expects to ever meet you.
No occupational field has inhaled diversity quotas this much. Looking at lists of award winners, grant recipients and editorial board members, made up predominantly of women, one would think that men are half-way illiterate. But in truth, far-left badges are ravenously shared and traded by the NY literary establishment, with many magazines and agents expressing a preference for “underrepresented writers,” not to mention all the literary events based around LGBT youth, minorities, inner-city kids, etc.
For example, let’s look at the identities and leftist credentials of the just-announced winners of the Whiting Awards:
Brian Blanchfield: white, LGBT
LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs: African-American, BLM, ebonics
Madeleine George: lesbian, generalized SJW
Mitchell S. Jackson: African-American, BLM, former drug dealer
Alice Sola Kim: Korean-American, lives with editor of Buzzfeed Books
Catherine Lacey: white, pinned tweet: “Fiction is the practice of queering reality.”
Layli Long Soldier: Native-American, SJW
Safiya Sinclair: Jamaican-American, BLM
Ocean Vuong: Vietnamese-American, gay
D. Daniels: white, non-SJW?
In this group, I only see one person with no immediate SJW affiliation (or Twitter account). While I can’t comment on the skill of some of these writers, the selection, like other modern literary selections, reeks of a PR wet dream chosen by a Buzzfeed panel.
You need Roxanne Gay’s approval to write
The identity-politic quota system, of course, hasn’t gone unnoticed by writers. Beyond the Sad Puppies episode in the more libertarian domain of science fiction, a recent incident in the Best American Poetry anthology was highly illustrative of the imposition of identity politics on literary publishing.
A writer, Michael Derrick Hudson, had his poem accepted into the anthology under the Chinese name Yi-Fen Chou, only to later reveal that he was a white man from Indiana who’d been perpetually rejected under his real name. There was a backlash, with Buzzfeed excoriating this talentless white patriarchal monster who should have “taken a hint” and stopped writing when he couldn’t get published. Some writers concede the vexed nature of getting published simply for being “exotic.” Ultimately though, they justify it based on the distinction between equality (equal treatment) and equity (equal access). That is, even if a white man is being discriminated against compared to a “translatina,” the white man faces fewer hurdles to publication (because his life is easier) and is still at an advantage despite the overt discrimination by publishing gatekeepers.
As in American life, identity politics will continue full-steam-ahead, powered by the unflappable nexus between writers of color and white women, whereby the former receive a platform from which to excoriate white people, so long as they trumpet the latter’s “rape culture” agenda. See, for example, one black writer’s response to the rape allegations facing Bill Cosby:
As far as Cosby’s alleged abuses, I was never conflicted. My only question was would this nation care if all, or most, of Cosby’s alleged victims were black women and girls. There wasn’t much intellectual or emotional reconciliation needed for me to understand that white Americans will go to all lengths to justify their terrorizing and pilfering of black folks, and most black men and boys, like most white men and boys, will go to all lengths to deny our active roles in sexual violence, sexual assault, sexual humiliation, and interpersonal violations of women and girls. The reality that white Americans are responsible for some of the most lasting, crazy-making violence on Earth does nothing to negate the reality that black men and boys, like white men and boys, are formally and informally educated by other men, boys, and patriarchal structures, to unrepentantly harm and sexually violate black women and girls.
What Kind Of Books Does This Produce?
The artistic goal of diversity quotas—if there could ever be a half-way acceptable one—might be to infuse lesser known narratives into the artistic zeitgeist through memorable but seldom heard characters and experiences. But we know this isn’t how it works in practice.
In novels from the Brooklyn intelligentsia, almost any African-American character is witty, pragmatic, agreeable, and surrounded by fools. But calling such a 2D cut-out a character is like calling a Pop-Tart baking. How such a character is supposed to elevate black people and nourish black artistic consciousness, let alone satisfy the average reader, is unclear. Rather than creating characters instead of identity-politics pets, establishment writers reach for the evermore rarefied tokenism.
Witness Garth Risk Hallberg, whose novel City on Fire recently received the possibly highest advance ever given to a novel: $2 million. Right from the first page, Hallberg introduces us to an interracial gay couple comprised of a wealthy but negligent white man who walks out on his long-suffering, paragon-of-virtue black boyfriend.
Or consider the “masculine” baseball novel The Art of Fielding, which revolves around a college dean and his affair with a black male student. Or the brand new What Belongs to You, whose author markets his book by saying he’s been cruising public bathrooms since he was 14. While these Ivy-educated authors are skilled at craft, it’s impossible to know where the virtue-signalling impulse ends and the story-telling begins. Possibly, they are trying to avoid the fate of Jonathan Franzen, who, despite being a bespectacled, militantly Democratic bird-watcher who writes an excess of female characters, faces a wrathful literary establishment who can’t quite countenance a straight male writer who has opinions about things.
Stephen King doesn’t want you to vote for Trump
Dead or muted are the mainstream male literary writers of yesteryear—Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Philip Roth, John Updike—many of whom are now considered arch-misogynists. In their stead, we have a generation of soldiers of Clintonian globalism led by radical feminists who write about “MUH FEELINGZ” and getting abortions, not to mention race agitators who get front-page editorials in The New York Times for their screeds against the never-ending assault against the “black body.”
Conclusion
Artistic communities have often been marked by dilettante behaviour, in-group rituals, and urbanism. But whereas 1920s Paris gave us works of Joyce, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald that still live on (the ultimate test of quality), it’s hard to imagine longevity for any socially conscious work written in a rent-controlled Park Slope flat—or any pitch-perfect but insipidly conformist book cranked out of one of America’s writing factories. Rather than writing bravely about the issues that define our experience and have no easy answer, the modern writer has to kneel before and pay his dues to the shrine of social justice.
Not only must he gain a large flock of SJW Twitter followers and relocate to New York to win over gatekeepers, he must design stories that include grotesquely high representations of women, LGBT people, and minorities, lest his “privilege” be a noose around his neck.
To this generation, it doesn’t matter how anti-art this is. It doesn’t matter that diversity in literature can’t possibly be served by the industry’s domination by four Manhattan publishing houses. It doesn’t matter that Dostoevsky would have mangled Crime And Punishment had his goal been to write a suburban novel with a Tatar Raskolnikov, a lesbian Dunya, and a lower-class non-binary Razumikhin. None of that matters, because New York killed literature long ago.
Read More: The 2016 Oscars Showed Us Which Lies The Hollywood Elite Wants Us To Believe
“I am not joking when I say that one of the best possible investments in your writing career, as a straight male who wants to get published …”
–is to independently self-publish. It’s 2016. We have .epubs and InDesign and microphones and free global distribution. An author needs a publisher like a fish needs a bicycle. In fact, ALL fiction writers have either made the jump or are actively contemplating it. Paper, electronic, audio — you can do it all yourself now.
Vox Day, Mike Cernovich, “anti-fragility” all come to mind.
The “publishing house” is old dead school that was ripe for the picking by the leftists. But their way is the old way and it’s going away. This is why they purposefully and intentionally went after the awards process. Also why they are coming after the internet.
They are already losing.
Castalia House, the independent publishing house with which Vox Day is connected (I’m always uncertain on the exact details), has more Hugo nominations this year than Tor. They publish a spectrum of material primarily through Amazon, and their name tends to imply:
– Not SJW crap
– Well written
– Actually edited by someone who can speak the language
They’ve been around for, what, five years tops? Already they’re more reliable and give better royalty percentages than any of the classic houses.
Vox is their editor I think. They gamed the Hugos as revenge against Tor who’s been gaming the Hugos for many years.
Amazon? Well then their books can’t be too non-SJW, or if they are, then the day might well be coming when Amazon pulls ’em.
Still, I’ll have to check them out. Thanks for mentioning it.
Amazon sells Roosh’s books dude.
Tor has been shit for years. I remember trying to read their SJW stuff in the mid-Nineties. Made me want to vomit.
Amazon may start censoring the same way Faceberg and Twatter do. We need alternative platforms.
It’s another group, like the mainstream media, that is losing it’s grip. For far too long, these publishing houses (no matter who is in charge) had too much power over writers….and now it’s even worse with the victim mentality (women, gay men, minorities) in charge of these places. Gone are the days of good work, now it’s all about pay back with diversity (except diversity in their eyes means the house is closed for all white men).
That’s what I’ve seen the most in our country since Obama took office. The group always crying about how we need to be more diverse and that very definition meaning “all welcome except white men”. The racism is wide open, today.
“–is to independently self-publish. It’s 2016”
Truly that is the way to go today. The mainstream puts out garbage,, but indie publishing has allowed for niche markets. Roosh would not have been able to publish any of his books if it was not for the indie route.
That said, if all the things continue to deteiorate with regards to free speech: i.e. google and facebook getting on board with censoring websites and social media postings, we could see amazon removing ebooks and physical copies from their database that conflict with the agenda of the elites.
That’s fine. They can cut off one head and two more will grow in its place.
Lets hope so Bob.
A friend of mine is writing a book on the economy and business management. He’s got the credentials for sure, and it’s a shake up about what’s wrong with everything. He got an agent, but has to do a lot of pre-publish marketing on Social Media. Then he’s got to get a publisher to print it out. He thought to go the indie route, but the chain booksellers have become outlet stores for the big name publishers. He can’t get his word out without playing the game.
My friend has an MBA, but he’s not a Doctor in anything. But one of the publishing houses recommended he put M.D. or PhD after his name. Just out and out fraud. Or if he could write under and assumed name with more SJW appeal.
If it doesn’t fit into neat little boxes, the publishing world doesn’t want it, because they look at statistics that tell them to stick with certain formulae. It’s effectively squashed human expression and creativity.
I was thinking this as well. To Hell with NYC. But this article brings to mind some of the recent SF and Fantasy offenders, James Corey and Joe Abercrombie. These guys, maybe to satisfy SJWs are writing “strong” female characters. These characters are so strong they can beat up men with ease. The irony of course is that these characters are not really women, they are men with women’s names.
The thing is of course, is that these books are almost exclusively read by men. So these “shims” are written in to satisfy feminists who hate these books anyway. On top of that, they antagonize the male readership. I will never read another book by these guys because this kind of nonsense sickens me. It is likely that other men will be put off as well.
“The thing is of course, is that these books are almost exclusively read by men.”
One of the goals of this brainwashing is parent propaganda – trying to get fathers to raise their daughters as infallible snowflakes, rather than virtuous wives. This will further demolish the pool of women worthy of a wedding ring, making it easier for land whales to find a man to agree to forty years of sadomasochistic cohabitation.
I like ,there’s a way to bypass the NYC SJWs!
Indeed. I have both of Rollo’s books and I’m pretty sure they were not approved by The New Yorker.
Chuck Tingle. Stay hard, buckaroos!
It’s a weird mix. The chains controlling the market, like Barnes & Noble, are pretty much just outlets for the publishing houses right now. But they’re dying out because there’s no original thoughts or stories on their shelves, and that’s because the big publishing houses don’t want to take a risk on a book without the formulae and statistics that they know have been working for the past 30 years.
I know a couple of people who’re writing, and one is going for a big name publishing house because he wants the national distribution, but the other guy is having a whole other experience. He’s actually enjoying the writing process because it’s HIS, and he doesn’t have to rely on a publisher/distributer dictating to him what’s supposed to be in it and what it’s about. And he has the freedom to take it overseas if he wants.
Conventional publishing is dying off, mainly due to poor economics and the dominance of the houses by SJWs cited here. I expect that fairly soon it will be relegated to nonfiction and reference texts, while fiction, which is the greater part of the book market by far, goes wholly independent of the houses.
If you’re of a mind to thank someone, thank Amazon.
Thanks to the Internet, even if Amazon becomes a problem for publishers, there are any number of distributors waiting in the wings to steal their customers.
EDIT: I meant “problem for authors” more than publishers. With self-publishing, it gets fuzzy in my head.
Those stores already dominate internationally — Kobo, iTunes, Scribd, Barnes and Noble, Google Play, FNAC, Casa de Libros — the list goes on and on and on. Amazon is huge in the US, but writers have to think globally now.
And just wait til 5G goes global. Holy crap will the book-distribution playing field level out.
What is 5G?
I guess its what comes after 4G.
There are plenty of would-be distributors, true. I’ve worked with one — Smashwords — and they do a good job of exploiting the non-Amazon outlets such as Barnes & Noble and Apple.
We indie writers still have a few hills to climb. In particular, we lack skill at promotion and marketing, and editing services remain very expensive, perhaps too expensive for many of us. But all things in their time.
If you’re willing to go through unofficial channels, you can get some quality editing done. I used to charge other high school students to edit their application essays, and every one of them was accepted.
The problem is that, in the official industry, they demand a Masters in English for an editing job. That’s expensive stuff, and most English students cannot write nearly as clearly as Germans who took it as a second or third language, anyway.
(SHAMELESS AD) If you do the writing and want an editor, I’ll give RoK regulars a special discount. Base rate $2 per thousand words, which works out to approximately $80 per standard-length novel. Half up front, half if you want to submit my edited works for either further edits or final publication.
My man, that’s a true bargain! How do we contact you?
Contact me through evermoreinstructional.com, my personal website. I’ll not link the email here, but you can find it there.
Of course, to be eligible for the deal, we need to chat a few times on this forum so I recognize you. I like money, after all, so I don’t want just anyone taking advantage.
Caveat: my specialty is non-fiction writing, primarily in the form of long essays. I’ll probably have to upcharge for at least the first few fiction works, in part because my prose is quite rusty and in part because it’s harder to maintain the original voice.
I’m in. You can have a free copy of any or all of my already-issued novels if you want to satisfy yourself that you wouldn’t be wasting your time.
Sweet. I’ll have to take you up on that offer later (I’m traveling at the red-hot moment).
By the way, this is how I advertise. I sell my programming books to kids interested in computer science, and they tell their friends. My first book was published less than a year ago, and without even social media advertising I’m making enough to keep my sites up. Ideally, my writing and editing turns out as profitable as academiccomposition.com.
Congratulations. Another of the great challenges for indie writers is the discovery of niche networks that support the marketing of niche offerings. As a simulations expert of high repute, I’ve toyed with the idea of a nonfiction tome on the subject, but the prospects for marketing have always defeated me.
Hey, I’m in the top thirty Amazon listings for a book listed under “debugging”. The fact that there are only about 33 books in the category doesn’t occur to most people.
Write what you know, explain it well, and eventually people will lean on it. I keep myself content with the knowledge that few best-selling authors became famous in life.
If you write one on de-buggering you’ll have to self-publish
(chuckle) A good point. On a humorous note, I’m reminded of a friend of mine who once said that he graduated eleventh in his class at seminary school. It took a while to get him to admit that there were only twelve students in his class.
Well played.
Dickens was reviled, trashed, and forgotten for about half a century after he died. Scott Fitzgerald died forgotten; Gatsby wasn’t resurrected until twenty-five years later.
That there is bottom-of-the-barrel pricing, Taignobias. I charge a lot more, as do most editors.
I’m banking on the fact that I tend to see quality writing on this site. I can edit that pretty quickly and efficiently. Plus, it’s a base rate for a single pass – if I end up fixing all the grammar and restructuring paragraphs on each page, or if we do multiple rounds of edits, I’m upcharging.
That’s a solid price. You could do a lot worse than that on Fiverr – and I have. The few things I’ve had edited cost more on the order of $2.50 per thousand words.
Interesting… what does that say about the British State education system?
I’m inclined to generally charge a base rate of $5-$10, but based on my criteria (regular at RoK), I expect anything submitted to be already basically ready to go.
What is the name of your book?
The new contracts coming out of New York publishers are one step short of outright slavery. Only a fool would sign one.
Or a worthless author, like old McRapey (John Scalzi, for those not yet among the Dread Ilk). They gave him something like 400k to write terrible fan-fiction, and he’s already reneged on at least one without sanctions.
Can you point me to one? I’m no longer in that orbit.
From what I hear, you end up agreeing to most of the following at a minimum:
– Exclusive publishing rights belong to the publisher
– 5% or lower for royalty payments
– No advances unless the editor really likes you
– No money at all if the publisher pulls your work (and they keep all the rights)
– Anything the editor decides to cut (usually on ideological lines) stays cut
– You can lose all rights and royalties if the editor disapproves of your extracurricular activities (read: you’re on sites like this)
Meanwhile, Amazon gives 30% royalties as a default, and unless you submit it for Kindle Select they claim no ownership to your work. There’s just no contest.
Isn’t Amazon rather notorious for exploiting its authors and pulling eBooks (and other products) whimsically?
Amazon might have broken the SJW stranglehold on book publishing, but that was assuredly never the intent of nutjob and SJW Jeff Bezos.
I can speak only for myself. I’ve had only positive experiences publishing through Amazon’s KDP and CreateSpace channels. Their online facilities are excellent, their royalty scheme is generous, and they pay monthly, which is unique in publishing. Though I’ve occasionally heard whispers of others’ disputes with them, I can’t confirm anything and I have no details.
“Or consider the “masculine” baseball novel The Art of Fielding, which revolves around a college dean and his affair with a black male student.”
Oh FFS…..taking a masculine sport like baseball and “debasing” it with this utter shite… I had to read that sentence twice before it sunk in. I just wonder do they play “hide the baseball bat”?
I’m torn between blaming SJW’s in literary fiction for turning literary fiction gay and the idea that literary fiction was already kinda gay. Plenty of male authors make millions writing fiction- but it’s lowest-common-denominator page-turner stuff like “The Davinci Code.” Although I love Jo Nesbo. Perhaps Norway has a publishing industry that isn’t run by bitter women and gays?
The distinction between literary fiction and genre fiction started in the 1920s. It was a status signal, showing the world that only lower-class people needed plots.
That distinction has now almost been erased.
That’s a fairly recent phenomenon. Once publishers realized that women spend all the money, books had to start catering to them.
Heinlein, O.S. Card, Douglas Adams, and countless other authors published before the 70’s put out some material that could never get published today.
I wouldn’t say “plenty.” The list of guys making a living seems kind of tight to me.
So does my novel about the leader of a Socialist Revolution in South America who falls in love with the local young priest have a chance or no ? It’s a tale of privilege, class struggle and queer sex.
I am also quarter Cherokee and trans – neuroatypical. Do I have a chance or will the forces of Patriarchy stop me from getting my well deserved 10 million dollars ?
Hmm…we’ll need to see a few of the dating and sex scenes first. If there’s anything there that is even vaguely supportive of heterosexuality or negative toward homosexuality, it’ll have to go.
your butt-sex novel sounds better than my butt-sex novel
The literary world has been left wing for a long time now, and that’s not going to change overnight. I don’t know much about the New York scene, but one does associate the city with liberalism, and I suppose both upper case and lower case New York Intellectuals. I don’t think there’s much point complaining about it – it’s just what it is: the liberal fortresses will fall, when and as the market changes (and some interesting details in the comments already about how that may already be happening).
One thing I would point out though, which will make the fall of SJW literature inevitable sooner or later is the fact that as the author implies what passes for literature these days is extremely sameish. In the past I’ve tried to read authors like Genet and Gide (I never did get round to Death in Venice or anything) and if you can stomach a smattering of implied sodomy you will be richly rewarded, not spiritually perhaps, but in terms of a literature that breaches norms, breaks with traditions, shocks and appals.
Now at this point some of you are thinking ‘what the hell, this guy’s into queer-as-fuck-literature of the kind the author was warning about’. Well, actually I’m not. I don’t want to read any of the gay erotica masquerading as literature listed above, not because I’m too conservative (although I have no particular interest in the subject) but because IT IS NO LONGER TRANSGRESSIVE.
It no longer has the power to shock, or rouse us from slumber. The people who read this stuff just want more of their 5-a-day gay health foods (carrotts stuck up the arse, aubergines stuck up the arse, bananas…you get the picture etc). As the author says these guys probably can write very well. Better than most conservatives and right wingers right now. That’s because they have the zeitgeist, and practiced in what they have to say and of course have all the right connections, and channels for publication etc). But they are also losing that zeitgeist. I’ve noticed for a while now. The leftists, and liberals no longer seem to have a great deal to say, even if they are very good, and very polished, at saying very little. It’s not just that they’ve become complacent. They have, but it’s also to do with the fact they can no longer speak truth to the public. An Emile Zola in the 19th century, could tell you more about French society than any amount of reading the papers. Likewise a Genet, or a George Bataille had the power to genuinely shock people to the core. Even in the 90s there were works like American Psycho, which were capable of rousing people to fury. But even then, if you think about the response, considering the subject matter, it was quite tame: by the 90s people were already jaded and weary of sexual violence and shock jock stuff. The problem for the left is that their literature of transgression is no longer transgressive: it is now completely and utterly conservative. A lesbian kiss, a close up of gay arse-shagging, a head-exploding: it is no longer transgressive. It is boring. I have to admit I was a bit shocked when that guys head exploded in game of thrones (yeah, I know I’m no longer talking about literature here but its on the same subject matter) but when I read in the Daily Mail a couple of days ago that there’s a new film coming out with lesbian necrophilia, I just thought, same old, same old. It feels the same as just about everything else I’ve watched or read.
The old left-liberal literature of transgression is dying because it has nothing left to transgress against. And because it has nothing left to transgress against it can no long shock us into thinking deeply about the things we take for granted.
This, and this alone, is the opening which exists for those writers, thinkers, artists, philosopher or any other kind of grade A wankers who think they can make an artist. There’s no need at this point to say exactly what it is, or what it will be. No need to focus on the content at this stage. You’re prejudices and your rage will fill in all the gaps as necessary, but what is clear to me right now is that we need a new literature of transgression, one which violates the old.
The new transgression is to show women turning voluntarily away from feminist propaganda, admitting that men are better than women at certain things, and putting their husband’s needs above their own.
The author that does this convincingly will be remembered.
And to get the women now readying themselves to vote for Hillary Clinton to read and go wild about it.
” I don’t know much about the New York scene, but one does associate the city with liberalism…”
You might think so, and Lyin’ Ted Cruz definitely thought so, but the electorate didn’t think so 🙂
Funny enough, you can be an SJW and still get rejected on the most foolish of grounds. Author Nancy A. Collins is one such case who has been rejected numerous times recently despite being active since the 1980’s with several dozen novels and award nominations to her name. Her novels are full of murder, rape, gore, molestation, etc. with the vampire characters being among the most evil she puts to page while the main character, a chick ripoff of Blade, being the ultimate of woman power fantasies. Yet it is her most famous character that won’t see the light of day until an independent house publishes it.
“You need Roxanne Gay’s approval to write”
I kind of feel like that’s a challenge. That guy who submitted his poem as an vietnamese chap is a bit of hero. There is a a bit of a tradition of literary trolling. At least there have been people who’ve submitted fake post-modern literature, had it accepted even though it was a complete piss take (Bricard and Sokal). How hard could it be to write fat black lesbian troll fiction?
Hey, Mary Ann Evans wrote under the pen name George Eliot in order to get published. It’s a tradition that fellow just continued.
not so sure. That’s just a woman pretending to be man.
A guy did it before masquerading as a Native American too. Of course, Sherman Alexie (the most ridiculous non-talent ‘writer’ ever) was right there to sniff it out. He wrote a book titled something like; “My heart is flowing river” or something and of course the progs overcompensated all over it until they found out he was a fraud. I’m not sure how fiction can be outed as ‘fake’ but logic doesn’t play well in Leftlandia anyway.
Minimalize
Write
Self-publish
Enjoy your own great stories as an old man while smoking a stogie in your mini-home in Alaska
“Sherman Alexie (the most ridiculous non-talent ‘writer’ ever) was right there to sniff it out.”
I put Sherman Alexie right there with Sandra Cisneros. We’re supposed to applaud them because they are minorities who managed to write a book. And their stories have the same effect as five Melatonin pills. Big Time sleepers!
I guess it’s all about adhering to the victim narrative. If you are a minority writer, you better write a “woe is me” tale or you will NEVER get published.
What did Sandra Cisneros write about? Let me guess. A haunted 17th century pirate ship adventure? A hard-boiled detective novel in 19th century London? A completely original take on a dystopia survival tale? A modern day adventure about Texas bankrobbers? Oh….no…..Oh, she wrote a thinly-veiled (or unveiled) autobiography about her cross-ethnic adjustment struggles, full of dull vignettes about her own upbringing? Fucking 100% guarantee. I knew it for sure before I even checked Amazon. Even the part about it being broken up into vignettes. Unreal. Funny how ‘diversity’ being rammed down everyone’s throats has led to a total lack of diversity.
You hit it on the nose.
A very tidbit…the bio on the back says (I will paraphrase a bit) Sandra Cisneros lives alone at her home in Chicago with her three cats.
Of course she does.
“A guy did it before masquerading as a Native American too.”
Better story than merely getting published.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2001/09/03/the-runner
Alexi Santana’s application to Princeton was one of nearly fourteen thousand for twelve hundred places in the Class of 1992. Once, when Fred Hargadon, the head of the Princeton admissions office, was asked to describe the perfect candidate for admission, he answered with the name of a fictional character, Huck Finn. Most students selected for admission probably have less in common with the illiterate son of a violent alcoholic than with his diplomatic young friend Tom Sawyer. Still, Hargadon’s answer does neatly summarize the virtues that Princeton looks for in at least some of its applicants—originality, self-reliance, and the kind of “diverse life experiences” that might keep the school’s Tom Sawyers entertained. Santana’s score of 1410 on the S.A.T.s was well above the average of students admitted to Princeton, and his Hispanic-sounding surname likely recommended him for special consideration as a minority applicant. But his personal essay, the story of a self-educated ranch hand who read Plato under the stars, was what lifted his application to the top of the pile. Santana, the admissions office reported, had “trained on his own in the Mojave desert, where he herds cattle for a living (mostly in a canyon called ‘Little Purgatory’). On a visit to campus in March, he slept indoors for the first time in ten years.”
[…]
The tales that Hogue told Princeton explained his lack of a high-school transcript and teacher recommendations; they also flattered Princeton’s self-image as a cradle of meritocracy. By accepting applicants like Santana, the university reminded skeptics that a Princeton degree was a reflection of personal achievement, not just a means by which wealthy, successful Americans might pass on their advantages to their children.
Even a cursory look at the numbers, Hogue believed, revealed that
Princeton’s sense of itself as a home for the finest young scholars,
regardless of family background, was no less a fiction than his story of the ranch hand who read Plato under the stars. The America of the late eighties was a nation in which élite credentials were more closely tied to social and economic status than ever before.
Not the first time someone goes writing under a fake identity.
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41Ri8kfoL4L._SL500_PIsitb-sticker-arrow-big,TopRight,35,-73_OU01_AA130_.jpg
But seriously, I was always wondering, how can Barnes and Noble stock so many books about women.
Think of it this way, what self-respecting man would spend his free time in a Barnes and Noble reading novel about walking with a cat on a beach while sipping a “sugary death with a touch of coffee”?
Especially when he could just get what he wants from Kindle, while spending the rest of his time pursuing self improvement.
Since childhood I have been an avid reader. Easy 2 books a week usually more unless traveling whereupon I will read a Wilbur Smith or Lee Child novel repeatedly until traded or given to another traveler. In my more desperate word hungry moments I have on occasion opened a book penned by a female. What a fucking mistake. ! or 2 chapters in I realize I do not have a clue what she is writing. It may as in Romanian. Womens minds are full of kaka.
Depends. A few females write like men. Check out Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club (memoir), which is really gritty and hard-nosed.
BTW, many female readers feel equally turned off by male authors.
Ann Patchett
Hannah Tinti
Are two true storytellers who don’t just bee-line it straight to faux empowerment issues. Not at all.
Awesome article.
A few years ago I started shopping my first novel around to agents. It was a story about a guy with man tits who discovers the pickup community and learns how to bang lots of women, for better or worse.
Two days after shopping it out, I got a call from an agent who was the head of the English Lit department at Mcgill University in Montreal. I almost shit my pants I was so excited. He made me promise not to shop to any more agents, as my book was so excellent he promised to get me published, and even teach the book to his students.
Three months later he gets back to me and say’s “Sorry. Couldn’t sell it.” No other explanation.
I had interest from a New York group of agents, all of whom were women. It was picked out of the slush pile by an intern and passed around. Eventually after a few months of consideration they informed me they loved the Sardonic tone of my novel, but would not represent it. No reason why.
But I know why. Because it’s a book about sexuality from the male perspective, and it’s about the pua scene. That’s a no go subject in today’s mainstream publishing sphere.
That’s why I self published on Amazon. And that’s the way men seem to be going these days. For now we can as Amazon isn’t censoring us, yet.
In my search for an agent I found it incredibly difficult to find male agents who represented books geared towards male interest. There just aren’t any, as they would not survive.
I tried to get ahold of Ryan Holiday’s agent, and Tucker Max’s, but never heard from them.
There is definitely room for a publishing house that represents books aimed at masculine men.
I’ve got a friend who is going through this same cycle. His novel has been making the rejection rounds for over a year now, largely because there simply aren’t any male authority figures in the publishing industry and it’s unapologetically written about and for straight males.
I don’t know if it’s true or not, but he says that his research has indicated that there simply isn’t a market for male-focused fiction because women make up the overwhelming majority of modern book buyers.
It’s true. In fiction, men only buy guns-and-commando action stories, murder mysteries, and historical stuff.
Overall, women buy nine times as many novels as men do — mostly because of the romance genre, which is by far the bestselling genre. Romance writers who are consistently productive make bank. I met a guy who writes the stuff under an androgynous name just to pay his bills, and he’s now making more than he ever did at Encorpera.
The problem with self publishing is that many writers just aren’t good at marketing. We don’t all have huge platforms from our blogs, and don’t have the money to hire freelancers to run our platforms, format our books for Kindle, Kobo, Itunes, print. Plus marketing, graphic design, editing, proof reading, social media, mailing lists. All of this is what the trad publisher is supposed to do, on top of getting the books onto shelves in physical retail space.
Edit: Not to mention trad con publishing royalty wise is a joke. If you’re lucky you get 12%. A publisher should give the author at the minimum 40% royalties for digital products.
The benefit of mainstream publishing is that you have the stamp of approval that green lights mainstream media to “review” your product. While self published authors have to approach blogs for reviews, the mainstream press will largely ignore your book. The social proof is still a powerful marketing tool. Think “New York Times” bestseller. If you have that stamp, you’re in.
We have to resort to clickbait, outrage marketing. I’ve actually pissed off feminists on purpose. It’s a standard marketing tactic to embrace the sjw outrage machine for press. Well, not like that takes much conscious effort if you write about men’s issues.
Personally I’ve refrained from writing about the culture war too often, as it leads me down the path of darkness and irritates my friends and readers. But shit, what’s an author to do? Outrage works.
Guys. Start publishing houses. Give guys like me book deals and do our bullshit so we can write!
Think about a guy like Mike Cernovich, or Roosh, if they started publishing books by other authors. There could be a revolution in publishing. The thing is, most of the big self pub authors don’t want to publish anything but their own work, because they love writing. I’m in that boat as well. I could start a publishing house, but I just want to write my books.
“[We] … don’t have the money to hire freelancers to run our platforms, format our books for Kindle, Kobo, Itunes, print. Plus marketing, graphic design, editing, proof reading, social media, mailing lists.”
You can do all of that by yourself for almost nothing.
Ebook formatting: Free on Amazon, Draft2Digital … OR you can DIY with Jutoh ($28 onetime fee)
Print formatting: Use InDesign. $30 per month
Book Cover: Use InDesign. Gimp is free but inferior.
Proofreading/editing: Swap with other writers for free. Plenty of them out there.
Social media: Free
Mailing list: Free on Mailchimp up to 5000 subscribers
Marketing: Depends. It’s a crapshoot. Most guaranteed ROI is Bookbub, which is pricey.
Check out Dean Wesley Smith for more guidance. He’ll show you the way.
I know because I’ve done all that. I’m “Self-Published.” I just find it annoying and would like a publisher to help me as an author. Like I said, most writers suck at business. Bukowski would have never been read if he had to run a business. He was too busy writing, drinking a fucking groupies.
Ah, so you want to be an “artist”. Unfortunately, in the modern publishing environment, there is no publisher that will do anything except print the book and distribute it. (They rarely edit anymore, and they don’t market at all.) For agreeing to the printing and distribution, you get 14.5% of sale price. Why not print and distribute yourself and make 70%? It’s a no-brainer, if you ask me.
I love to drink cocktails and fuck women, but I also love to control my businesses. You can do both.
But it’s just this way, because they aren’t publishing the books we read. If Roosh was on shelves in Barnes and Noble people would read it. Think of the massive ebook collection of men’s books that we all have on our Kindles and phones. There is a massive market for men’s interest literature. There are loads of great authors who would sell a lot more books if they had a platform.
My friend had a similar problem years ago. He wrote a satirical dystopian sci fi book that was kind of similar to Fight Club. He sent it around and got told it was very well written but there is no market for it.
But there is a market, isn’t there? Us!
He is a bit of a white knight, so he has no interest in courting ‘us’ 😉
Problem is you were trying to subvert the narrative too noticeably. Baby steps, man. Perhaps a trojan horse tactic might do the trick?
For example: I got a friend working on a graphic novel that contains the standard “grrl” power character -competent on the battle field- but subverts the tropes by having her quite nuts off the battlefield eg stabs a guy after he pretty much saves her. (friend hasn’t shipped it around to publishers yet, as he’s a perfectionist nut).
Wow, this is some serious Bad Apple!! shit right here.
Well, I was wondering why modern fiction was just one naff (and usually boring) story after another that I stopped reading it.
This article explains a lot.
Great piece.
Self-publishing is the way to go if you’re straight, white, and male. I guess there’s a certain stigma about it, but if it makes you money and gets your work/message out there, does it really matter what the leftist literati think?
The grand old tradition of the great American novel is well and truly dead.
R.I.P
It was a nice idea that no one was ever able to accomplish because the United States is so large and diverse. It would be much easier to write The Great Liechtensteinian Novel.
Stephen King is a who!
I think he could be the antagonist in his next horror novel. That’s a creepy ass face.
No, this is a creepy ass face
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/a1f755a47eeb0b0736d6c3c3cf978c942895945f138092304953955f555942db.jpg
Excellent article.
Perhaps ROK could start its own publishing house – not for pick-up material, but for anything of quality that would never get published in the queer-incestuous, whine industrial complex the author describes.
“Blurb” seems like a good deal: can do Barnes & Noble (online)/ Amazon distributing or your own. But I haven’t used them yet. They do give you free software “Bookwright” to format your book though. If ROK sets up a Blurb store it would require less effort on their part. They’d be like an agent of sorts I guess.
Yeah that’s pretty much what I meant. The marketing is the main thing.
Do a “book of the week” here or Rooshs’ blog perhaps. For every person who comments theres about a hundred lurkers.
^^^
Or hold an annual competition. There does´t have to be much of a prize – just the promise of publicity.
This would be great! Maybe a handful of recommended books in various subjects… historical fiction, art, sci-fi, etc. I think this would be a great help for all of us.
There used to be a place called Loompanics that was a catalog of books on all kinds of out-of-the way subjects and do-it-yourself type of stuff. With the internet they went online, but I think the got shut down by DHS.
Read the crap published by literary magazines. Some of it (maybe 40%) is well-written; however, the stories are usually boring, the characters are one-dimensional, and the endings are predictable. They only exist because most charge writers a “reader fee” to submit to their magazine. Then they promptly reject most of what comes in.
“Iowa Writers Workshop”
Don’t worry, right down the road we’ve got the Ames Writers Workshop.
You don’t need anyone’s permission to write. As Mike Cernovich says, start a blog, learn SEO, get on social media, and be heard. Network with other like-minded people and start your own.
It’s a lesson that Black men would be wise to learn, and it seems that it is something that White men and men of other races might want to pick up on to (those that haven’t already).
Modern fiction is unreadable for a simpler reason. It’s boring.
There are only seven plots. Homer trod the same path as every aspiring writer of a quest, and told the tale much better.
I don’t care to read idle speculations about technology that will be obsolete in ten years any more than I want to read a SJW tract dressed up as a novel—or another rehash of Tolkien (himself highly overrated). Give me a good history or a biography of a great man of Western civilization—or the Good Book. I have a fighting chance of learning something from those.
The ‘Minority Mafia’ found an unbelievable weak link in publishing. They have been running over the industry for two decades plus.
Sherman Alexie comes to mind. Amy Tan and whoever else.
The storyline is ALWAYS the same;
The minor adjustment struggles of saint-like hyphenated Americans or immigrants who must heroically overcome constant racism (of a country that red-carpeted them to literary fame, hmmm…)
The cover often features a small, non-white child looking confused and stressed out in his little cowboy outfit. Like “What am I?” Ohhh, get the tissues out. Apex scenes often feature dilemmas like “I was at the neighborhood picnic and I had to choose between a hot dog and hummus/falafel/burrito/kimchi ji-ge/sushi/curry. I was so confused!”
And white progs (who are actually the most racial-minded people of all) get to gush over the cross-racial unfairness and really just overcompensate all over the place, probably to the point of orgasm.
It’s so stale, but all the lefties in publishing will apparently never tire of their “Look! I’m not racist!” tingles. Now you add in the trans/fat acceptance stuff.
Literature should span the entire (unlimited) scope of human imagination. Dull, one-trick pony leftism has pigeon-holed the human imagination into tired out identity politics pandering. BORING.
Just go back 50 years or more for real storytelling.
So if I were to get something published, where would you suggest? Amazon is a good spot I hear, same with self publishing . Self publishing is hard to get out there but you keep ownership, but I’ve heard amazon lets you keep ownership too.
Look up Joe Konrath’s blog and start reading. He’s a cheerleader for self-publishing and/or Amazon publishing, and unlike a lot of self-published types, he has experience on both sides of the line: he got 8 books published through one of the Big Six and then switched to self-publishing through Amazon — and never looked back once.
In essence, so long as you’re prepared to hustle — and you have to hustle even if you’re published by a Big Six house — self-publishing offers you much better returns per copy than traditional publishing does.
Thanks for responding. I’m writing a fiction series that will ultimately be 5 books long. I know a publisher would want to make changes due to the characters being politically incorrect. It’s not a militant red pill narrative, but by today’s standards everything has feminist propoganda or is considered offensive.
Nothing like hearing Junot Diaz whine about how unfair things were for him (after he was elevated to fame and fortune for publishing banal coming of age diaries—oh, ahem, ‘literature’ lmao)
Just like Alexie…whine, whine, whine, go collect another check for publishing completely mundane vignettes about his own life. Again and again. Pure autobiography that is horribly misclassified as literature.
Excellent article. 100% true.
Junot Diaz’s logic sets up a situation in which he will simply never have to stop crying about racism. Because once people (even progs) simply get tired of his shit, then that just proves the existence of the patriarchy ‘censoring’ him. That’s why these workaday ethnic novels that don’t have a trace of imagination on display will simply never go away.
Here is an actual Sherman Alexie poem. It could have been written in two minutes. Notice how he establishes his anti-white creds at the very beginning. Therefore, the rest of the poem is automatically unassailable.
The white woman across the aisle from me says ‘Look,
look at all the history, that house
on the hill there is over two hundred years old, ‘
as she points out the window past me
into what she has been taught. I have learned
little more about American history during my few days
back East than what I expected and far less
of what we should all know of the tribal stories
whose architecture is 15,000 years older
than the corners of the house that sits
museumed on the hill. ‘Walden Pond, ‘
the woman on the train asks, ‘Did you see Walden Pond? ‘
and I don’t have a cruel enough heart to break
her own by telling her there are five Walden Ponds
on my little reservation out West
and at least a hundred more surrounding Spokane,
the city I pretended to call my home. ‘Listen, ‘
I could have told her. ‘I don’t give a shit
about Walden. I know the Indians were living stories
around that pond before Walden’s grandparents were born
and before his grandparents’ grandparents were born.
I’m tired of hearing about Don-fucking-Henley saving it, too,
because that’s redundant. If Don Henley’s brothers and sisters
and mothers and father hadn’t come here in the first place
then nothing would need to be saved.’
But I didn’t say a word to the woman about Walden
Pond because she smiled so much and seemed delighted
that I thought to bring her an orange juice
back from the food car. I respect elders
of every color. All I really did was eat
my tasteless sandwich, drink my Diet Pepsi
and nod my head whenever the woman pointed out
another little piece of her country’s history
while I, as all Indians have done
since this war began, made plans
for what I would do and say the next time
somebody from the enemy thought I was one of their own.
Oh the rage, even a ‘tasteless sandwich’ Grrr…. This is a POEM. It’s not just some note he texted to a buddy who asked him ‘What’s up?’ F’ing ridiculous.
Hmm, let’s see….
No rhyming scheme
Use of profanity
Nonsensical and pointless
Am I missing anything?
Nope, you’re dead on. This is quite possibly the worst pile of make-believe literary excrement I have ever come across.
All his poems are like this. He was in a private school in Spokane by 14. Went to Washington State and was a national literary star by 22 or so, simply for being the first Native American to even bother to keep a diary basically. So he rages about how unfair life was when his luck is up there with Arabian scions.
The utter absence of talent is actually entertaining. It is the Emperor’s New Clothes on meth, steroids and bath salts.
You’re missing the fact that he is a nationally renowned master poet and that his poems could be written in under a minute. This is unintentional comedy and self-parody to a level that the world will never see again.
Sherman Alexie earns today’s Backpfeifengesicht award = the face in need of a fist.
‘Free verse’? You may as well call sleeping in a ditch ‘free architecture.’ – GK Chesterton
Men should read Chesterton, both his fiction and his nonfiction. Even if you’re not Catholic. I’m not.
Don’t even credit him with free verse. There’s not even any imagery, metaphor, originality on display at all. Nothing clever, no insights. NOTHING. It’s just the most totally ridiculous poetry of all time.
To Hell with modern champagne “writers”, 99% of the books sold on Amazon are utter garbage and a few of those that Im actually ready to buy are not being sold there because they didnt pass some Leftist, degenerate censorship filter
The few good works out there are made by independent writers with a backup source of income, and a never ending supply of savagery (with zero fucks to give).
Like this guy:
http://enemiesforeignanddomestic.com/
In the first book he posits a realistic false flag to allow a total US gun ban.
His second book posits what we may very well look like in 5-10 years if we leave our borders open and/or grant amnesty.
Book 3 is even scarier. And his other book suggests a way to escape.
Definitely my favorite author.
SJW’s will never be content with dumbing down movies vis-a-vis SJW beliefs, since they know guys like us will boycott certain releases. Therefore they have to destroy books as well in order to continue to corner the market on entertainment, and to prevent dissent from rising. That behavior reminds me of certain people whom Trump gets unfairly associated with.
That said, this highlights why WE should be following identity politics as well, namely that of the neo-masculine, straight, American born men. If their goal is to close off traditional venues for us, our response should be to publish things independently and use the internet and other alternative means to get around the SJW’s.
they are trying to corrupt the video games industry too.
You make a great point about “us” following Identity Politics, however, Identity Politics are only really effective in media and schools. No way neo-masculine men can crack those sacramental bastions.
That’s true, we’re more individualistic than they are, and have intellectual diversity to show for it.
What I’m saying is that we at least have an outward apparatus to exploit identity politics, in order to turn their tactics back on them. The best way to beat Alinsky users is to be better at using his tactics than they are.
You are correct. Very sad that the powers that be have allowed them to create use group think in order to cause such hysteria… even in supposedly intellectual corners.
And since the Internet is still a frontier for now, we use that to our advantage.
I had to read one of Junot Diaz’s books for one of my college courses, and God, was it a SJW snoozer. The protagonist is a closeted gay, morbidly obese, extremely nerdy and friendless Dominican-American college student who spends the whole book unsuccessfully trying get a girlfriend, weeping and crying like a baby about it, and making suicide threats to his family and friends. That’s pretty much the entire plot, not much else happens. Rather than having him self-improve or turn his life around, the book ends with his brutal, gory death, which I guess was done to make some kind of point about the marginalization of gay Dominican nerds. SJW-inspired literature has the ability to be boring and depressing like none other.
I read that. Pure autobiography, just like 95% of ethnic ‘fiction’. It’s just basically “I’m brown and beyond criticism (ie racism) so I will freely navel-gaze and come to terms with my adolescent and teenage regrets, all on your dime.”
What’s so incredible is how seriously literary fiction (you know, character, plot, dialogue, imagination, storyline, foreshadowing) has been completely forgotten in favor of brown peoples’ diary-keeping.
This is why it’s my policy to not read any novels published after 1980
Outside of Cormac, that’s a great strategy.
Reminds me of Milton Friedman’s rants against the licensing boards in the medical world.
Friedman was wrong about too much (the libertarian curse), but he was spot on about that, just as this article appears to be about the book world
I applied to 6 different MFA programs last year, rejected from all of them. There is a 2% acceptance rate for some of them, and who are they going to pick a rich white girl from the DC suburbs or literally anyone else who is a minority? In my senior poetry thesis class we were asked what our goals as writers were: I announced to the class that I will never win any prestigious literary award because the literary elite don’t want me. They don’t want to give any awards to a thin, white girl who doesn’t write about rape. My professor immediately shamed me and said I shouldn’t think that. This professor was a black woman married to a Jewish man and a massive SJW and hated me. I wrote a long poem/story about an 11 year old catholic school girl who suddenly develops a penis and in workshop my classmates went off on me. They were like you don’t know how Catholicism works, or is she intersex? trans? there had to be some PC social justice element to something I was tinkering around with and having fun with because I could. The creative world through universities is so PC and overbearing. The MFA system shoehorns you into writing in a specific style and stifles any unique talent. You are not encouraged to develop your own unique style in creative writing anymore. Ultimate SJW Lena Dunham went to the same college as me and transferred and I realized that if she continued on, the english department would have told her to for once write about something that isn’t herself. She wouldn’t have made it, Oberlin really coddled her and let her do whatever she wanted.
Your story sounds cool, but work on your paragraphing, sweetheart!
Was feeling the emotion, paragraphing could use work, but I’m expressing muh creativitee.
“I wrote a long poem/story about an 11 year old catholic school girl who suddenly develops a penis and in workshop my classmates went off on me. ”
Make it a magical penis that grows out of her forehead and turns out to have the secret of saving the world in a grim, dystopian future.
Honestly, I actually really like your idea. Only, our current reality is bleaker than what I can conceptualize.
“AHHHHHH! SHE WAS SHOT IN THE HEAD!”
And yet the biggest best sellers, the works that actually made their authors rich, are the likes of “Harry Potter” and “Song of Fire and Ice”. You know, the kind of straight-white-cis-het-normative drivel that ordinary folks will actually pay to read and enjoy. Oh, and the works of Steven King 😉 Not a single pudding-eating lesbian cowboy or BLM terrorist in sight.
I started reading a song of ice and fire and its first book Game of Thrones in 1996. If HBO and a squadron of sjw faggots didn’t make a hit tv show out of it 6 years ago would you have ever heard of it, no. Further: the homos over at HBO have pretty much ripped the story apart, taken out its soul and replaced it with a bunch of gurl power nonsense to the adoring public.
Harry Potter, despite being written by a woman, is excellent writing. It is a series that actually matures with its readers which deals with all sorts of literary themes and tropes in playful and interesting ways. It is fun. Oh, for the record, my guess is that your awareness of this is also coming through Hollywood.
I don’t know about pudding or terrorism but I will say that faggots and SJW’s get their grubby little hands on anything they can, fuck it in the ass until it has nothing left of its original character and then parade it down the street profiting as their homo mob throws money at them for the finished product while simultaneously complaining that it is cis-hetero (which by the way means “fucking normal”) drivel.
You faggots love to rape something and the profit off of it while, at the same, criticize it. You really do want it both ways…oh wait, yes yes that is correct.
Go back to cognitive dissonance . Com or wherever faggots like to jerk each other off and let men talk.
As always you’ve hit the nail on the head. There is plenty of good literature out there that won’t see the light of day in film simply because it’s neither diverse enough nor is it PC enough for the powers that be. When it is brought forth, it’s gutted to the point readers of the original stories don’t recognize it anymore and are so disgusted they end up as that reading dipshit on social media.
I won’t lie. If I wrote my masterpiece and a bunch of homos shoved a hundred million in my hand and said “let us ruin it” I’d wrap it in Christmas paper.
And I wouldn’t blame you one ounce for that.
In fairness to faggots, rape and profit are my two basic hobbies.
Boy did you misinterpret my post. Little hint: don’t drink and reply, you’ll just ramble like an idiot, and put in a suspicious number of faggot references.
kk
I used to enjoy buying a new book. Now I understand why I simply haven’t been able to find anything half decent in the new releases these days.
Thank you for this insight into today’s Literature, er, ‘industry’, Jonatan. I hope we see some improvement in the near future.
1997 American Pastoral and 2005 No Country for Old Men are the last two novels I purchased and felt as if I read and thought about something great, beyond myself.
You know, I just dealt with this same issue on my blog in a post called, “Why Johnny Doesn’t Read Any More”: http://seagullrising.blogspot.com/2016/06/why-johnny-doesnt-read-exercise.html
Since there’s so little decent stuff written for men these days, I’ve been going back to the pulps and have found a lot of really great stuff written back in the day. There’s a good bit of old pulp mags scanned and available free online. I’ll be reading up on some and reporting back on it as I get the chance.
“Since there’s so little decent stuff written for men these days, I’ve been going back to the pulps and have found a lot of really great stuff written back in the day”
Seriously. And if any man wants to read any decent masculine liiterature today he has to go seek out writers like Hemingway.
What’s not to like?
Cormac McCarthy.
I’ve been getting into the pulps as well. IMO, the pulps had some of the most creative literary minds ever made. Not necessarily the best writers, but innovative and most importantly, entertaining.
I read this article and wonder why any guy really bothers to read fiction anymore. And why would any of us want to be a part of this club when there are tons of new ways to publish what we want without dealing with this racket?
There is some great fiction out there. Prince of Thorns…
Self-publishing doesn’t work for fiction unless you’ve got tons of cash to pour into self-advertising, too. Literary agents are still quite important for much of the market, sadly.
Read pre-1980. Done.
And you could go back read anything about history or politics written by the “losing side” in the past couple of hundred years…
Yep sounds like any job.
Btw “Whiting” Award? Sounds racist…
Triggered bob?
… https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/85b18573deb20df3c763e0e847fa4ab3e87a2448f5a96122d301da6018a07734.jpg
I finished my first fantasy novel last year and presented it to literary agents under my daughter’s name for the same reasons the article suggests. I’m a privileged white male, see, but being treated with equality and equal opportunity conspicuously isn’t one of my privileges, but my daughter’s a Thai girl!
It’s funny the article mentions that. It makes me wonder how many other privileged white men are doing it? For all we know, half the best selling books written by women might really be written by their husbands or fathers!
As a life long New Yorker who has been around both academia, creative writing and publishers for most of my life I have to say that this article is basically a very clear, clean instruction manual with no slant or bias — simply truth.
Knowing only this article and not anything else about JS I am left to conclude that he is and has been involved and knows these people and this topic very well.
I would suggest most fervently that anyone who is thinking about becoming an author as a career choice not just read this article instinctively, but also read it very carefully to ask if this is the word you really want to be in. Trust me, spending two decades in a career only to realize you don’t belong there and then having to make a jump is doable, but not enviable.
If the literary word is really what you want be prepared to encounter it for what it is — something illustrated very nicely above.
It would be fun to see the religious break down of who runs publishing.
Jews probably.
Ethnic, really, but yeah.
I liked the part where Coach Reardon had to spank all the cheerleaders.
The narrative was so vivid, so visceral, that I could envision myself facing the onerous task of inflicting much-needed discipline on the obstreperous and recalcitrant nubiles.
Then later, he is confronted by Donna, the ageing yet still hot wife of H.Ross Dumphries, wealthy industrialist and vindictive local political boss.
“I know you need this job”, she intoned in a low dusky threat, slowly unbuttoning her sheer white blouse…
My rule of thumb, based on long and acute observation, is that when women come to the fore in a field long dominated by men, that field is in decay.
Which is cause and which is effect can be debated on a case-by-case basis, but did women composers and women conductors come first or did the decline in the audiences for classical music? Here, women came into power in the NYC publishing industry and book selling tanks.
I suspect that one reason is that men must compete and achieve to get laid. Women ignore their own appearance for other priorities and get less male attention.
That said, I haven’t bought and completed a new book-length work of fiction in literally decades (there have been a few SF exceptions.)
Classical Music declined long before women started composing…
The experts wonder why no one reads any more…
“…it’s impossible to know where the virtue-signalling impulse ends and the story-telling begins.”
This confusion seems to be the goal.
I am a teacher in CA, and you should see our 800+ pg Lit Anthology. We read one story in August and then let it sit on a shelf and collect dust. The kids have no interest reading the politically-driven stories and poetry. They complain, and I understand.
I used to love reading sci-fi until the 90s when it became either leftist screed or female porn. Thanks to The Castalia House blog I’ve been buying or downloading awesome old triggering works that are very un-PC.
The solution is to start our own publishing houses outside of NYC and with the internet there are other ways of getting published that bypass the SJW publishing houses.
How (((New York))) Killed Male Literature
FIFY
Well said! I was waiting to see if anyone would point out the elephant in the living room.
The literary scene was co-opted by the ruling class decades ago – much like the art scene. In the case of art, realism is no longer taught in art school. I have a friend who is a well-known artist. He’s an abstract artist, of course, because there isn’t any other kind of art being made these days. One night we were drinking at this local pub, and he asked me if I wanted to go with him to his studio, and watch him work on a piece. I said sure. So we went over and he took two canvases from one of his work benches. He put the first one on the floor, on top of a tarp. Then he grabbed a bunch of tubes of oil paint, of various colors, three in each hand, and he started squirting the paint willy-nilly on the canvas that was resting on the tarp. Then he took the second blank canvas, and pressed it on top of the canvas that was on the tarp. And he just let it sit there for about five minutes. Then he took the top canvas off very carefully, and held up the two finished pieces of “artwork”. At which point he smiled slyly, and sarcastically asked me if I wanted one of his originals. Critics gush over this guy’s shit – and literally, it’s shit. Modern art, modern cinema, modern music, modern literature – all of it has been carefully calculated and constructed to reduce the human population to the level of animals. Mediocrity is elevated to greatness. Garbage is elevated to acceptable. Up is down, black is white, and the sky is green…
Is your friend named Jackson Pollock?
I still can’t tell the difference between the plain white paintings of Robert Ryman, Kasimir Malevich and Robert Rauschenberg. The entire canvas is literally just featureless white. But still preferable and more honest than squirting paint at random onto a canvas. The only modern art I really tolerate is land art … it generally requires some effort to make large-scale objects.
At least, like all top down institutions, publishing will be losing itw vitality as an industry by pursuing a NWO agenda.
I didn’t want to read this article. I knew all too well what it was going to say. Some years ago I attempted to get the attention of some major publishing houses with a novel that had some extremely masculine characters and a masculine story line that was rather conservative in theme. However, I am glad I did finally read this little masterpiece, because it kicks ass and belongs in the Best of ROK. Funny and irreverent, snappy and cutting, it calls out the dying and despotic bullshit that is legacy publishing, and is sure to leave enough feminist tears on the ground for me to wash my feet after being soiled with SJW dogshit.
Sounds to me NY Publishing is in the process of writing its own obituary. Long live the wide open internet and its freedom of expression (which I’m concerned it won’t last).
Fucking SJW/Feminists ruin everything… Bukowski, Hemingway, Jack London, Steinbeck would not get published today if they had to go thru the Gaystapo NYC publishing gatekeepers…
I disagree on one of these at least. Hemingway might have managed to retain some masculinity in his writing, but he was hanging out with postmodern fuckheads like Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound, and thus was one of the anointed literati.
Maybe some of his later stuff would have been embargoed by The Cathedral for badthought, but have you ever actually tried to read “The Sun Also Rises”? It’s navel-gazing hipster trash.
Burroughs. He managed to be “gay” and masculine at the same time.
>While these Ivy-educated authors are skilled at craft, it’s impossible to know where the virtue-signalling impulse ends and the story-telling begins.
Precisely this. The fiction and poetry I’ve read written by MFA pukes is mostly trash.
Author here.
First thing I learned was that going to school does not make you a better author. It may make your grammar better, but that’s it.
The publishing world is garbage. Many top books get rejected by editors and agents. They don’t know dick.
There is no reason not to self publish. If you have the cash for marketing and a good editor, you would be gimping yourself to give up 90% of revenue to the industry.
All publishers do that you may have issues with is marketing. And if your name isn’t King or Rowling, you won’t even get that.
If you put your heart and soul into something, back it. Market the hell out of it and pay an editor to polish it.
Hire a graphic designer to make a custom cover. Then hire a cover maker to make that design into a book cover.
Then keep 70% to 90% of the revenue from your hard work.
Look up some of the best selling authors and you will see that a large number of them did not take up a writing course in college. You can’t teach art.
How do you go about marketing it? Are there companies that do that? Any suggestions welcomed!
I’ll update this to me I begin. As of now I’m poor and unknown so I am considering Facebook ads, and a bit of word of mouth as well as a professional site.
I did find out comicon booths are uprising lay affordable, but you gotta get them faaaar in advance since they sell out.
I’ll look you up once I get into marketing phase and tell you what I did and how it worked.
Oh btw. I would suggest against a firm that advertises to authors. Those are usually scams. Making a few bookmarks and placing th book on those insider catalogs does nothing for you.
Thanks!
( ( ( New York money ) ) )
Sounds very much like Hollywood and the whole studio/writer system there, but with the monetary impulse slightly more subdued rather than in-your-face.
A couple years back I self-published a book on Amazon. I put a lot of work into it; a complex and fascinating topic. After a week, a gay-sounding guy left a one star review, basically because he didn’t agree with my ideas and got lost in the complexity. Haven’t gotten a sale since.
There are too many fools out there. I don’t know how to make it as an author unless you start as a blogger, or mindlessly parrot the SJW narrative.
>writing about New York art/literature
>not naming the Jew
Most definitely. For 50 years anybody could get published if they wrote about Nazis and Jews. The erosion in our literature has been going on a long time, that favoritism was just a foot in the door. And now you’ll notice that every new book coming out is like every other book put out. They use a script now and your novel has to have A,B,D. . .elements and not encourage the reader to go outide any mental/emotional boxes. You know how the book’s going to end and who did what after you read the first chapter. It’s all predictable, and shows how backward we’ve become in promoting the human spirit.
When publishing houses started laying off editors and talent scouts, that signaled the end of real creative thought and the monetization of consumer ingnorance. Now that it’s for brain-dead people, to influence them towards brain-dead ideas, it’s not worth a trip to the bookstore anymore. What I read I have to find on Amazon or borrow.
It started with the Beat Generation, who weren’t really a “generation” at all, but just drug addicted, queer Jews who came from wealthy families and got published and promoted because it made money, but they had to claim that there was a new social movement called “The Beats” and springboard off of that. Without the media manipulation for the “movement,” none of the writers could get published. It was gay porn told through stoned ramblings; No one wanted it.
It was the foot in the door that allowed monied interests and the Corporo-Government Complex to use the industry to water down actual thinking and literature and start their social control over consumers.
I’m serious when I say, if anyone here can hook me up with some modern conservative/non-SJW fiction writers I would really appreaciate it. I love writers like Robert Frost, Hemingway, Henry Miller, Kurt Vonnegut and the likes, it seems the only writers with anything to say these days are working in the field of science-fiction and fantasy, which I only moderately like. I want a poet who isnt going to proselytise on the evils of the patriarchy or cram their sexual escapades in a Home Depot bathroom stall down my throat. I think this escape to fantasy, while mastered superbly by writers like Stephen King or Neil Gainman, shows how exhausted we’ve become as culture, reminds of something Ingmar Bergman said about young and upcoming film directors, “they make very beautiful films (in terms of lighting, sound and cinematography), but they seem to have nothing to say.” I cant keep in looking back into the past for strong male writers, or to modern non-fiction from the likes of Mike Cernovich and Jack Donovan, surely there’s someone out there with a good story to tell.