The Cultural Decline of Literary Fiction - by Owen Yingling

What happened?

Recently, there has been a lot of talk about the “decline of the literary (straight) (white) male.” The marginal benefit provided by an additional take on this topic, some clever new angle walking the tightrope between edgy and politically correct, is rapidly approaching zero. The problem with these articles—and the discourse as a whole—is that none of them go far enough. There is an impassable chasm between the stardom of Mailer, Updike, McCarthy, DFW, Franzen, etc and whoever is getting fellowships and is published in The New Yorker or Paris Review today. Yet the chief complaint from…

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