Coming to MTSU, Spring ‘26–

MALA (Master of Liberal Arts) 6050-Philosophy in Recent American Fiction

(For more info: phil.oliver@mtsu.edu... https://prafmtsu.blogspot.com/)

We'll all read three novels* together, and each of us will additionally read and report on either a fourth novel or on a specific author's life and works.** 

"Philosophy" = searching for wisdom, clarity, enlightenment, meaning, perspective, purpose, reality, truth, understanding, ... especially with regard to the human impact on nature, the environment, other species, & other humans.

"Recent" = 21st century

*The three novels:

1. Richard Ford, Be Mine

2. Richard Powers, Playground (see below #) 

3. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, 36 Argyments for the Existence of God

**Possible fourth choices, for individual reports: 

• The Sellout by Paul Beatty (2015) - A satirical look at race and identity that won the Man Booker Prize.

• The Candy House by Jennifer Egan (2022) - Explores themes of memory, connection, and digital surveillance. 

• Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner (2024) - Considers whether the path to emancipation from what ails modern life is not revolt, but a return to the ancient past. 

• Any of the earlier Frank Bascombe novels by Richard Ford...

• Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi (2016) - Explores the lasting impacts of slavery and the search for identity across generations.

• Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver (2012) - Explores climate change, ecological disruption, and human responsibility. 

• Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver (2024) - a new take on Dickens' Copperfield.

• The Road by Cormac McCarthy (2006) - A harrowing journey through a post-apocalyptic landscape, meditating on survival, love, and morality.

• A Children's Bible by Lydia Millet (2020) - Set in a near-apocalyptic world, it examines generational responsibility and environmental collapse.

• Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng (2022) - Dystopian fiction about cultural repression and familial bonds.

• The Overstory by Richard Powers (2018) - A Pulitzer Prize-winning novel weaving interrelated stories about trees, nature, and activism. 

• Bewilderment by Richard Powers (2021) - This novel delves deeply into themes of ecological awareness and the human condition through the story of a father and his neurodivergent son.

• Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid (2019) - Investigates issues of race, privilege, and morality in contemporary America.

• Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin (2022) - This narrative explores human creativity and relationships within the context of gaming and artificial intelligence.

• Gilead by Marilynne Robinson (2004) - A profound exploration of faith, mortality, and legacy in small-town America.

• Plato at the Googleplex by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein...

• The Maytrees by Annie Dillard (2007 meditates on time, love, and mortality in a manner reminiscent of late James or even Santayana.

• A Children’s Bible (2020) and Dinosaurs (2022) by Lydia Millet, perhaps our sharpest living ecological moralist. She writes with a mix of irony and tenderness about apocalypse, indifference, and human responsibility to the more-than-human world.
• The Woman Upstairs (2013), The Emperor’s Children (2006) by Claire Messud.
  Messud’s work probes questions of authenticity, ambition, and moral compromise—what Sartre called mauvaise foi in a modern American key.
• The Flamethrowers (2013), The Mars Room (2018) by Rachel Kushner
  Both novels interrogate freedom, rebellion, and moral responsibility within systems of art, politics, and incarceration.
• Fates and Furies (2015), Matrix (2021) by Lauren Groff
  Matrix, in particular, is a striking meditation on creative power, spirituality, and women’s community—an existential study of agency within constraint. Medieval monastic life reimagined as a feminist parable of creation, solitude, and visionary leadership. Philosophical focus: Meliorism, the work of care, and the imagination of better worlds within the constraints of necessity — what it means to “find delight in dark times.”
• The History of Love (2005), Forest Dark (2017) by Nicole Krauss
  Krauss brings a metaphysical sensibility to questions of love, art, and transcendence—often through a quasi-Kabbalistic lens.
• Oryx and Crake (2003) and The Year of the Flood (2009) by Margaret Atwood 
• The Auburn Conference by Tom Piazza
• Culpability by Bruce Holsinger

**Possible authors,  for individual reports:

• Michael Chabon

• Jennifer Egan

• Richard Ford

• Jonathan Franzen

• Barbara Kingsolver

• Rachel Kushner

• Ann Patchett

• Richard Powers

• Marilyn Robinson

• Philip Roth

• Tom Piazza

• Your suggestions...

I asked ChatGPT to draft a story combining the voices and themes of Richard Ford and Richard Powers, narrated by Frank Bascombe…

Culpability

Set at a summer rental on the Chesapeake Bay, a riveting family drama about moral responsibility in the age of artificial intelligence, from the bestselling author of the “wise and addictive” (New York Times) The Gifted School.

When the Cassidy-Shaws’ autonomous minivan collides with an oncoming car, seventeen-year-old Charlie is in the driver’s seat, with his father, Noah, riding shotgun. In the back seat, tweens Alice and Izzy are on their phones, while their mother, Lorelei, a world leader in the field of artificial intelligence, is absorbed in her work. Yet each family member harbors a secret that implicates them in the accident.

During a weeklong recuperation on the Chesapeake Bay, the family confronts the excruciating moral dilemmas triggered by the crash. Noah tries to hold the family together as a seemingly routine police investigation jeopardizes Charlie’s future. Alice and Izzy turn strangely furtive. And Lorelei’s odd behavior tugs at Noah’s suspicions that there is a darker truth behind the incident—suspicions heightened by the sudden intrusion of Daniel Monet, a tech mogul whose mysterious history with Lorelei hints at betrayal. When Charlie falls for Monet’s teenaged daughter, the stakes are raised even higher in this propulsive family drama that is also a fascinating exploration of the moral responsibility and ethical consequences of AI.

Culpability explores a world newly shaped by chatbots, autonomous cars, drones, and other nonhuman forces in ways that are thrilling, challenging, and unimaginably provocative. g'r

The Auburn Conference by Tom Piazza

This is delightful. And so is Tom's latest book about his friendship with John Prine, late  in John's life. Met him at the southern festival of books this past October. 

It is 1883, and America is at a crossroads. At a tiny college in Upstate New York, an idealistic young professor has managed to convince Mark Twain, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Confederate memoirist Forrest Taylor, and romance novelist Lucy Comstock to participate in the first (and last) Auburn Writers' Conference for a public discussion about the future of the nation. By turns brilliantly comic and startlingly prescient, The Auburn Conference vibrates with questions as alive and urgent today as they were in 1883—the chronic American conundrums of race, class, and gender, and the fate of the democratic ideal.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/63920580-the-auburn-conference

 

The best fiction audiobooks of 2025

Selected by the editors at @audiofilemagazine, who reviewed 2000+ audiobooks this year.

https://fivebooks.com/best-books/the-best-fiction-audiobooks-of-2025-audiofile-editors/

America - hope we find it!

 

"Let us be lovers, we'll marry our fortunes together"
"I've got some real estate here in my bag"
So we bought a pack of cigarettes and Mrs. Wagner pies
And we walked off to look for America

"Kathy, " I said as we boarded a Greyhound in Pittsburgh
"Michigan seems like a dream to me now"
It took me four days to hitchhike from Saginaw
I've gone to look for America

Laughing on the bus
Playing games with the faces
She said the man in the gabardine suit was a spy
I said, "Be careful, his bowtie is really a camera"

"Toss me a cigarette, I think there's one in my raincoat"
"We smoked the last one an hour ago"
So I looked at the scenery, she read her magazine
And the moon rose over an open field

"Kathy, I'm lost, " I said, though I knew she was sleeping
I'm empty and aching and I don't know why
Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike
They've all come to look for America
All come to look for America
All come to look for America
Source: LyricFind
Songwriters: Paul Simon
America lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC

A better American dream

If there is an America on the other side of this, it will have to be a different country, a better one, based not on the restoration of hopes that people my age once had, but on a broader sense of the future, a better American dream…
Timothy Snyder

https://www.threads.com/@thetimothysnyder/post/DRqA1GLEr34?xmt=AQF0wuoS99qC1fBBb4P4qseWehZtehP0KB63sCbHIByzDCJBopXW9QXYFzbeaC46YBEEoV4P&slof=1

I asked ChatGPT what to read next, after Ford and Powers…

…contemporary American writers who are working the same fault lines — mortality, technology, tenderness, disillusionment, moral responsibility, grace under pressure — but each in their own register.

---

If you're coming off Richard Powers' Playground

Powers is playing the long game of consciousness, intelligence, agency, responsibility — all with that mix of lyric wonder and cold technological dread. Here are contemporary American writers who stand in that same wind.

1. Ted Chiang — Exhalation

Precise, humane, skeptical, and quietly luminous. Chiang circles the same big questions: what counts as mind, what counts as experience, and how fragile our moral frameworks become when we build thinking systems. A perfect philosophical counterpoint to Playground.

2. Karen Joy Fowler — We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

Not about AI, but absolutely about intelligence, empathy, otherness, and the moral knots Powers loves. It's smart, daring, and emotionally devastating in the same "so what does this say about us?" way.

3. Colson Whitehead — The Intuitionist and The Nickel Boys

Whitehead shares Powers' appetite for big conceptual frameworks blended with moral inquiry. The Intuitionist is more speculative; Nickel Boys is stark realism, but both probe systems and souls with Powers-like intensity.

4. Jeff VanderMeer — Hummingbird Salamander

Eco-terror, surveillance, intelligence (human and non-human), and the sense that the future is collapsing into us. VanderMeer is more surreal than Powers, but they share a prophetic tone.

5. Lydia Millet — A Children's Bible and Dinosaurs

Millet is one of the quiet powerhouses of contemporary American fiction: ecological consciousness, moral bewilderment, and a strange, steady hope. A Children's Bible especially echoes Powers' urgency.

6. Don DeLillo — Zero K

DeLillo stripped to the bone. Mortality, technology, the human impulse to transcend limits. Stoic, cold, philosophical — very much in Powers' orbit.

7. Kim Stanley Robinson — The Ministry for the Future

Nonfiction in spirit, fiction in form. Clear-eyed, forward-thinking, ethically driven. Robinson has the same "wake up; time is short" energy, but channeled through global systems rather than intimate relationships.

---

If you're coming off Richard Ford's Be Mine

Be Mine is late-style Ford: mortality, regret, tenderness, the lurch of fatherhood, the humor that barely keeps us from breaking. If you want contemporary American voices who can hit those same human notes without sentimentality, here they are.

1. Kent Haruf — Our Souls at Night

Spare, honest, unsugared. Haruf writes with a Ford-like respect for ordinary lives, aging bodies, and the long shadow of past choices.

2. Elizabeth Strout — Olive, Again and Lucy by the Sea

Strout is as clear-eyed and unsentimental as Ford, with the same mixture of rue, wisdom, and earned tenderness. She may be the closest living cousin to Ford's emotional register.

3. Andre Dubus III — Townie and Gone So Long

Dubus carries grief, fatherhood, violence, and compassion with the same raw directness. He writes the ache of American life with almost Fordian clarity.

4. Stewart O'Nan — Emily, Alone and Wish You Were Here

O'Nan is criminally under-read: domestic life, aging, family, loss — all handled with patient, unsentimental grace. He has Ford's attentiveness but less irony.

5. Ann Patchett — The Dutch House and Tom Lake

Patchett writes about family, aging, and forgiveness with a quiet moral intelligence. Tom Lake in particular has the same elegiac warmth as parts of Be Mine.

6. Jonathan Franzen — Crossroads

Franzen can be prickly, but he's wrestling with the same American tensions Ford has always confronted: duty, self-delusion, yearning, the bruises family leaves behind.

7. Marilynne Robinson — Home and Lila

Not Ford's tone, but Ford's depth. Robinson writes aging, regret, fatherhood, and grace with a steady, luminous seriousness that pairs beautifully with Ford's long walk through American loneliness.

8. Ron Rash — The Caretaker

Grief, responsibility, rural America, moral ambiguity — Rash's sensibility often feels like Ford's distilled through Appalachian clarity.

---

If you want one from each list — the closest kin to Powers and to Ford

Closest to Powers:

Ted Chiang, Exhalation.

Lean, precise, humane, and philosophically bracing.

Closest to Ford:

Elizabeth Strout, Lucy by the Sea,

or

Stewart O'Nan, Emily, Alone.

Both are honest, unsparing, and tender in the way Ford, at his best, has always been.

Ford’s Frank on Thanksgiving

“Most of our students are functionally illiterate”

Not MALA students, though. Right?

"…Most of our students are functionally illiterate. This is not a joke. By "functionally illiterate" I mean "unable to read and comprehend adult novels by people like Barbara Kingsolver, Colson Whitehead, and Richard Powers." I picked those three authors because they are all recent Pulitzer Prize winners, an objective standard of "serious adult novel." Furthermore, I've read them all and can testify that they are brilliant, captivating writers; we're not talking about Finnegans Wake here. But at the same time they aren't YA, romantasy, or Harry Potter either.

I'm not saying our students just prefer genre books or graphic novels or whatever. No, our average graduate literally could not read a serious adult novel cover-to-cover and understand what they read. They just couldn't do it. They don't have the desire to try, the vocabulary to grasp what they read, and most certainly not the attention span to finish. For them to sit down and try to read a book like The Overstory might as well be me attempting an Iron Man triathlon: much suffering with zero chance of success.

Students are not absolutely illiterate in the sense of being unable to sound out any words whatsoever. Reading bores them, though. They are impatient to get through whatever burden of reading they have to, and move their eyes over the words just to get it done. They're like me clicking through a mandatory online HR training. Students get exam questions wrong simply because they didn't even take the time to read the question properly. Reading anything more than a menu is a chore and to be avoided..."

https://open.substack.com/pub/hilariusbookbinder/p/the-average-college-student-today?selection=06f1e586-9dbc-48df-9f81-a138b9dc4b64&r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

The Loved Ones

I read this in a secular spirit, whatever Wendell's intentions: the permanent world is this one, but inverted. As Emerson said: "there is no other world." But there are other ways to take it. And my dear departed are indeed present, ever more-so as time goes by. And I am ever less absent. I begin to inhabit what Richard Ford calls the Permanent Period.

The Cambridge Companion to Twenty-First Century American Fiction

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/cambridge-companion-to-twentyfirst-century-american-fiction/75A9A01A8126F242370382DCA3E5D086

NYTimes: Readers Pick Their 100 Best Books of the 21st Century

When the Book Review published a list of the 100 best books of the century, we knew we'd hear from readers who were incensed or gutted or driven wild by grief. How could So-and-So's book not make the cut?

One of the best things about working in books is just this: the passion of our constituency. No way would we deprive readers of the chance to vote for their own list and make their voices heard.

And so you have. There's some overlap between your list and ours — we agreed on 39 books. As for the 61 new entries here, what stands out most is that they're the books that captured cultural moments and sparked lively literary conversations. They're also great. Enjoy!

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/books/reader-best-books-21st-century.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Best historical fiction set in the south

"The paradox is that, although it's obviously still quite segregated, and there is a huge suspicion on either side, these parallel worlds are tightly braided."

https://fivebooks.com/best-books/best-historical-fiction-novels-set-american-south-xan-brooks/

The underfed hunger for quiet, sustained attention

David Foster Wallace on why reading feels so hard:

https://www.threads.com/@alexandbooks_/post/DQ8HxtMANJn?xmt=AQF0BPSe1nPtp36GfUST5AHrPy_AFQuRDRQFjVIxh8daHk7f8vNoXM9oJq1oiz5IpHupfSY&slof=1

Summer ‘24

"Every new novel by Cusk is a major literary event, although her experiments with form—and her unpicking of what she has previously called the "underpinnings" of narrative—are often initially received with bafflement"

https://fivebooks.com/best-books/notable-new-novels-of-summer-2024-cal-flyn/

Window or painting

"You can consider whether a novel is like a window you look through to see the people beyond on the other side, or whether the novel is like a painting you just look at."

https://fivebooks.com/best-books/contemporary-fiction-robert-eaglestone/

Powers on music & mortality

"The use of music is to remind us how short a time we have a body."

If you love music, slake your soul on this: https://www.themarginalian.org/2022/10/15/richard-powers-music/

We’re all novelists

The Dogged, Irrational Persistence of Literary Fiction

Reports of its death are greatly exaggerated.

"… The worst possible thing those of us who care about literature can do is sell it short and put some end date to it. The future is always being written at every moment, and hope and faith and even an irrational belief in literature's primacy in and importance to the human prospect is the cure for despair. All of the books I mention in this essay survived to see fame and recognition and a kind of permanence against long odds.

Henry James, who had some career setbacks of his own, put it best: "We work in the dark — we do what we can — we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art."

Or as the Mets pitcher Tug McGraw phrased it a bit more economically: "Ya gotta believe!""

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/20/opinion/case-for-literary-fiction.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Richard Powers on our future history

Oh this is so beautiful and so moving and so urgently true: Richard Powers on how to rewrite our future history, as a planet and as a people

https://www.themarginalian.org/2023/01/05/richard-powers-thea/

Booker in the ‘00s

The 2000s was a decade of changes and innovations for the Booker Prize: its status meant it could afford to take risks with its format. Most notably, this was the time when longlists were first revealed publicly, initially including as many novels as the judges saw fit to include.

https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/features/the-booker-prize-in-the-noughties-10-novels-that-are-well-worth-revisiting

the cure for despair

"The worst possible thing those of us who care about literature can do is sell it short and put some end date to it," writes Gerald Howard, a retired book editor. "An irrational belief in literature's primacy in and importance to the human prospect is the cure for despair."

https://www.threads.com/@nytopinion/post/DQC0b3TCEk6?xmt=AQF0Rd9Xhejf0abJsKcoZNWanBVaolj61s5hquBu5pCVgg&slof=1

Descending to a post-literate culture

Those who most need to grasp this message will find it too long. They won't read it.

"…For centuries, almost all educated and intelligent people have believed that literature and learning are among the highest purposes and deepest consolations of human existence.
The classics have been preserved over the centuries because they contain, in Matthew Arnold's famous phrase, "the best that has been thought and said".

The greatest novels and poems enrich our sense of the human experience by imaginatively putting us inside other minds and taking us to other times and other places. By reading non-fiction — science, history, philosophy, travel writing — we become deeply acquainted with our place in the extraordinary and complicated world we are privileged to inhabit.

Smartphones are robbing of us of these consolations.

The epidemic of anxiety, depression and purposelessness afflicting young people in the twenty-first century is often linked to the isolation and negative social comparison fostered by smartphones.

It is also a direct product of the pointlessness, fragmentation and triviality of the culture of the screen which is wholly unequipped to speak to the deep human needs for curiosity, narrative…"

https://open.substack.com/pub/jmarriott/p/the-dawn-of-the-post-literate-society-aa1?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

Dark Academia: A Starter Pack

The genre — characterized by Gothic intrigue and a liberal arts aesthetic — grew out of Donna Tartt's cult favorite campus novel, "The Secret History." Here's where to start.

Dark academia exploded like a firework from a single book: Donna Tartt's 1992 debut "The Secret History," a classic campus novel with the murky atmosphere of the Gothic tradition. When it became clear that a follow-up would not be swiftly forthcoming, a whole array of books — plus a thriving digital subculture (R.I.P. peak Tumblr) — appeared in Tartt's wake, striving to recapture the magic of reading "The Secret History" for the first time.

Dark academia is neatly summed up in the first chapter of its founding text, when the protagonist identifies his fatal flaw as "a morbid longing for the picturesque." Put those three elements — morbidness, longing, the picturesque — in a jar, shake 'em and dump the contents into a school setting: That's dark academia. Characters in chunky cardigans contemplating murder in cold, musty archives. Intimidating cliques of hot people in secret societies. Queer longing sublimated into Latin translation (and vice versa). Here, across genres and age ranges, are some of Tartt's worthiest successors...

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/08/books/dark-academia-books.html?smid=em-share

2025 National Book Award finalists

Today, the National Book Foundation announced the finalists in Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Translated Literature, and Young People's Literature for the 2025 National Book Awards.

https://lithub.com/here-are-the-2025-national-book-awards-finalists/

Booker

Earlier this week, we announced the Booker Prize 2025 shortlist during our wonderful event at the Southbank Centre. Find out more about this year's shortlist ⤵️

https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/prize-years/2025

September’s best

Ian McEwan's What We Can Know, Arundhati Roy's Mother Mary Comes to Me, Kiran Desai's The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, and Stephen Greenblatt's Dark Renaissance all feature among September's best reviewed books.

https://bookmarks.reviews/the-best-reviewed-books-of-the-month-9-26-2025/

Booker shortlist

"As a Booker prize judge I helped whittle 153 books down to a shortlist of six. Here's why you should read them."

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/sep/23/booker-prize-judge-shortlist-six

Flashlight to Katabasis: 18 of the best books of the year so far

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20250619-the-best-books-of-2025

Booker prize finalists ‘25

Judges' blurbs
https://www.threads.com/@thebookerprizes/post/DO_STW-j3Ri?xmt=AQF0zfZH6E3ZmATMIMNJT2uLCy4d_Gy1ylDtIxLDvf0v9Q&slof=1

The Books We Loved This Summer

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/18/books/summer-reading-bucket-list.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

AI’s suggestions: best 21st century American philosophical novels so far

https://chatgpt.com/share/68cc0d81-e64c-8007-b336-13b10e001dee

First person

"The voice of the first person allows a great freedom. It can touch on reportage, natural history, science, fiction, poetry, myth. It can embrace such a wide variety of strategies."

https://fivebooks.com/best-books/william-fiennes-on-first-person-narratives/

Fewer People Are Reading for Fun, Study Finds

From 2003 to 2023, the share of Americans who read for pleasure fell 40 percent, a sharp decline that is part of a continuing downward trend.

...People may draw particular benefits from thinking deeply about what they read and talking about it with others.

It is not the case that “I can sit you down and give you a Jane Austen novel, you read it, and you come out with better mental health,” said James Carney, an associate professor at the London Interdisciplinary School and the lead author of a 2022 study on reading and mental health.

But discussing and reflecting on fiction — as opposed to just reading it — was linked to better mental health and social capabilities, including the ability to perceive nuances in interpersonal relationships, said Dr. Carney, who was not involved in the new study. Engaging with many forms of nonfiction would probably have similar benefits, he said.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/20/well/reading-pleasure-decline-study.html?smid=em-share

BBC Radio 4 - Take Four Books, Rachel Kushner

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002h9n8

31 Novels Coming This Summer

Taylor Jenkins Reid heads to space, Megan Abbott climbs a pyramid (scheme) and Gary Shteyngart channels a 10-year-old. Plus queer vampires, a professor in hell and an actress's revenge.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/22/books/review/new-fiction-books-summer-2025.html?smid=em-share

Bad news for democracies

From The New York Times: Thinking Is Becoming a Luxury Good That’s bad news for our democracies.

...An electorate that has lost the capacity for long-form thought will be more tribal, less rational, largely uninterested in facts or even matters of historical record, moved more by vibes than cogent argument and open to fantastical ideas and bizarre conspiracy theories. If that sounds familiar, it may be a sign of how far down this path the West has already traveled...

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/28/opinion/smartphones-literacy-inequality-democracy.html?smid=em-share

Reports of the death of literature are greatly exaggerated

 Ann Patchett responds to David Brooks:

 

Ann also recommends:

 

The living word

Reports of the death of literature, David Brooks, are greatly exaggerated.

Ann Patchett-
https://youtu.be/tPrH7kqGKCY

“dehumanizing effect on our culture”

I'm old enough to remember when novelists were big-time. When I was in college in the 1980s, new novels from Philip Roth, Toni Morrison, Saul Bellow, John Updike, Alice Walker and others were cultural events. There were reviews and counter-reviews and arguments about the reviews.

It's not just my nostalgia that's inventing this. In the mid- to late 20th century, literary fiction attracted huge audiences. If you look at the Publisher's Weekly list of best-selling novels of 1962, you find works by Katherine Anne Porter, Herman Wouk and J.D. Salinger. The next year you find books by Mary McCarthy and John O'Hara. From a recent Substack essay called "The Cultural Decline of Literary Fiction" by Owen Yingling, I learned that E.L. Doctorow's "Ragtime" was the best-selling book of 1974, Roth's "Portnoy's Complaint" was the best-selling book of 1969, Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita" was No. 3 in 1958 and Boris Pasternak's "Doctor Zhivago" was No. 1.

Today it's largely Colleen Hoover and fantasy novels and genre fiction. The National Endowment for the Arts has been surveying people for decades, and the number who even claim to read literature has been declining steadily since 1982. Yingling reports that no work of literary fiction has been on the Publisher's Weekly yearly Top 10 best-selling list since 2001. I have no problem with genre and popular books, but where is today's F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, George Eliot, Jane Austen or David Foster Wallace?

I'm not saying novels are worse now (I wouldn't know how to measure such a thing). I am saying that literature plays a much smaller role in our national life, and this has a dehumanizing effect on our culture. There used to be a sense, inherited from the Romantic era, that novelists and artists served as consciences of the nation, as sages and prophets, who could stand apart and tell us who we are. As the sociologist C. Wright Mills once put it, "The independent artist and intellectual are among the few remaining personalities equipped to resist and to fight the stereotyping and consequent death of genuinely lively things."

…

David Brooks 

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/10/opinion/literature-books-novelists.html?smid=threads-nytopinion&smtyp=cur

NPR fic pics

After long days focused on the facts, our newsroom reads a lot of fiction at home. We asked our NPR colleagues what they've enjoyed reading so far this year, and these are the titles they shared…

https://www.npr.org/2025/06/25/nx-s1-5356144/fiction-books-summer-2025?utm_source=threads.net&utm_campaign=npr&utm_medium=social&utm_term=nprnews

Why Did the Novel-Reading Man Disappear?

Some of us are still here, though we may be culturally irrelevant. So much the worse for the culture.

Men are leaving fiction reading behind. Some people want to change that.

...One real challenge at hand is a frenzied attention economy competing for everyone's time, not just men's. To present the sorry state of the male reader as having solely to do with the gendered quality of contemporary fiction misses a screen-based culture that presents nearly unlimited forms of entertainment.

"Our competition isn't other publishers," said Sean Manning, the publisher of Simon & Schuster. "It's social media, gaming, streaming. All these other things that are vying for people's time, attention and financial resources."

Asked whether the publishing industry needed straight men to read more fiction as a purely economic matter, Mr. Manning focused instead on the social benefits of reading.

"It's a problem if anyone isn't taking advantage of an incredible artistic medium," he said. "It's hurtful not to be well-rounded."
...
nyt

The Overstory

Richard Powers' powerful ode to the natural world was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2018. Discover our Monthly Spotlight for May.

https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/features/monthly-spotlight-the-overstory-by-richard-powers

31 Novels Coming This Summer

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/22/books/review/new-fiction-books-summer-2025.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Music embodied

"The use of music is to remind us how short a time we have a body."

Richard Powers, at his best, on the power of music: https://www.themarginalian.org/2022/10/15/richard-powers-music/

“An Outlook Recognizably Ours”

What is the first truly "contemporary" American novel, the book that regardless of its age still feels decidedly current in its tone and sensibilities? A swarm of candidates comes to mind (many of them in the LOA series): the psychologically dense, morally ambivalent fiction of Kate Chopin; the urbane and ironic surrealism of Jane Bowles; Ann Petry's prescient dissections of race in America. But one of the strongest claims comes from Walker Percy, the Louisiana-born doctor-turned-author whose 1961 masterpiece, The Moviegoer, was published sixty-four years ago this May.

Paul Elie, who edited the LOA edition of Percy'sThe Moviegoer & Other Novels 1961–1971, writes in a 2019 New Yorker article:

With its slack and offhand protagonist, its present-tense narration, its effortless mix of informal speech, images from popular culture, and frank ruminations on the meaning of life,The Moviegoer is, in my estimation, the first work of what we call contemporary American fiction, the earliest novel to render a set of circumstances and an outlook that still feel recognizably ours.

Immersing readers in the mind and muddle of Binx Bolling, a New Orleans stockbroker who spends his days cavorting with secretaries and taking refuge in the cinema, The Moviegoer is barely a novel in the traditional sense. Loose, discursive, psychological without being psychoanalytical, Percy's prose is pitch-perfect, conjuring a voice you can't get out of your head.

Consider a few of Binx's more memorable observations, as astute and relatable today as they may have seemed taboo and troublingly frank in the early '60s:

I have discovered that most people have no one to talk to, no one, that is, who really wants to listen. When it does at last dawn on a man that you really want to hear about his business, the look that comes over his face is something to see.

Catching the leading wave of a loneliness epidemic washing over the country, Percy's narrator treats alienation and malaise as a doctor might search for telling symptoms in an ailing body:

For some time now the impression has been growing upon me that everyone is dead. It happens when I speak to people. In the middle of a sentence it will come over me: yes, beyond a doubt this is death. There is little to do but groan and make an excuse and slip away as quickly as one can.

Despite its title, The Moviegoer is less about watching movies than the ways in which movies and movie logic have come to feel, in an atomized age, more real than life itself (Binx himself refers to the process of "certification," where the appearance of a place or person in a film confers specificity upon it, a sense of actually existing in the world).

Emerging from a less media-saturated era than our own IP-soaked present, Percy's novel deftly captures the feeling of being adrift in a sea of images, dreams, and abstractions—our own and others'—in which profound musings about the nature of life and faith stand on equal footing with the mundane and workaday. The effect, strangely enough, is liberating: "I had discovered that a person does not have to be this or be that or be anything, not even oneself," reports Binx. "One is free."

Refuge

"Novels are the Socratic dialogues of our time. And this free form has become the refuge of common sense in its flight from pedantry."
— Friedrich Schlegel, Critical Fragments

Is the Next Great American Novel Being Published on Substack?

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/is-the-next-great-american-novel-being-published-on-substack

https://itunes.apple.com/app/apple-store/id1081530898?pt=45076&ct=App%20Share&mt=8

Richard Powers

Richard Powers often explores the intersection between technology and the natural world. Here's our guide to his ever-expanding list of powerful novels ⤵️

https://thebookerprizes.pulse.ly/qzschc58hn

Percival Everett’s “James” Wins a Pulitzer

A year ago, Percival Everett published his 24th novel, "James," and it became a literary phenomenon. This week, it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Revisit a conversation with the novelist just after the book was released.

https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/the-new-yorker-radio-hour/percival-everetts-james-wins-a-pulitzer?utm_source=threads&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=tny&utm_social-type=owned

James, by Percival Everett

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DJXVf8GyfEA/?igsh=bDU0bTVkcG91eW9v

Contemporary American Literary Critics

According to Scarlett…

https://chatgpt.com/share/681bde08-b63c-8007-9c09-62fe173a596a

Playground by Richard Powers review – an electrifyingly beautiful tale of tech and the ocean | Fiction | The Guardian

Richard Powers's 2018 Pulitzer-winning book The Overstory was one of the landmark novels of the past decade. Grounded in science and animist thought, it was a glorious ode to the wondrousness of trees. Bewilderment (2021) interleaved private loss and climate collapse to recount the grief-soaked journey of an astrobiologist and his neurodivergent son. Both these novels were set in the US. In Playground, his cerebral, Booker-longlisted new novel, Powers swivels part of his attention to French Polynesia, taking on neo-colonialism, artificial intelligence and oceanography...

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/sep/29/playground-richard-powers-review-ai-ocean