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

Coming to MTSU, Spring ‘26–

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

(For more info: phil.oliver@mtsu.edu)

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 

**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

• Your suggestions...

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

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/