When a new publisher dedicated to finding “overlooked” male writers was announced last month, the news should have gone off like a hand grenade in the discourse. The “where are all the male novelists?” debate has been raging for years. Back in 2020, Times columnist James Marriott had to deactivate his Twitter account for a fortnight, due to a huge online backlash to a piece he wrote about the apparent absence of young male novelists in modern British literature. A steady supply of takes and counter-takes have rolled across social media timelines ever since. This March, a piece in Compact about white male novelists in particular did the rounds, largely thanks to one striking stat: “not a single white American man born after 1984 has published a work of literary fiction in The New Yorker”.
Read Full Article »
