Is it the year of the man?
I still remember seeing, last year, the front page of The New York Times after Donald Trump’s election: “AMERICA HIRES A STRONGMAN.” Since then, it feels like the country has increasingly adopted power, strength and stubbornness as virtues, neglecting empathy, logic and sensitivity. It’s been distilled into the literary world, as writers bemoan the loss of the ‘male author,’ while other writers argue that’s not the case, or that male writers need to step it up anyway. I traveled to New York, then Philadelphia, to interview two authors whose books investigated a more relaxed methodology of manhood, and it was fun, in both instances, to be two men chatting about literary men. “Two men talking about masculinity—you instinctively laugh at that,” Andrew Lipstein told me.
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