> Books like Pride and Prejudice, War and Peace, The Brothers Karamazov, etc still sell many thousands of copies every year, more than even big hits in contemporary literary fiction.

I think the author skips past the real answer right here. The old books haven’t gone away. Even if we assume there are good new books, they have to compete with the supply of existing books, which grows without bound - unlike the time and attention of consumers.

Every form of media has this problem. A human lifetime can only consume so many books, so many films, so many hours of music. A new movie comes out: what are the odds of it being more worth your while than one on the existing IMDb Top 1000? Decreasing.

Books are no different. What are the odds that something new is going to displace something existing off the shortlist of greats that you already don’t have time to read?

I think the first half of the article is the strongest, most plausible part. The argument:

Economic opportunities for professional writers have declined dramatically. The two crucial pathways were mentioned for novel writers to support themselves economically: (1) magazine writing and (2) academia. In the first case, magazine circulation has suffered because advertisers left for the internet, and in the second case, academic job oportunities have declined because of governmental cutbacks to universities, especially in the humanities.

The second half of the article argues that authors have made a tradeoff, deciding to maximize critical praise instead of book sales, thereby turning off general audiences who don't share the obscure and trendy tastes of the critics.

This argument felt weak. As far as I can tell, there's no real explanation of how it supposedly came about. Even the article author seems to admit there are holes in the argument: "There are still some important open questions: the exact role of the critics in moving authors away from popular taste." Indeed.

I'm personally a fan of contemporary literary fiction. My own suspicion is that the problem in literature is the same as the problem in music and movies: corporate consolidation and the ascendancy of data-mongering penny-pinchers with no taste except for profit maximization. Their preference in all the arts is derivative dreck that's easily marketed, ideally with a built-in audience and reproducible, with the goal of spawning an endless series based in the same "universe." The leaders of the industry don't want to take chances on new artists, unless they can guarantee a massive hit.

I love how this article cuts right through a lot of bad trite explanations for literary fiction’s decline that have been pushed by its adherents (“the internet made people stupid”) to really try and analyze the supply side and demand side factors of why not many people buy contemporary literary fiction anymore.

His point that people still read challenging literary fiction, just by dead people, also seems an important one (see HN’s recent discussions of reading Ulysses) and rather damning for contemporary literary novelists. So is the point that many good writers who wanted to actually earn a living that way ended up writing for prestige TV in the 2000s instead.

I do wish he’d discussed more why Sally Rooney seems to be the exception, in terms of commercial success. What is it about her books that’s different? What did she do (or avoid doing) to appeal to a wide readership?

Finally, he seems to draw a pretty hard boundary between literary and “genre” fiction that I’m not sure always exists. Ursula Le Guin is a good counterexample here.

> What made the fiction literary was it spoke the language of memory, where the reader inhabited the experience of the characters, and this changed how readers experienced the world after. > > — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36882341

People don't turn to books for this sort of experience anymore. People are not "literary minded". For the average person, interpolating another person's experience against their own through the written word is counterintuitive if not impossible and detached.

It takes a literary mind to feel through text. Electronic media of all sorts, aside from long form text displayed electronically is just that; electrifying.

I think that the quote I pulled from motohagiography applies to all writing and when we go further:

> Writing on the internet is participatory, impersonal, performative, and anti-intimate.

The cultural decline of all writing becomes more obvious.

Anyone who cares about this sort of stuff needs to understand that their brain is rewired but their spirit still craves the same old stuff that it sought out for when the mind could stomach total absorption in a dry block of pulp.

People seem to forget that many of the books we find to be "literary" today were 1800s smut. These were commercial successes in their time, and weren't considered "highbrow," that was just what people read. Dismissing all of the books people read today as "genre" and not literary is the problem.

I'm a bit of an old timer so I'll throw something out there. Entertainment used to be rare. Albums used to cost $20 back when that used to be a lot of money. TV was 13 channels, and that was if you had cable. People had to read because there was no other option. Now there's absolutely unlimited free/cheap entertainment and literary fiction is highly politicized because of critics. There's no such thing as a controversial novel that gets any mention by anyone post 2008.

The last contemporary literary novel I read was Michel Houellebecq's "Submission" and I read it only because it was controversial, extremely well written and Hourllebecq writes novels that appeal to middle aged men. I'm always up for a novel like that, but it seems impossible to find these days.

This was a great read!

I think the analysis of the declining pipeline is spot on. Up until around 2016 or so, I was on track to try my hand at the world of literary fiction—I had participated in several circles in college, sat on the review board of a lit mag, joined a group of writers post graduation, all just to eventually...set it aside.

I always had a "day job" during this time, but other than that I was single and had few responsibilities. This made holding a typical nine to five and actually getting some writing done somewhat tenable.

As my sphere of responsibility expanded (relationships, etc) this quickly became untenable. There's only so much time in a day, unfortunately, and as we continue along a career path, we're incentivized to invest ever increasing amounts of time into that, rather than a far-from-lucrative gamble on literary pursuits.

When you're able to actually make money on your literary work, it establishes a virtuous circle. Writing more makes you a better writer and writing more gets you paid (allowing you to support those other aspects of your life). Contrast this with the modern experience of desperately trying to carve out whatever time you can to make at least a brief writing session happen, amidst being exhausted already by the other demands on your time (your non-writing job being a big one).

From the critical side, I think the situation is pretty much analogous to that of contemporary art. The common person would meet most experimental literary works with a quizzical look, just as they meet most contemporary and conceptual art with the a quizzical look. Artists, however, have had better success with this because their objects are not generally mass produced. This has allowed the critical narrowing and distance from the common taste to be buoyed up economically by natural scarcity and the concomitant transformation of the object into a value-holding asset. That can never happen with literature, which is definitionally reproduced at scale.

That’s the old standby argument, and it may be right. I can’t really read John Barth or George Saunders the way I can read Richard Russo or Lionel Shriver or Kurt Vonnegut or Michael Chabon or Barbara Kingsolver. For me the experimental writers are very unpleasant to actually read. David Foster Wallace is just inside that frontier for me, and I can enjoy IJ. Bernard Malamud was pretty dark but I could hang in. But Paul Auster … I love what nonfiction writing I’ve seen, but the New York trilogy is so dark and Spartan it makes Joy Division look like disco.

Nitpick: I finally gave up on Pynchon, but is he really postmodern??

I really enjoyed this article but the claim of no literary fiction making the Publishers Weekly yearly top 10 lists since 2001 isn't really true:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publishers_Weekly_list_of_best...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publishers_Weekly_list_of_best...

It is true that there isn't that much literary stuff that breaks through, and the stuff that does is usually somewhat crossover (e.g., All the Light We Cannot See in 2015 or Song of Achilles in 2021) but it exists. These two books are shelved under literary codes (though also historical). Song of Achilles in particular is beautifully written and a personal favorite of mine, at least among books published in recent years.

Then there are other works like Little Fires Everywhere and The Midnight Library that I might not consider super literary but nonetheless are also often considered so by book shops or libraries (e.g., https://lightsailed.com/catalog/book/the-midnight-library-a-... the lit fic code is FIC019000).

I was really surprised that Ferrante's Neapolitan series, the best example (I would have thought) of recent work with both high literary acclaim and popular appeal, did not actually make the top 10 list for any year.

Affording someone status for being someone with an opinion on cultural artifact X no longer exists. No one is impressed, there's too many people with thoughtful opinions on important books doing absolutely nothing valuable in society.

This is a really good analysis article. Thank you for posting it. I think the critic vs consumer decoupling rings true to me, and this is obviously the worst economy to exist in as a "struggling" anything.

There are a lot of industries that are struggling right now to figure out how to re-monetize independent from large corporations (like magazines/ publishers/ movies/ etc) because those corporations are cutting out anyone not already hugely profitable.

I feel like whatever solution we eventually land on to 'democratize' media funding will also be a good solution to our FOSS funding problem.

I wonder if the same thing is happening in genres like sci-fi. These trends sound familiar: Publishing books to appeal to critics, more prestige fiction published, less published white male authors, less published books on best seller lists (by published I mean published by a professional publishing firm). I am not sure that big authors of the 80's and 90's such as Iain Banks, Neil Stevenson, Peter F Hamilton would get published now days. I've noticed the big sci-fi awards seems to have a lot more books with social justice themes than I remember. I find I don't like a lot of the newly published sci-fi. I'm reading a lot more self published books amd, at least judging by best seller lists on amazon, so are a lot of other people. It is a pity, I think professionally published books are generally better written, perhaps it is the pipeline of authors writing about themes I like being broken?

I read books to have fun, and litfic isn't really fun for me. I absolutely acknowledge that I read schlock -- mostly progression fantasy these days -- because it's immediately fun and engaging to me. If I wanna think harder, I read about politics and current events, or work on side projects, or maybe play a strategy or puzzle game.

I don't see it. For one thing, the classic creative pieces of literary fiction continue to sell and be read (and we don't even know how many other people read pirated or freely available copies of them every day), while more new fiction than ever in human history is being published constantly.

About the vast majority of that new fiction, we really have no easy way to tell which of it will one day be considered literary fiction too. Many of the books and other pieces of creative fiction we consider "greats" and literary today, were at some point just, fiction. Tehir future reputation wasn't yet known.

Not quite literary fiction, but Shakespeare's plays were their era's versions of Hollywood films for the masses, but look at them now. Similar applies to many books.

Science fiction, and related or subgenres like sci-fantasy and sci-horror is just much better these days than literary fiction. The literary snobs won't admit that One Hundred Years of Solitude (which I read years ago and liked) could have been a scifi novel placed not in historical south/central america but instead on a set of planets orbiting a star 100 light years from here. If it had, they wouldn't consider it 'real literature'.

Science fiction is more fun to read, and often more creative - authors aren't limited to the sociopolitical realities of 18th century South America, they can invent whatever systems they like, and then the question is whether their world-building skills are good enough to avoid obvious inconsistencies.

Yes, people are still reading - but they're reading Adrian Tchaikovsky, Iain M. Banks, William Gibson, Susanna Clarke and host of others who aren't limited to scenes of 'historical realism' (which to be honest are often distorted pictures of history that were socially acceptable to the publishing houses of their day).

You can still read the classics - Conrad is my favorite late 19th/early 20tth century author - but Lovecraft is just as worth reading.

There are better ways to tell stories now; good story tellers are doing fine.

The only ones left holding the bag are people who wanted specifically to be 'literary fiction writers' because they have some conception of what that is and why it's important to have a story physically printed on paper.

I'll toss two theories into the pool:

The rising tide of anti-intellectualism.

The decline of humanities education in favor of stem education. This has both economic drivers and national security drivers.

Is the author using Drury, Michener, and Morris West to beat up on 2023? I haven't read Colleen Hoover, but I have read the others, and they haven't made my must-reread list.

Honestly, if one takes the best-seller lists of a few arbitrary years, one will find an awful lot of dross.

My own issue with modern literary fiction is the pretension. It’s been shoved in my face from middle school through college. Everyone writing “genre fiction” is not a Real Author.

Writing to be like one of the great writers of the past is completely missing the point. It’s one thing to follow a tradition. It’s another to think that tradition makes you great.

"A good deal of literary criticism serves only to reinforce a caste system which is as old as the intellectual snobbery which nurtured it. No one can be as intellectually slothful as a really smart person.”

— Stephen King

I’ve noticed my reading habits changing too. I used to read a lot of literary fiction in my twenties, but now I mostly go for nonfiction or short-form stuff. It’s not that I think fiction is less important, it just feels harder to make space for slow, quiet stories that don’t offer an immediate payoff.

Maybe it’s not just a cultural decline, but a deeper shift in how we deal with time, attention, and meaning.

My car magazines have all disappeared other than Hot Rod Magazine.

The medium changes. People communicate differently now.

The other day I was thinking about how absurd it seems from today that in the 19th century culturally cherished people wrote poems on the political situation (at least in Central Europe, think 1848, coffeehouse culture etc.), with rhymes, correct syllable count etc. Not just politics, but anything relevant, like love (romanticism) etc. Totally unironically, as a serious form of the social conversation. The closest we may have to that today is hip hop.

Whenever I look at some award list of contemporary "serious" literature it's filled to the brim with variations on "semi-fictional biography of a 20th century human". I have no idea why this is. Why is this the only type of story that is "taken seriously"?

Wtf is “literary fiction?” Sounds like a genre invented by snobs. Same old [people from past generation complaining that x medium art made by the current generation is worse/lacks a soul/etc/etc] that has been happening since the beginning of art. There is a wealth of extremely artful, literary written works being made by young people today. Just like there’s a wealth of extremely artful, boundary pushing music being made by young people today. You’re not gonna run into most of it if you only listen to top 40 radio but that doesn’t mean it’s not there.

Even so, with the “top 40” songs/books/what-have-you, I feel like these things are always framed as “cultural decline” when in fact it’s “cultural change” and you just don’t like the thing it’s changing into currently.

What is "literary fiction"?

Is it possible that the word "literature" just refers to fiction which has had time to accumulate gravitas, in part due to being old?

If that's true, "literature" production will always appear to be in decline ;-)

"Poets lie too much"

What is the goal of fiction? Escapism. What does it matter if its deep or shallow? The deep ones arent entertaining enough?

If you are expecting a character to enlighten you on a new problem, you are being corrupted by lies.

From Nietzsche to Plato, its agreed, fiction corrupts. Using it for anything outside entertainment is horrifying.

If it's true that lit fic started leaving the best seller lists around the early 70s, could that also be due to people finding other media to express themselves? Like experimental music, film, and other fiction genres?

when has litfic ever been relevant to the wider culture? There are exceptions of course but those are remarkable specifically because they are the exception. The average reader has always wanted Peyton Place, not Proust

I had no idea that literary fiction was a genre rather than a generic term for fictional literature until I read this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_fiction

There is a very simple explanation for the decline. The books are garbage that only masochists enjoy and that sadists force children to read in school. The description “Literary fiction may involve a concern with social commentary, political criticism, or reflection on the human condition” is full of antipatterns that are largely the mark of bad literature, since they miss the core purpose of fictional literature, which is to entertain. This is why “light novels” out of Japan and adaptations of them are popular while literary fiction is not.

I wonder if part of it is that culture is more fragmented. There is lot more of it and it is often in other mediums. Like say TV-series. So there is no need to read certain type of fiction to stay on top of the recent thing...

it doesn't help that the craft of writing is being forgotten, even if you don't read you can see the same issue in film and television.

it's quite clear to me that the author, and peers of the article dont get out enough. the issue is not the decline of literary fiction, it is rather the fact of fiction it lself is no longer possible, which is quite evident when listening to the surreal, harrowing, epic tales to be told by the people all around the edges, haltingly, and reluctantly told, but everywhere. we no longer live in a "golden age" where we can mull over the causes and effects of human lives lived large and bold, as the inescapable reality is serving you coffee, in a 3d printed sci-fi setting, the furnishings hard, the light eminating from an incomprehensable device operating at frequencys absent from any literary narative, a high whine wavering beween revelation and impending doom, more in line with some mythical description of the advent of deamons and spirits than anything a civilised and literate culture would ever allude to. Cervantes and Hobbs stand as proxy's for two possible paths, Hobbs bieng the overwheming choice, all of the impossible to reconcile inconsistansies, simply ommited from our narative, and twisted into a booming(pun.acknowedged) busniess of exporting our conradictions.

My problem with books is that it takes a lot of time to read a book, and it's very difficult to tell beforehand if I'll like the book.

>Literary fiction, serious fiction,[1] high literature,[2] or artistic literature,[2] and sometimes just literature,[2] encompasses fiction books and writings that are more character-driven rather than plot-driven, that examine the human condition, or that are simply considered serious art by critics.

Same reason new christmas carols dont land. And people dont listen to new classic music styles. It has to meet arbitrary rules regarding art, seriousness and get past critics to even be added to the category. I say category because anyone can write fiction, its just magical fairy dust better than you wankery when you add literary to the front.

Much easier to instead simply write good fiction and let idiots clutch pearls over its literariness.

Boils down to "This arbitrary category with a bunch of great nostalgia based entries doesn't have modern competition"

Meanwhile genre fiction printer goes brrrrrr which contains a lot of shit, but due to sheer quantity contains so many gems you never even need to worry about critics or "literary" fiction.

Actually I feel like this is yet another example of how stupid it is to gatekeep art as higher than process. Art comes from process. It isnt a single part of the process that can be separated from it. People complained video games could never be art. People complain that genre fiction cant be art. These days its AI image generation. Its all art, or can be art.

Don’t forget rise of audible.

If I or anybody else publishes a novel about LLMs taking over the world, it would be classed as science-fiction, not as social commentary.

We suffer the same vices and the same diseases of one hundred years ago, and by then we had already invented capitalism and “enjoyed” it for quite some time. So I recon nobody would be able to write something like Les Miserables or David Copperfield and expect to have the same impact.

Our technological world and the nature of our collective miseries are constantly changing, and IMO are fertile ground for literary creation, but writers trained on the classic literary fiction works would not be prepared to handle the intricacies of our broad technology sectors and its social implications, and if they did were prepared and did write on those topics, they wouldn’t be recognized by their peers and the New Yorker as literary fiction writers… Think about The Martian, and a long list of wonderful works that have never made it to any of the high-brow lists this article refers to.

Book sales figures are so private that I don't know how to validate this, but my intuition is that this is just the mirror of the rise of genre fiction. It was never unpopular in the first place, and there's little if anything left of the 1960s-era consensus that genre fiction is fundamentally lesser. I read a lot, and it's just never occurred to me that I have to find literary fiction if I want something deep or thought-provoking.

I agree with what seems like the article's main point, namely that literary fiction has declined because it's not actually good anymore, it's just targeted at a tiny subculture of critics with weird tastes. In a way this is prefigured by the whole idea of "literary fiction"; the article never explains what this is, but it seems to mean something like "fiction that intends to be something other than pure entertainment".

> after postmodernism a kind of MFA minimalism came to dominate literary fiction

I totally agree with this and it more or less sums up why I hardly read any contemporary literary fiction. (And I'm one of those people the article talks about who does read a lot of novels, just not many new ones.) Although it's contrasted here with postmodernism, in a way I see a contiguity between them, as the irritating background sensation I get from most such writing, is a deliberate attempt by the author to create a distinctive "voice". Some of the postmodernist stuff does it by being very weird, but the new stuff can be even worse because so many writers are trying to create "their own voice" within this tiny range of the style space. I make an effort to sample this sometimes when I'm in a boosktore, but I'll pick up a book and read the first page or two and a wave of ennui washes over me.

Around 20 years ago, in college, I went to a talk by a classics scholar (as in, ancient Greek classics), who made an offhand reference to "The sort of story you read in the New Yorker, you know, one everyday American preaching a gentle sermon to another." I've always remembered that line and it still rings true today.

The article seems to talk about the "wokeness hypothesis" on this issue in terms of attributes of authors (e.g., their race or gender) rather than of stories. I don't know much about that. But if there's a way that wokeness or something like it has influenced writing, I'd say it's from a different angle: I just get the sense that there's a lot more risk today in writing about characters very unlike the author. It can be perceived as trying to "tell [insert group name here]'s story" without their involvement or consent. I think the severity of this is overstated by right-leaning reactionaries, but it's hard to argue that it's not a genuine shift in societal mood and values.

I think this is somewhat unfortunate, because it has a chilling effect on the role of imagination in writing. When we assume that a writer writing about some character is "telling the story" of people in the real world who are somehow similar to that character I think we sometimes close ourselves off to interesting stories that can potentially speak to many readers across cultures and categories. Like I say, this effect isn't decisive, but it's real.

When reading the article I also kept thinking about "classical" music, which seems like the musical counterpart to "literary" fiction. I've met people my age, younger, even kids, who respond with visceral enjoyment to Beethoven, Chopin, etc. I've met people who genuinely like stuff like Debussy and Ravel. I'm not sure I've ever met someone who unironically liked contemporary classical music on that level. Like literary fiction, it's become an inside game for people who want to push boundaries and move beyond conventions, and making something that sounds nice is secondary. There are exceptions to various degrees (Philip Glass comes to mind) but on the whole I get the sense of the same phenomenon mentioned in the article, which is that everyone seems to take it as given that no one is writing any music today that is even in the same league as Beethoven or Bach.

In the realm of fiction, that kind of connects to this:

> For the last twenty years American literary culture has been unable to produce a writer we can describe as great without at least feeling a tinge of embarrassment about. We should be worried.

That feeling of embarrassment feels connected to the rise of irony in art in general, and I wonder if it's another reason literary fiction has suffered. It's hard to write in the modern world without working in a significant wink-wink-nudge-nudge about how stupid and banal things are, not in the sense of satire or even witty commentary but just a kind of devil-may-care acceptance.

But there may be hope for us yet. According to a story that may be apocryphal, around 100 years ago someone asked Andre Gide who the greatest French poet was and he answered: "Victor Hugo, alas!"

Got too politcal

While I disagree that “the publishers went woke” is a salient reason (or even true in any real sense), I give the essay props for resisting the urge to reduce a very complicated problem down to a single causal factor.

To produce a good work of fiction its important to both 1) have a story to tell and 2) tell it masterfully.

By the time people collect enough life experience to satisfy (1) they've aged out of the demographic that's willing to put in the work to learn (2). This is why great writers are and will always be rare. People who write slop in their 20s will either fail and give up or be a victim of their success and produce more slop to satisfy their audience.

I've never been able to give myself a good justification for why I should be reading any of that stuff.

I’ve been wanting to buy a copy of Flowers for Algernon. It’s easy too, my local Barnes and Noble has it in stock. But it’s $19 (in paperback!) for a book published almost 60 years ago.

I don't know what could possibly make me read books. Reading is a chore, and not very efficient at the best of times. There's also the eye strain and the neck pain, and comfort in general. Best would be to read from bed, but bed is for sleepy time, a hard earned lesson.

But that's just me. Here's why I think books are no longer being read in general.

It's simply a format that time has moved on from. First came the radio, but radio wasn't gonna compete with books. Radio was succeeded by television though, and that sure could, but television is presently being succeeded by the internet, with TV companies desperate for any remaining attention, attention that they keep bleeding.

All this time the format has failed to find a foothold, and carve out its stay. You may discover that this is not universally true across the world, such as in Japan, where light novels are decently popular. It has its own place, but in the Western world, the only reliable place books have is in the classroom. I stipulate that the reason you see a prominently female readership is for the same reason: girls are (were?) taught in school that they're the more artsy type, that humanities should interest them more, and so they proceed(ed) to take that on the chin. Fast forward a few decades, and there you go.

The same applies for all other foregone forms of art. Theater? Opera? Ballet? Classical music performances? You'd have to pay or coerce me to attend these. Where I live, all the institutions hosting these are living off of government money, as they're simply unable to sustain themselves otherwise. People just don't care. The shows put on are basically live-action museum exhibitions. Although I guess even museums should be included in this list. Modern audiences are simply completely out of tune with these, they are an exercise in anachronism. And until the communities behind these continue to hammer in their formal position in art over their actual one, rather than try to connect with said modern audiences, this trend will continue. That is assuming such a connection is even possible still at this point.

Video killed the radio star.

I remember listening to that as a kid and thinking it must be wrong because we still had radio, we even had books everywhere as far as I could see. Of course we still do, but it's not just literary fiction suffering; book sales tend to go down (pandemics excepted) while the numbers being published goes up.

Anecdotally, I followed an interesting ex-MI6 bod on Tiktok (@theenglishspy) who had ~50k followers and admitted, maybe a few months after publishing a book he'd been pushing, that he had sold less than 100 copies. I had my own go [1] at narrative non-fiction for a cause and also didn't manage to break 100 copies.

Perhaps it's a good thing; the market's saturated, while overall demand for books is falling it's because there are more instant, engaging formats that people are seeking to invest in finding stories. If the internet ever goes down, those books will still be there, we'll just have to find a way to order them.

[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0DVC8XG1X/

Younger people don't read books as frequently as they did when I was young (pre-internet). Bookstores are flooded with junk, with the SEO-equivalent of publishing spam having won out on the bookshelves. Libraries are as bad or worse. Students do not pursue Greek and Latin and classical literature, and have no reference point of high culture apart from the distracting now.

And the English language has declined. English has always been a scraped-together, something-of-everything tongue. But jargon and abstractisms have killed expression. Meanwhile, French and German have eaten so many Americanisms that they're in terminal indigestion, and now the whole planet thinks and talks like a slightly below-average bumpkin American with a college journalism degree.