Notebook: (2) Some Men Reading

Who is entitled to an audience, vs. how one earns it

Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, Portrait of Auguste Gabriel Godefroy (1741). São Paulo Museum of Art

Read Part One of this post here!

The cluster of ideas emerging from Yahdon Israel and Jerid Woods’s work—a critical and also forward-looking understanding of masculinity, an energetic and proactive effort to engage people with reading—seemed a striking contrast with the contemporaneous, mostly white discourse on “men reading,” which was more focused on who is entitled to an audience, rather than how one earns it. An early entrant in the genre was Johanna Thomas-Corr, writing in The New Statesman in 2022 and sounding the recurrent note, post #MeToo, that “if men can’t publish gloves-off accounts of their sexual urges—as today’s female authors are encouraged to—then male readers will feel disenfranchised and disengaged by fiction,” and Joyce Carol Oates notoriously tweeting that July that “a friend who is a literary agent told me that he cannot even get editors to read first novels by young white male writers, no matter how good.” 2024 saw a relatively lightly researched article in Esquire called “Where Is All the Sad Boy Literature,” which got its own smattering of responses, including one from novelist Andrew Boryga that identified a dissonance in experience between working-class male writers in particular and all the affluent, educated white women in publishing (see also Lee Cole in LitHub). In November 2024 there was a National Endowment for the Arts study revealing growing discrepancies between men and women’s reading and a consonant spot poll in The Washington Post. Then in December of 2024 came the first of a run of assertive New York Times opinion pieces, this one by creative writing teacher David Morris, which opened, “Over the past two decades, literary fiction has become a largely female pursuit,” and declared “if you care about the health of our society … the decline and fall of literary men should worry you.” The visibility of ascendant repudiators of reading like Andrew Tate and Samuel Bankman-Fried appeared to underline his point.

The next month Constance Grady gave the whole subject a bracingly empirical rebuke in Vox, citing statistics showing little meaningful change in male vs. female reading, in particular noting that an oft-brandished statistic, that men currently constitute only 20 percent of the market for fiction, has no traceable source. But three months later the subject was back, with a widely circulated article in Compact by one Jacob Savage. Jacob Savage based most of his argument on the absence of white men under forty from current literary prizes, fellowships, and “notable” lists and again blamed an “insular, female-dominated publishing world” and triumph of wokeness for freezing them out. Sarah Brouillette offered the interesting riposte that “when the conditions in any field of work worsen, that work is more likely to be done by the people with the least power in the labor market,” and noted that “grievance-mongering” is an effective way to build a platform, now more salient for the working writer than winning a prize or getting a story published in The New Yorker. Journalist Ross Barkan (who had the previous year written an essay, “From Mysogyny to No-Man’s-Land” that covered some similar territory) replied with more equanimity that if there are more women readers of fiction than men, publishing will respond to that market, but he does regret the absence of “the interiority of men” from the literary record and believes it creates a “challenge for solving the problem of getting boys into books.” He showed up again on the subject in The Guardian. Barkan and Brouillette’s analysis recognizes that women have historically been the majority of fiction readers, but men enjoyed a brief ascendancy in midcentury, when, as Brouillette puts it, “the conditions for the commercial development of prestige fiction” were optimized and men were at the wheel. These conditions “were relatively short-lived, reaching a peak with the surge in university enrollments after World War II, when there was expansive state-supported higher education and high rates of secure employment in a growing economy.” Ross Barkan observed that we now live in a “fractured era” that no longer allows for books to have the kind of visibility and cultural consequence that made celebrities of the male novelists of midcentury. And there is, to be sure, a problem in our blockbuster-driven publishing economy with developing new careers, as Yahdon Israel’s work squarely faces. It surely is made worse for young white men because they don’t benefit from women’s market force or from the effort to redress the historic underrepresentation of marginalized groups, but white men still enjoy significant institutional advantages system-wide (not least in predominating among corporate CEOs, the guys who write the checks).

Ross Barkan in 2025 founded a literary magazine on Substack called The Metropolitan Reader that was designed to coalesce the readership that many of these disgruntled white men sought. In April of that year a new male-oriented publishing house was announced in England (a magazine focused on working-class writers appeared a month later). A writer Ross Barkan quoted, Caleb Claudel, a few weeks later published an article in The Metropolitan Review arguing that writers hardly need bother getting published by major outlets any more and they are better off self-publishing or publishing as he does within a sympathetic circle on Substack; prizes don’t make much of a difference anyway when it comes to earning a living. The Atlantic checked in with “The Real Reason Men Should Read Fiction,” and in July the Times offered its next salvo with a temperature-taking by style reporter Joseph Bernstein, bringing in both Yahdon Israel and Sean Manning. Then in August Constace Grady was back at Vox observing that the nascent Substack literary scene, including The Metropolitan Review, “looks like the literary scene of twenty years ago … All the sad young literary men that are said to have disappeared are there on Substack, thriving,” as in the blogosphere of yore.

This episodic “men reading” discourse was accompanied by a spate of articles about the decline of reading generally, a “reversion to orality,” students no longer reading whole books, and the diminished circumstances for literary fiction. Owen Yingling wrote a widely shared article arguing that market conditions did more to explain the sunsetting of the visible male literary career than wokeness or women in publishing, but he ultimately blamed a narrowing of literary taste on the “supply side” for fiction’s obsolence. Lincoln Michel’s rebuttal made the too-rarely-seen observation that the absence of literary work on the bestseller lists today owes more to commercial publishing having learned to sell commercial hardcovers in large numbers, moving the mass-market paperback reader onto the hardcover bestseller list and killing that genre, and dwarfing the fairly constant sales of “literary” fiction. Romance and other genre writing decamped to self-publishing, only to return and dominate bestseller lists once those authors, mostly women, built up an audience for themselves with the newly abundant “creator” technologies. Publicist and publishing observer Kathleen Schmidt argued that we see more women writers in fiction today because they’ve become masters of what Ross Barkan calls, approvingly, “hustling.”

Then in July, a week or so after I saw DJ Johnson talk about college savings accounts and podcast studios, David Brooks weighed in with a Times op ed making the case that, although he “would not say novels are worse now,” because he “wouldn’t know how to measure such a thing,” “social pressure and conformity,” by which he meant of the woke sort, had drained contemporary literature of “confidence and audacity.” His essay included a number of straightforward factual errors that were quickly catalogued by the people guaranteed to read it, but one could see easily in it the theme that has been percolating through these discussions: that without the freedom to write openly about sex the way they want to, men can’t write books men want to read, and of course women can’t write those (though as novelist Ian McEwan discovered way back in 2005, and statistics confirm, women readers keep male fiction writers afloat).

There are a lot of obscuring factors in these highly generalized discussions. They are careless with the difference between reading fiction, reading literature, and reading at all; between buying newly released hardcovers, reading ebooks, reading library books, reading your own books. The smallish cohort of working male novelists under forty often seems to stand in for all men, who, as a group, still make a ton of money selling books. Calamitous technological upheaval in how the written word is distributed is confounded with changing tastes. There is an argument that “literary fiction” is a recent invention of the marketers, although from the point of view of Yahdon Israel and Jerid Woods it is obvious: literary writing is writing by people, as Yahdon Israel puts it in his opening pitch from Simon and Schuster, “who understand that their book is a means to do something they want to do in the world,” Jerid Woods’s “sentences that rearrange my spirit.” Literature aims to do something more with you than help you pass the time.

One thing that Yahdon Israel and Jerid Woods do that I do not hear the advocates for more prominence for white male literature do is that they place the contemporary work they are speaking up for in the context of a whole tradition. They are talking all the time with their readers about great works from the past with which new work is in a continuous conversation and encouraging their readers to read both. I hear the white men say, these other men had a platform and I don’t. But I don’t hear them advocate for their work, or the work of their cohort, as a necessary part of a continuous literary project, beyond (to use the identitarian logic) its representation of their type. Naomi Kanakia, one of the relatively few women central in The Metropolitan Review crowd, who writes often about these issues, has said, “I’m friends with a fair number of guys who’re writing novels about angry losers” and suggests that their agents and editors may not be too far off when they suggest these themes “didn’t feel very fresh.” Katie Roiphe persuasively argued in 2009 that the now-forbidden descriptions by the midcentury generation—Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, and John Updike being the oft-referenced three—of sex as an “imaginative quest” or endeavor to “defeat death” at least have “a certain vanished grandeur.” She accused their successors not of being limited by politically correct proprieties but by “a new narcissism”: “ the literary possibilities of their own ambivalence.” Are our new masculinists articulating a vision of literary value that inspires readers to read and continue reading with them, beyond saying, you need to publish more people like us? And are they going out, as Yahdon Israel and Jerid Woods and the romance novelists do, and finding those audiences, brand new audiences, and inspiring them to read in language that meets them where they are? One study found that the voluminous ranks of new woman readers have added to the size of the pie rather than taken readers from men. It seems like for now this cohort is speaking to like-minded friends, fellow writers, and that the internal technology of Substack gives oxygen to such localized ambitions.

I am not really convinced that, if we had an under-forty Philip Roth or John Updike who was successful on today’s terms, their books would necessarily speak to the alienated young men for whom Andrew Tate is posturing. We have writers like former Marine Jack Carr for instance who do not struggle to be published. I would also propose that a young white male writer who truly broke through convention and articulated a latent strain in the society the way Roth and Updike did would find publishers and readers. A fact well known to people of my generation who have been publishing for many years is that it is just much harder now for work that would have been marketable forty years ago to find a place, even though books with few claims might continue get published gambling on reaching identifiable markets.

It is … interesting that one finds such an unwavering conviction that heterosexual women would find works that “accurately capture the psyche of millennial masculinity” repellent. But perhaps what is needed in contemporary literature is not so much an expression of subterranean millennial sexuality but work that strives to find a vision for a meaningful place for millennial men in the modern world. Jerid Woods’s interviews often touch on the struggle of Black men to feel useful (example). Sex in the big midcentury male novels, as Katie Roiphe pointed out (and David Foster-Wallace ridiculed) was about more than sex. The darkness, the hatred, the nihilism that seems to lurk at the furthest reaches of “bro” culture demands literary attention, but it demands attention that appraises it from a larger vantage than just inhabiting it. Can a person who is completely socially isolated, despises those whom he wishes to sexually subdue, does not value the humanity of others, be rendered in literature without a regarding consciousness? To do otherwise seems a kind of propaganda, and not to serve the aims of, say, David Morris. The few fascist-inflected authors who linger in the literary canon—Ernst Jünger, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Ezra Pound—offer enough in the way of mitigating complexity to hold attention. Humbert Humbert remains with us because his author had a larger aesthetic (and, within it, moral) vision. Authors I admire and have published, like Michael Robbins and Tim Parks, have written works that step courageously into the hazardous terrain of sex and dominance. Literature does at bottom rest on an understanding that there is possibility in opening oneself to the minds of other people. We will not have a persuasive literature of white masculinity unless it is committed on some level to self-examination and candor of the kind Jerid Woods and Yahdon Israel have embarked on.

The word “swagger” is an interesting token here. Katie Roiphe used it retrospectively of the sexually adventurous novelists of midcentury. Ross Barkan wrote that now young men do not “swagger about since that behavior is considered uncouth or outright toxic.” But remember Yahdon Israel: “When I say swagger, I mean influence with integrity.” He built a whole brand on swagger. He goes on, “those reading experiences on the high end, where you feel so validated that you have to stop everything you’re doing and your body is having a physiological reaction to the book, and you’ve got to call somebody, to tell them about it—for me, that’s what swagger is.” Maybe literature has to earn its swagger.

I never did get back to DJ, and Jerid, and Yahdon for an update on how their projects of inviting young men into reading are going these days. I kept reading what they wrote and listening to their podcasts, and I wonder now if I was afraid to ask the question: Is this working? What do you see working? They have shown signs of struggling with this question themselves. But the truth is, I do not care that much. If five people have listened to Jerid’s podcasts and felt moved to read and love literature, and learn to strive to be bigger selves, that is enough for me. If two kids have $75 in a college savings account from having written book reviews it is enough for me. If three people walked into Baldwin & Co. after seeing a click-baity clip of Eddie Glaude it is enough for me. Bowling Alone author, the sociologist Robert Putnam wrote in the Times last August that a “boy crisis” in the 1900s was met by an effective growth of civic institutions that care for them. Jerid and DJ and Yahdon are doing that.

I used to work with writers who were exiled from Soviet bloc countries and could never return to their homes or their friends or their families, would never again walk the streets where their language was spoken, because of their writing. Literary people around them felt that their commitment to writing was something special and inspiring because for them there were stakes. But there are stakes for all of us.

---

Ann Kjellberg is the founding editor of Book Post. Read her Notebooks on books and the reading life here (Reader’s Guide here).

Read about our other two Black-owned partner bookstores, Source Booksellers in Detroit (and its founder Janet Webster Jones) and Black Stone Bookstore and Cultural Center in Ypsilante.

---

Baldwin & Co, in New Orleans, is Book Post’s Winter 2025–26 bookselling partner! We partner with independent booksellers to link to their books, support their work, and bring you news of local book life across the land. We send a free three-month subscription to any reader who spends more than $100 at our partner bookstore during our partnership. To claim your subscription send your receipt to info@bookpostusa.com. And support the Baldwin & Co nonprofit’s mission of leveraging the power of books to ignite social justice and inspire change with your donation or membership—or see if there are ways to support your local bookseller financially.

Follow us: Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Notes, Bluesky, Threads @bookpostusa