The State of Books

GQ Magazine just published a lengthy but fascinating thinkpiece: "Will Books Survive? 34 Insiders, Experts, and Icons on the State of Literature in an Age of Uncertainty."

I must admit that I've never read anything by, or even heard of, most of the participants in the discussion, which is organized thematically. (I hang my head in shame.) But several of them are gay, including Bryan Washington, whose first short story collection, Lots, we'll begin reading early next year. Here is the section of the article I suspect will be most interesting to many of you:

For years, there’s been a bunch of handwringing over the gender gap in the literary market and trends like “performative male reading.” So the question is: Do men read? If so, what?

Morgan Entrekin: They never have read as much as women. The number that I’ve heard in terms of reading fiction is seven to one. And I heard that 40 years ago.

Chelsea Hodson: I don’t think about gender that much when I’m publishing or reading. I do think men read. I think that these pieces are just trying to create clickbait.

Bryan Washington: Gay men read. Queer people read. I don’t know what straight people read, though.

Ira Madison III: The gays are reading. I mean, they only seem to be reading Fruit Fly, and some of them The Disappearers. Performative reading—I feel like that phrase got a lot of traction. But everything is performative when you assume that everyone is doing things for other people. Thinking something is performative is based on how you value performance. It says nothing about the other person. It says everything about you. You’re not reading Confederacy of Dunces at the bar because you feel self-conscious, but maybe this dude really just likes Confederacy of Dunces and wants to read at the bar."

If you are even mildly interested in an assessment of the publishing world today, I commend this article to you.