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Posted on 10/07/2026 7:26:24 AM PDT by Angelino97
For young white American men, building a successful career in fiction has become something like trying to kick water uphill. An analysis by Jacob Savage in Compact of The New York Times’ annual “notable fiction” lists and that of several other leading magazines revealed the grim reality:
"By 2021, there was not one white male millennial on the “Notable Fiction” list. There were none again in 2022, and just one apiece in 2023 and 2024 (since 2021, just 2 of 72 millennials featured were white American men).
"There were no white male millennials featured in Vulture’s 2024 year-end fiction list, none in Vanity Fair’s, none in The Atlantic’s. Esquire, a magazine ostensibly geared towards male millennials, has featured 53 millennial fiction writers on its year-end book lists since 2020. Only one was a white American man."
Yet it’s not that young men aren’t writing. They are, but the publishing industry’s ideological capture is acting as a gatekeeper and shutting them out.
Consider this year’s National Book Award longlist. Its fiction nominees run the gamut, featuring autistic, transgender, and gay characters alongside stories focused on the oppression of black men and indigenous people.
The number of white men selected? Just one, Alexander Maksik, a Gen-X writer from Los Angeles. This once prestigious event—Tom Wolfe and Philip Roth have both been recipients of the award—alongside countless other literary prizes, has now been deluged by progressive identitarian nonsense.
The most interesting part is the inclusion of a solitary white author. While the addition of Maksik and his novel Passengers may appear designed to deflect attention, the writer has previously conceded his own troubled status as a beneficiary of “white privilege” in a self-flagellating, identity-atoning interview with Fiction Writers Review.
One can only assume his inclusion was granted as a token exception, provided he remains sufficiently apologetic and inveighs against his own demographic. If a white man wants to be part of the cultural elite, public self-abasement has become a prerequisite for entry.
Literature’s modern-day key masters are liberal women. I have previously written about how women hold a de facto monopoly across every sector of the U.S. publishing industry. This chromosomal cartel now extends to judging—enforcing their progressive doctrine.
This year’s ideological militia is chaired by Caro De Robertis, a nonbinary Uruguayan novelist. De Robertis’s work includes Cantoras, a narrative centering on queer women under Uruguay’s dictatorship and the 2025 non-fiction compendium So Many Stars: An Oral History of Trans Non-Binary, Genderqueer and Two-Spirit People of Color.
The slop-quotient is strong. Mainstream publishing no longer wants art that shocks or pushes boundaries. Contrast this modern conveyor belt of regime-approved identity trauma with a writer like Dennis Cooper.
Cooper, a gay transgressive writer whose books like Frisk or The Sluts plumbed the visceral, harrowing depths of alienation and desire, pushed literature to its absolute psychological limits. Yet you’ll never find this modern-day De Sade on any shortlist for mainstream recognition or awards. Right identity group, wrong subject matter.
An American male writer trying to solicit a literary agent has to contend with the fact that more than three-quarters of U.S. agents are women, according to an industry survey by Lee & Low Books.
A form of progressive sexualized nepotism has socially engineered a monoculture where young male writers are marginalized and ignored in an industry that regularly ridicules masculinity. For your average middle-aged woman, there is little interest in or understanding of narratives centered around male experiences.
A look at the themes driving this year’s nominees tells you all you need to know about publishing priorities:
* Described by the National Book Awards as a “queer epic,” Marlon James’ novel The Disappearers follows the aftermath for each of the survivors of a homophobic attack on black and mixed-race gay men in 1980s Jamaica.
* Julián Delgado Lopera is a gay Colombian writer whose nominated novel, Pretend You’re Dead and I Carry You is based on the life of a young gay Latina’s experiences as an immigrant to America. At 15, Delgado moved to the U.S. and joined San Francisco’s queer literary scene. His previous novel, Fiebre Tropical, won the 2021 Lambda Literary Award for lesbian fiction.
* The turbulent life of a trans healthcare worker with autism is the subject of Morgan Thomas’s Mad Eden. Meanwhile, in her prose debut, Red Ants, Native American poet Kimberly Blaeser explores the lives of Anishinaabe people in modern America.
The explosion of female-centric and identitarian-themed progressive fiction correlates with the literary establishment’s sprawling network of identity-specific awards, fellowships and prizes designed to elevate previously “unheard” voices. Events such as the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction and the Lambda Literary Awards have come to dominate the industry.
Few, if any, mainstream prizes champion male experiences. Instead, traditional categories have been rebuilt into mandatory diversity showcases that bypass young white men unless they offer ideological fealty.
Fiction is about stories. They impart knowledge, wonder, and wisdom. We tell them knowing they outlast our finite lives—a cultural gift we pass on to the next generation. If we engineer them out of existence, soon we’ll have nothing to say about the human condition.
If we want men to enjoy the unbridled thrill of writing, we need to break up the chromosomal cartel. Until publishing changes and realizes that creativity trumps equity, the great American novel will remain a dead letter, held captive to a censorious committee.
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The purchasers of those magazines are free to "vote with their pocketbooks" and cease patronizing them.
Regards,
Well, who are the customers? Businesses are not going to overlook a profitable market. It is highly likely that the people who buy books and read them prefer these sorts of books.
Amazon Prime’s free, monthly “First Reads” rarely include male authors.
Yet businesses often do so.
Remember the huge hit The Passion of the Christ was when it came out? Yet Hollywood did not flood the market with similar traditionalist Christian films.
Many big businesses push woke, left-identitarian progressive products or advertising, regardless of profits. They get away with it because all their competitors do so as well. And because many people will buy whatever slop is out there, merely because it's all that's available.
It is highly likely that the people who buy books and read them prefer these sorts of books.
Some prefer them. Others buy them because they want to know what "the smart set" is reading. Because they think it's what they should be reading.
I knew a fellow from a conservative family. He'd always buy tickets to the latest, hot Broadway play, because it's what his Manhattan coworkers all bought.
I knew another conservative man who subscribed to The New York Times and The Smithsonian because he thought it's what the intellectual class, to which he aspired to belong, read.
Sigh. It wasn’t that long ago that the Lambda was considered a joke award, kind of like a “nice try” trophy.
I have had fun in last 4 years reading books that came with our inherited house...including an 1897 copy of Huckleberry Finn. Do not think I have read fiction since I read One Second After about 15 yrs ago. Just finished Eric Metaxis 7 Men and 7 Women. Now into Mollie Hemingway’s Alito which is about a lot more than Alito. But...I am old.
You can also read them on a computer, but an ereader is better. Can be a Kindle or some other ereader, doesn't matter which.
Ditto Google Books. Many old out of print are available in .pdf for free and can be downloaded
I’m going to check out Archive.org
Thanks
Yup...was recently reading an 1800s book in an archive online about hubs relative who lived from 1598 to 1698. Oldest man in NE America at the time!
LOL!
If there is to be a solution, it has to be grown from the grassroots up. You need to get boys interested in reading fiction for entertainment before you can have a market for fiction written by men, for men. Right now everything our culture does, from the first day of kindergarten up to the top of the NY Times bestseller list, sends boys the clear message, "This isn't for you. Reading is for girls."
Boys want to be the hero of the story, not the supporting character standing behind the strong empowered girl. They want to have adventures. They want to do things. The last major writer who delivered that experience for male readers was Tom Clancy, and he died 13 years ago. (Brad Thor comes in a close second, but the jury is still out on him.)
So instead of reading books, boys play video games, because that gives them the heroic experience they crave without years of teachers browbeating them with the idea that being male is wrong, and they need to step aside and defer to the girls.
How do you get a generation raised on video games to go back to reading books for entertainment? That's the mystery to be solved. But I will point out that Games Workshop sells a hell of a lot of books in their Black Library series.
It’s amazing that the same people who view the exact same paucity of minorities on a list can turn around and make sure that it’s done to white men. This reveals that they are not logical reasoning people, rather they are lying scumbags who only want their own power. They’re gonna get put back in their box because that’s apparently where they belong.
“Businesses are not going to overlook a profitable market.“
They will if they’re supplied by ideologues. I used to buy night table fiction all the time. Haven’t bought any in decades. The Woke started in fiction a long long time ago. Hell newspapers are or were businesses; haven’t bought a newspaper since 1995.
Noah Smithwick’s “The Evolution of a State, Recollections of Early Texas Days” is fascinating and now back in print. I got it 10 or so years ago on some other eReader app.
And yet plenty of white males are making a living writing books. By focusing on the “critical darling” lists these guys are missing most of the actual business of publishing. For a very long time writers have had the choice: they can be critical darlings, or they can sell books. Nobody reads the stuff from the critical darlings.
LitRPG, the “hot new” subgenre of scifi. Stories that build out from video game concepts and rules. Dungeon Crawler Carl the super hot series in litRPG. Soon to be getting a TV adaptation.
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