Over the past 12 months, almost all of the buzz in fiction has been around young women: Patricia Lockwood, Yaa Gyasi, Raven Leilani, Avni Doshi, Lauren Oyler. They feel that men – and especially young men – are being shut out of an industry that is blind to its own prejudices. The general consensus is that young male writers have given up on literary fiction. Whenever I speak to men in their 20s, 30s and 40s, most tell me they couldn’t give a toss about fiction, especially literary fiction. But that’s because “it’s only relatively recent that you could have fiction written by a woman about intimate subjects like sex – and for it to be classed as literary fiction”.

Source: The Guardian May 16, 2021 06:00 UTC