A REPORT

Sure looks like an establishment collapse, anyway. The above two covers are for the two most heavily-hyped literary books of the past two years. Can people not see how bland and neutered the two covers are, as is the writing inside them? Brilliantly fake in one case. Instantly dated in the other. Both written by well-connected bubble-world monoclass authors. “Of the moment,” at least for the Manhattan-Brooklyn trust fund set. They’re akin to the pop music world circa 1955 when rock n’ roll burst onto the scene from beneath. From the hinterlands and underclasses of the American nation: settings not of pampered complacency, but cultural change. Upsetting a status quo that had no edge, no reality, no passion. Like literature today.

How much Big 5 conglomerate marketing money was behind these two books? A million dollars each? There’s no way of knowing, because no arts journalists take an adversarial stance, combined with real investigation into things. If they did, they’d lose their livelihood. The way things have been in the moldy lit scene for decades.

LAST GASP OF THE INTELLIGENTSIA

Never fear! Our literary intellectuals have an answer: the metafiction novel The Tunnel by William Gass, due to be rereleased by Dalkey Archive Press in exactly one month. A novel about a professor, and about his mentor, who’s a professor, and his colleagues, who are professors, and about a book he’s writing, but it’s really two books, and Gass said he made the opening difficult to discourage most readers. Certain to save the art!

The Phd crowd are excited, anyway, if no one else.

The state of American literature now.

-K. Wenclas for New Pop Lit NEWS