Is the novel dying?

[Anonymous No.23041978]

We’ve already seen how poetry was destroyed by the music industry; the most a poet today can hope for is be featured in a couple of obscure journals. Will the same happen to the novel?

Everything complex or unique about the novel as a medium has been totally discarded. Publishing houses have prioritised plot over characters as well as journalistic and bland prose over anything approaching a unique style. The novel is merely something to be adapted, whether that be for film or an audiobook, and anything that is not totally streamlined cannot be effectively adapted.

The last popular literary novel in my mind is probably Blood Meridian. However, I’d estimate that 95% of those who have read it do so for the violence and gore, and their analysis of the text doesn’t extend beyond “the judge was the devil”.

Take something like Harry Potter for example. There has been such a decline in reading rates that there could never be another phenomenon like that again. Unless there is some reading counterculture when society realises at how stupid gen alpha are, reading will continue to decline as a hobby. There will be no random breakout novels like “The Da Vinci Code” that captures the cultural zeitgeist because for one there is no shared popular culture anymore and, two, nobody reads anymore.

Has there been any /lit/ authors that got their start within a decade ago? Nope. If an author didn’t build up their readership before the internet kicked into gear they remain obscure.

[Anonymous No.23041987]

>>23041978
>The last popular literary novel in my mind is probably Blood Meridian.

[Anonymous No.23041990]

He rapes his sister, Phoebe

[Anonymous No.23041996]

>>23041978

Hopefully we enter into the age of the 20-50 page novel. Something a bit longer than a short story, just basically a sped up novel.

Make a series of 3-4 of them if you really must go novel length.

This will solve the short attention span problem plus actually get people reading. The current full length novel is not currently working for males.

[Anonymous No.23041999]

>>23041978
>The last popular literary novel in my mind is probably Blood Meridian.
It was the name of the rose, retard. Nobody cafés about Blood Meridian outside of the internet. Same for Lovecraft.

[Anonymous No.23042001]

>>23041996
>Hopefully we enter into the age of the 20-50 page novel. Something a bit longer than a short story, just basically a sped up novel.
It's called a novella
>This will solve the short attention span problem plus actually get people reading. The current full length novel is not currently working for males.
Like a light novel (which is essentially an illustrated novella)?

[Anonymous No.23042006]

>>23041999
>Name of the Rose 1980
>Blood Meridian 1985

[Anonymous No.23042007]

>>23042001

Yes I want to see these marketed to guys more. Def happy for some illustrations being added too, men are visual. I always like when novells have a few drawings in them.

[Anonymous No.23042011]

Honestly, my suggestion at this point, is learn how to make visual novels.
It's pretty much a book with some visual and animation accompaniment, and it's a medium that's growing, rather than shrinking away.
And no, I'm not necessarily saying make some anime shit, where you get to fuck the girl. Not to say you can't do that.

[Anonymous No.23042012]

>>23042007
Yes, illustrations are nice.

[Anonymous No.23042100]

>>23041978
The music industry primarily affected pop culture, which it also helped create. Poetry had been going through a long slow death and was already mostly in the grave by the point the music industry had become an industry.

Also, Blood Meridian did not even sell out its 5000 copy first edition, it had no popularity until McCarthy got some movies made.

[Anonymous No.23042497]

>>23041999
>actually believing any of that shit
That Lovecraft is stil horrendous for your standards.

[Anonymous No.23042500]

>>23041978
>Is the novel dying?
Who actually gives a shit. Art is dead in general, that stuffy literary critics are bawling their eyes out over novels becoming slightly more mediocre does not matter.

[Anonymous No.23042505]

>>23042100
Blood meridian was rediscovered in 1989 or 1990. It was already a big deal at least in literary communities in the early 2000s. It's mainstream popularity is only a decade old however.

[Anonymous No.23042506]

>>23042497
*Lovecraft opinion.

[Anonymous No.23042514]

>>23042505
>Blood meridian was rediscovered in 1989
Rediscovered? It came out in 1985 lol
Rediscovering is like Moby-Dick which was published in 1851 and rediscovered in the 1920s. BM became mainstream until 2017 when reddit started reading it but it was always kind of known.

[Anonymous No.23042515]

>>23042505
This. It’s similar to Stoner

[Anonymous No.23042525]

>>23042514
Rediscoveries can be immediate. It sold 1500 copies in 85 with no fanfare. Between 1989 and 1994, it was being endorsed by guys like DFW, Bloom, Lish and Delillo as one of the best books by a living American. McCarthy was already a small celebrity before ATPH was released (which is why Knopf pushed on promotion and it eventually turned out to be a best-seller). Reddit had no hand in making it popular. It was regularly endorsed on r/books since atleast 2012. It was popular before that. In 2005, it was voted as the 2nd best book in last 25 years in a fairly large poll, before reddit was even a thing. Now the wendigoon video and McCarthy's death are the primary movers for its shooting popularity.

[Anonymous No.23042941]

>>23042525
I appreciate your post but they don't care. They are just shitting on McCarthy because they want to anger people. Every intelligent person knows that McCarthy was brilliant and Blood Meridian was brilliant too.

[Anonymous No.23043183]

>>23041978
Everything is already dead, silly.

[Anonymous No.23043198]

>>23041996
>This will solve the short attention span
lmao Gen A kids can’t sit through a one and a half hour movie without getting distracted. Won’t be long before finishing a movie trilogy without scrolling through tiktok will be seen as some intellectual feat.

[Anonymous No.23043213]

I don't think it's disappearing just transforming. Hollywood basically depends on novels, video games too. It's a really huge industry that will not die any time within your lifetime.

[Anonymous No.23043475]

poetry is an outline/formula/structure same as a novel, movie, etc. You mean will sheeple stop paying for it and artists choosing it as their medium of expression.

[Anonymous No.23043692]

>>23041978
>However, I’d estimate that 95% of those who have read it do so for the violence and gore, and their analysis of the text doesn’t extend beyond “the judge was the devil”.

There really isn't anything else to say about it anyway. It's an incredibly shallow book written by someone who cant properly structure a sentence.

[Anonymous No.23043702]

>>23043692
>redditspacing
>retarded opinion
Checks out.

[Anonymous No.23043735]

>>23041978
It's not that the novel is dying. People still write great things. You could write a great novel right now.
It's that no one would read it. The issue isn't the death of the novel, but the death of the reader.

[Anonymous No.23043744]

Can society please rediscover John Barth, Joseph McElroy or Alexander Theroux now?

[Anonymous No.23043771]

>>23043702

[Anonymous No.23043822]

>>23041996
Nobody wants to read the many existing short story collections and anthologies (unfortunately). I've heard many zoomers complain about being unable to focus on a book for more than a paragraph or two. I don't think kids raised on 5-second video clips are going to grow up to be "voracious" readers. Even reading Twitter/Reddit/4chan will be a challenge for them after a childhood of unmonitored Youtube/Tiktok etc. exposure.

>>23042525
>Now the wendigoon video and McCarthy's death are the primary movers for its shooting popularity.
Oh, I was wondering why I kept hearing about it nonstop out of nowhere since last summer.

[Anonymous No.23043852]

>>23043822
Shit, man. When I was growing up even the dumbest kids would read something, even if it was just comics.

[Anonymous No.23043862]

>>23041996
Human males are defunct. Look at their plunging educational attainment as we shift to a knowledge economy. Look how they make up the overwhelming number of violent criminals. When their need for social status and sex are frustrated they want "civil war now!" They scream for a Boog and buy weapons as toys while fantasizing about destroying society (which of course somehow turns them from losers into high value individuals). They dogmatically buy into the same hierarchical structures that keep them miserable, then shuffle off to go "fap" to images of women being sexually abused, unable to resist touching their dicks or the sweet dopamine hit the porn gives them for even a day let alone a week.

And when faced with their many failures, that they have become repugnant to women, that they seek to destroy the society their ancestors built out of childish spite over their own failures, their response is always the same: "muh dick." They have to rely on the color of their skin to give themselves a sense of self worth because there is nothing else there in the shallow, dopamine addicted coomer consoomer husk worth lauding.

Nay friends, nay. The future of the moid is extinction. A handful of high value moids might be allowed to live, to provide the seed to carry on the species. Most must be culled.

AI and autonomous combat systems, as distasteful as they are, open the road to purging the surplus males. No doubt, some males are very much worth keeping. But the ideal society of the future will have moids as only 10-20% of the population.

This my sisters, is the future to which me must attain. If the moid is allowed to continue breeding our of control, he will destroy our world.

[Anonymous No.23043876]

>>23043862
One can pity the moid, but one cannot have mercy on them. They will help us build our future sisters. "What, 10 women for every man. Surely I will be among the elite allowed to live, I, as a man, am exceptional."

There is no need to be cruel. The boy-man will gladly step into his place on the conveyor belt, the promise of sex electrifying his brain. There in his pod he will be comfortable, provided with his "vidya" and pornography. He will go to his rest peacefully, having coomed his last, full of fast food, as the bolt gun hisses into his brain.

Already we know the advantages to the enviornment of a switch to a more plant based diet. This will free up myriad slaughterhouses for the eventual Great Cull.

[Anonymous No.23043932]

If you keep a finger on the pulse of the novel publishing industry then it seems pretty obvious that novels that get published today by people who aren’t old enough to grandfathered into some scheme equate basically to propaganda or a social-signaling game for coastal MFA types. So I would say the novel is already dead. Obviously, novels are still being published and maybe some older novelist will write one or two that are pretty good, but for younger people novel has been subsumed into this professional huckster thing that’s going on and it’s lost all the unique advantages it had over other literary mediums. You can’t even do with the novel what you used to be able to do with it and it just doesn’t get into the hands of the people you’d want it to get in the hands of anyway. All this is downstream of a general cultural crisis though. It’s not just novels. It’s everything really. I think it’s hard to overstate just how bad things are from a cultural standpoint right now.

[Anonymous No.23043980]

>>23043771
>pretend oldfag from 2023.
That newfag doesn't have any idea either. I will give you retards a hint: there is a reason it's called greentexting.

[Anonymous No.23043984]

>>23043744
That sort of fiction has a shelf life. They unironically already have had their time in the sun. A movement so reliant on the zeitgeist was never going to age well. It has practically never happened.

[Anonymous No.23043989]

>>23043932
I don't know about that. I've read a few recent novels. Bakker's "The Darkness That Comes Before," and the rest of the Second Apocalypse series was published like 2006-2017 and is essentially Chudcore with its female characters and the amount of sexual violence. It has a very pessimistic view of humanity that doesn't fit neatly into an ideological box, since it's a bit of a melding of eliminitivist fatalism and ancient philosophy.

Pierce Brown's "Red Rising," was edited into the YA dystopian lit box for the first book, but the other five books are more like Warhammer 40k just limited to the solar system and with super humans larping as ancient Greeks and Romans. It isn't particularly political; it shows a revolt of the enslaved masses, but then that revolt gets messy and overwhelmed by Jacobinesque mobs.

"After Party," was fairly recent but not particularly political.
Lots of stuff coming out doesn't seem to fit into the box of "propaganda or a social-signaling game for coastal MFA types." In terms of sheer volume, stuff like Warhammer is huge and doesn't fit that box. Neither do plenty of mysteries, etc. "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," was sort of unique in the genre for being so over the top into political commentary, with all the good people being enlightened liberals and all the bad guys being hulking women-hating neanderthals (I liked the first book, but it's on par with Rand in terms of hackneyed, over the top political allegory).

Honestly, this seems more like an oppression complex than any real trend in publishing. If anything, the "Woke Wave" peaked around 2016 and has been receding ever since. The same thing happened with prior PC waves, like in the early 1990s, where, by the end of the decade, the PC movement had lost all steam outside small pockets, and yet it still acted as a bug bear for conservative persecution complex marketeers like Limbaugh.

I mean, people don't even use the term SJW anymore. Gone are the Kony 2012s of yesteryear. Only the residue of ressentiment remains.

[Anonymous No.23043993]

>>23043932
>I wrote a novel where the guy gets so pissed off he calls himself hitler and gives anti-jew speeches
this is only like 5 pages out of 250 though
I might as well just make a website and put the my manuscript on it for free lmao

[Anonymous No.23044000]

>>23043822
>I was wondering why I kept hearing about it nonstop out of nowhere since last summer.
I didn't see it coming either desu. It's a 5 hour video with nearly 6 million views. IIRC you need nearly a 3rd of the length to be viewed in order for it to be counted (or did they change that?). Even Stephen King doesn't get that kind of traction there.

[Anonymous No.23044010]

>>23043989
Okay but first of all, Scott Bakker is like 60 years old and built his career decades ago. The Darkness that Comes Before is 20 years old. It’s hardly relevant to what’s getting published today in 2024. Second, the fact that you find Bakker kind of chuddy and pessimistic really has nothing to do with what I said. I’m first of all speaking in generalities. I explained the rule and not the exceptions, though exceptions can and do exist. Pointing out the one or two authors who are exceptions don’t really refute it, especially if they published decades ago. Lastly, you seem to just have a preference for these truly mediocre YA and fantasy fiction authors. I completely disagree that these are books are even particularly good, but even if I grant that they were for a second, what does it mean for publishing if all of the good books are published exclusively in fantasy decades ago and there’s been nothing even remarkable since? It’s not good. I mean, what are you trying to prove? Why would you even mention “SJW” or “Kony 2012” as if those are remotely relevant to what I said? If you really wanted to refute what I said, you would just point out all these exceptions that are being published right now, but you didn’t and you won’t because you can’t.

[Anonymous No.23044011]

>>23043932
>>23043989
Everything is fake and gay. Everything.

[Anonymous No.23044014]

>>23043989
You can tell it's on the way out by how quickly new issues have to be put out. "Privilege checking," got lots of milage for years, because it really was ubiquitous. College students were forced to take privilege indexes and discuss their privilege scores; the controversy provided years of fodder. Now the same thing is tried with "Critical Race Theory," a new wave of angst drummed up over "CRT sweeping our schools," and the momentum over that was completely dead within 8 months. Even with it becoming a buzzword and motivating some momentary advocacy, no one was talking about CRT just months later. The problem for outrage pornographers is that you can completely create your outrage out of whole cloth. It needs some basis in reality to sustain itself. But the SJWs became a joke even among the left and the generation for whom Woke was most influential got burnt out on it. So it now makes a more and more poor specter, which is why we're seeing a shift back to focusing on migrant hordes and crime as the main area of focus.

[Anonymous No.23044015]

>>23043993
What? Are you sure you had the right reply?

[Anonymous No.23044018]

>>23044010
Who is winning all of the awards for writing?

[Anonymous No.23044025]

>>23043984
Movement? More like BOWEL movement. Nyeah.

[Anonymous No.23044026]

>>23044018
The people I described. I don’t get it. What are you trying to say?

[Anonymous No.23044029]

its dead.
We're on a literature board in which literary fiction is rarely discussed.

its dead

[Anonymous No.23044034]

>>23043862
>>23043876
lmao, you faggot probably gooned while typing your little self-extermination humiliation-fetish "story", stop watching porn and be ashamed of what you are doing with your time

[Anonymous No.23044039]

>>23044029
You did pick up the reprint of Women and Men, right?

[Anonymous No.23044041]

>>23044011
That looks nothing like Taylor Swift. The mass hallucination around her right now is hilarious though. "OMG, someone disagrees with my political opinions! Quick destroy her, it's triggering meeeeee! It MUST be some conspiracy by the elites. How can someone be popular and rich, which is good, but then practice wrong think, which is bad? The cognitive dissonance is killing me!!!!!"

And notice they got right to BBC posting. What is it with the nu-right and the obsession with BBC? Pic related, it's from Vince McMahon's law suit, one of his texts. Vince was notably a bit donor to "conservative causes."

[Anonymous No.23044044]

>>23044015
Yeah.
In this instance I was using a rarer greentext form where the greentext sets establishes the context
>be me
>post bullshit
But the market is grim for anything remotely edgy because again it all seems to be MFA hucksters pushing migrants, gaynal sex, etc., as part of the political apparatus. They want to get paid.

And it's not a white supremacist book but more of a "this side of the justice system is a joke" book.

[Anonymous No.23044045]

>>23044034
Probably a tranny or crab

[Anonymous No.23044050]

>>23043862
Man, that bubble is going to burst hard when you realize that a lot of female success in traditionally male arenas is owed almost exclusively to a legal and social mandate designed and directed by men, and that real authority rests in something women can never have - physical domination.

[Anonymous No.23044053]

>>23044041
Taylor is the fucking anti-christ and the fact she is pushed SO HARD is not organic at all.

[Anonymous No.23044064]

>>23044041
See also:

I miss actual religious conservatives. People who actually cared about the values fundemental to Western civilization. Now the right is potentially even more post-modern than the left.

"Truth? No there is no such thing. You need to look at who is finding what, there are only power relations!" is now a statement you're more likely to find coming out of the nu-right. And of course they have no problem with moral degenerates for leaders. God is dead for them. Relativism and nihilism reigns supreme. It'll end terribly. A society needs a conservative force, but ours has turned to an empty radicalism that flees from all definiteness. It's exactly what Hegel describes re the sans culottes in The Philosophy of Right. Of course, the Wokelati are just like this too. Two sides of the same sophist coin. Only disaster can follow.

[Anonymous No.23044073]

>>23044053
Would you say you feel triggered by it?

Sorry snowflake. Trump is a fat Boomer retard. Essentially half of his own cabinet has come out to say the same thing. Facts don't care about your feelings. He lost in 2020 BTW. Maybe you should go back to your hug box for a bit.

[Anonymous No.23044081]

>>23044053
shhh white women are singing

[Anonymous No.23044085]

>>23044073
I agree with you 100%, Trump is just another jewish puppet... more money for Israel!

Good goyim!

[Anonymous No.23044087]

>>23044029
There's no "eww genre fiction" board. Why would it surprise you that people on a low-brow humor site occasionally want to discuss something other than your driest required class reading? "Literature" is still massively overrepresented here relative to what people in real life actually read.

[Anonymous No.23044094]

>>23044050
The things is, money talks and bullshit walks. If you go online to SJW areas of interest you get ads for expensive organic food, European cruises, etc. If you go to 4chan or other Nu-Right sites and look at who wants to advertise there it's all fake pussies and "AI will turn this woman naked for you," gooner shit. At least what gets advertised on Fox News shows that the Boomers they get actually have some money and influence. Gold coins for when "fiat finally collapses," ain't cheap. But the nu-right, marketers definetly know they are dealing with a bunch of neets who only have spare change from mommy and daddy, or low tier wages to draw money from. And why expect anything different? Who else would actually want society destroyed, actually want war? Only those at the absolute bottom, below even the gang bangers in status.

But if you look at human history there has never, ever, been a beta uprising ever. It's just so much wallowing.

[Anonymous No.23044097]

>>23044087
There were two books in my "introduction to western literature" course used the word nigger a lot (Heart of Darkness and Beloved)
Just thought I'd throw that out there

[Anonymous No.23044101]

>>23044011
Kansas City Chiefs, not Washington Redskins*. The retard is mistaken.

[Anonymous No.23044104]

>>23044094
>But the nu-right, marketers definetly know they are dealing with a bunch of neets who only have spare change from mommy and daddy, or low tier wages to draw money from.
Does this have anything to do with the hiring practices and the social conditions that have changed drastically in the last 10-15 years?

[Anonymous No.23044123]

>>23041978
About 98% of good novels have already been written.

[Anonymous No.23044318]

>>23044053
Taylor swift is just another Elvis. They happen sometimes. I don't know why Elvis got huge but Taylor swift is the successful happy tall white woman that every obese miserable drugged up gremlin would rather be.
Hitler isn't relevant here except for my posts earlier

[Anonymous No.23044327]

>>23044318
Disagree, something waaaaaay more ominous about Taylor. She is built to be this icon of satanic America but presented as wholesome as apple pie so young women worship her as the ultimate white woman. (which couldn't be farther from the truth)

[Anonymous No.23044330]

>>23041999
>Same for Lovecraft.
Shut up, nigger.

[Anonymous No.23044337]

>>23044011
holy shit that's hysterical

[Anonymous No.23044339]

>>23044318
Elvis the pelvis led us to Wet Ass Pussy

[Anonymous No.23044351]

>>23044339

[Anonymous No.23044356]

>>23044327
Whatever. She's a celebrity in an entertainment industry and entertainment industry types are full of would-be magicians. There's a cycle at play, of "evil marketing makes evil people that in turn are appealed by evil marketing".

>>23044339
I don't know about that but Elvis maybe deserved his success. From what I've heard he spent every spare minute he had playing music. On Sundays he would do hymns on piano with friends and family singing around him until past midnight apparently and on other weekdays it seemed to be the same but less gospel.

I need to be like Elvis and put in the hours. Then people will know the struggle of Magic Hitler's last stand

[Anonymous No.23044374]

>>23044356
Entertainment is a psychological prison of sorts, our entire world view is shaped by these puppets dangled before us. It used to be a bit more even of a playing field, with nearly all of the villains I grew up watching having big noses and being rich, greedy fucks...

[Anonymous No.23044375]

>>23044039
nta, but no... it's so over and no...

[Anonymous No.23044377]

>>23044351

[Anonymous No.23044391]

>>23044375
The reprint of the Sot-Weed Factor, then?

[Anonymous No.23044400]

>>23044377
Haha!!!

OY VEY!!!

[Anonymous No.23044406]

>>23044374
haha

[Anonymous No.23044415]

>>23044094
Yeah, but that’s largely because even honest centrist opinions have been exiled from the institutional mainstream. The greatest trick the left has played thus far is making public endorsement of these things necessary to climb the social-professional ladder within institutions. 4chan became a refuge for right-thinking people simply because it’s the only place they welcomed. I think it’s arong to characterize all of these people as money-less NEETs although that’s increasingly the case because of the thing I mentioned.

I still don’t get your argument though. I mean, you’re implying that it’s nothing more than a bullshit commercial product, which only further affirms my claim that the novel is indeed dead.

[Anonymous No.23044448]

>>23044391
no... it's not looking... no no no, but i have a nice copy of an adultery by theroux!

[Anonymous No.23044468]

>>23044406

[Anonymous No.23044469]

>>23044448
Based, me too. I also have a paperback copy of Darconville's Cat with the pricetag still attached ($7.89)

[Anonymous No.23044516]

>>23044415
>Yeah, but that’s largely because even honest centrist opinions have been exiled from the institutional mainstream.
Re-watch the NDP convention in Canada with their yellow cards... full dystopian nightmare for any white male

[Anonymous No.23045295]

>>23044415
>Ahhhhhhhhhhhh, we chuds are so horribly oppressed, it is soooo unfair.
>Based, Donald Trump will probably be president against despite losing by 9 million votes this time because the political system is set up to privileged chuds. Based Musk. It's so based that the world's richest man is a chudkin!

Yeah, yeah, everything is oppression. You've become a mirror image of the people you hate. One wonders how Tate got all his stupid fucking cars in such an environment of repression of the poor chudkins.

[Anonymous No.23045301]

>>23045295
>One wonders how Tate got all his stupid fucking cars in such an environment of repression of the poor chudkins.
Scammers make bank. Fact.

[Anonymous No.23045347]

>>23044469
>cent is 89
why can't be 85 or 90 cents? I'm fucking pisedd

[Anonymous No.23045830]

>>23044469
i kneel, s-senpai...

[Anonymous No.23045930]

The only way out is to see the death of the modern publishing industry and to see a new model arise that engages readers and aligns them with self-publishing and small publishing houses.

[Anonymous No.23045949]

>>23041978
>poetry was destroyed by the music industry
lolwut? Poetry has been destroyed by endemic adult illiteracy. This trend has popularised comics at the expense of adult literature.

[Anonymous No.23046030]

>tfw called to be a poet
>tfw no one follows me
>tfw worst generation to be a poet
>tfw should have been born into computers or plumbing or something fuck

[Anonymous No.23046055]

>>23041978
>art is dying because people don’t consume it

Food is food whether you eat it or not.

[Anonymous No.23046102]

>>23046030
Don't you find peace in self-expression, even if nobody is watching?

[Anonymous No.23046140]

>>23046102
Yes immensely so but art is for sharing too

[Anonymous No.23046158]

>>23046140
Understand that organic art will always be suppressed because corporations and the elite need enter-tain-ment to bind the minds of the masses. To con-tain people's thoughts.

[Anonymous No.23046187]

>>23046030
>tfw always wanted to be an artist but the demiurge gave me a stembrain 3000
At least I can find some solace in 3d modelling

[Anonymous No.23046875]

>>23041978
>unless there is some reading counterculture
That is basically what /lit/ is and has been, OP. I dont know if you have noticed but anyone else outside of /lit/ and maybe a few places on reddit who are reading have only booktok slop like Sarah Maas. No one else, even for the most part academics, keep the classical literary tradition alive other than the autists that poat here.