The Art of Manliness posted about nine writers that are carrying the torch for men’s fiction. It’s not really a secret that most modern fiction is marketed towards women, but I wonder exactly how a story can have a gender. It’s an absurd notion on its head because only people have genders, not words on a page or airy things like narratives. I find it to be as silly a categorization as “chick lit” but if you’re a publishing giant trying to generate demand, then summoning genres out of nowhere might be a good idea.
Anyways, the list includes the yucky The Road
and The Interrogative Mood. That last one held my interest at first blush until I realized it was too gimmicky to be worthwhile. An entire book of disjointed questions and no narrative? Not fiction. Write a poem, please. My guess is that Harper-Collins rightly thought that no one buys poetry books anymore, especially men, so Powell’s editor strongarmed him into taking out the hard carriage returns and forming paragraphs in random places.
American Rust, about a cross-country roadtrip that leads to a murder, seems promising. And Philip Meyer is bald, the surest sign that an author knows “men’s issues” better than anyone.