THE AUTHOR BLOG

An Apocalypse of the Illiterate

Allow me to scare the shit out of you.‍As of 2022, only 48.5% of American adults reported reading at least one book in the past year.‍This marks a decline from previous years: 52.7% in 2017 and 54.6% in 2012...

Hollywood is Trying to Ban This Book

I’m Daniel Thomas Hind, and I’m the only person outside of his legal team who knows The Author’s true identity.I’m helping The Author publish THE AUTHOR by The Author when no one else will.I’m not a literary agent. I’m not even in the publishing industry...

All Your Literary Heroes are Dead

Our generation has no Hemingway. No Twain, no Fitzgerald, no Salinger, no Didion. We don’t even have a Bret Easton Ellis or Chuck Palahniuk. (Sure, both authors are alive and writing. But they no longer occupy the front row of the culture’s collective attention, as they did in the 90s and 00s, respectively...

A Message from The Author

The Author has asked me to share a piece he wrote for you that describes his “origin” story as an author. Here you go: “In February 2020 I moved to a cabin in the middle of nowhere to write a novel.Up until that point, I had spent my entire adult life making films, achieving a level of self-actualization that few even dare to dream of—fulfilling one of the most celebrated and clichéd aspirations the collective imagination has ever envisioned.But it wasn’t my dream...

My Review of THE AUTHOR by The Author

I’m one of the few people in the world who knows The Author’s true identity. My name is Daniel Thomas Hind, and not only have I read the novel but I’ve actively worked on it––from multiple rounds of editing, to proofreading, copyediting––and am now representing it, when nobody else will, to get it out into the world. Today I’m going to tell you why I love it so much and why I’m dedicating my life to its publication and success...

THE AUTHOR by The Author and The Catcher in the Rye: The Disaffected Protagonist in a Fractured World

Few novels have captured the voice of youthful alienation as profoundly as The Catcher in the Rye (1951). J.D. Salinger’s classic gave the world Holden Caulfield, the archetype of disillusioned youth—cynical, hypersensitive, and searching for authenticity in a world he deems phony.More than seventy years later, THE AUTHOR by The Author picks up the thread of that alienation, refracting it through the hyper-mediated, clout-obsessed world of contemporary fame...

Less Than Zero and THE AUTHOR by The Author: The Hand-Off from One Lost Generation to the Next

When Less Than Zero was published in 1985, it was immediately recognized as a generational text, capturing the disaffected, pleasure-seeking nihilism of the young and wealthy in Los Angeles. Bret Easton Ellis, only 21 at the time, wrote with a detached, affectless style that mirrored the emotional vacancy of his characters—kids with endless money, numbed by sex, drugs, and an overwhelming sense of nothing matters. The novel’s protagonist, Clay, drifts through LA during his winter break from college, moving from party to party, bed to bed, line to line, witnessing horrors that he neither resists nor fully registers...

How Leaving the Atocha Station Shaped THE AUTHOR by The Author

From its opening pages, THE AUTHOR by The Author announces itself as a novel that exists in a constant state of self-examination, blurring the line between reality and fiction, between artistic ambition and self-mythology. This preoccupation places it squarely in the lineage of contemporary “autofiction”—a tradition in which an author’s real life is transformed into a semi-fictionalized narrative, constantly questioning its own legitimacy. And if there is one book that serves as a lodestar for this style, it is Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station...

Infinite Jest and its Influence on THE AUTHOR by The Author

Few novels loom as large in contemporary literature as David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996). A sprawling, labyrinthine tome of postmodern complexity, it is at once a satire of American excess, a meditation on entertainment culture, and a deeply personal investigation of addiction in its many forms—substance, media, self-image, and attention...

My Struggle and its Influence on THE AUTHOR by The Author

Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle is one of the most radical literary undertakings of the 21st century—a six-volume, 3,600-page excavation of the author’s own life, rendered in obsessive, excruciating detail. It is a book (or series of books) that blurs the boundary between fiction and memoir, pushing the limits of self-exposure and testing the patience of the reader...

Jesus’ Son and THE AUTHOR by The Author: The Poetry of the Broken

Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son (1992) is one of the most raw, hallucinatory, and deeply felt works of American fiction. A collection of interwoven stories narrated by an unnamed drifter—known only as “Fuckhead”—the book is a fever dream of addiction, redemption, and the fleeting beauty found in life’s most desperate moments. Johnson’s prose is both sparse and lyrical, capturing the surreal rhythms of a life lived on the margins, where violence and grace exist side by side...

From The Sun Also Rises to THE AUTHOR by The Author: A Lost Generation Reborn in the Digital Age

Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) captured the disillusionment of the Lost Generation—young men and women who, in the aftermath of World War I, found themselves adrift in a world that no longer made sense. It was a novel about movement, about drinking and fighting and sex, about people trying desperately to find meaning in a culture that seemed to have abandoned it. Its characters—led by the aimless yet deeply wounded Jake Barnes—wander from Paris to Pamplona, seeking purpose, seeking sensation, but mostly just filling time...

From On The Road to THE AUTHOR by The Author: A Lost Generation Reborn in the Digital Age

Few novels have captured the restless spirit of American youth like Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. First published in 1957, On the Road chronicled the ecstatic, often reckless journeys of Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty as they crisscrossed the country in search of experience, self-discovery, and a meaning beyond the mundane...

THE AUTHOR by The Author and Post Office: The Literary Legacy of the Loser

Charles Bukowski’s Post Office and THE AUTHOR by The Author are, on the surface, wildly different novels. One is about a washed-up drunk scraping by in a dead-end government job; the other follows a nameless aspiring artist trying to claw his way into Hollywood in pursuit of fame. But beneath their differences, both novels explore the same essential question...