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.)
In a digital world filled with thousands of celebrities—from musicians to actors to comedians to athletes to reality idiots—and tens of thousands of social media influencers and podcasters representing every and any bizarre subculture you can think of….
You’ll be hard-pressed to name more than a few celebrity authors of fiction.
And even harder-pressed to name a handful under the age of forty-five.
The ones you do will mostly be commercial, fantasy, or Sci-Fi––and most of them are dinosaurs.
Try to name a single celebrity author of literary fiction who represents Millennials and Gen Z.
You can’t. Have you ever wondered why?
It’s not that being a celebrity is important for its own sake, but it does represent where the culture stands at any given moment.
Celebrities are signals of what’s deemed important and relevant now.
What does it say about our culture that we have few, if any, representatives of real literature?
And none who represent the younger generations?
I’ll tell you what it says.
Actually, The Author will (from THE AUTHOR by The Author):
“Culturally we’re fucked but everyone knows that,” I said, before giving a rather brilliant, albeit damning, criticism of the unregulated capitalization of the internet and its devices, a prophesy of the world to come: how we’ll soon bear witness to an emergent phenomena of consumption addicts and broadcast sluts for whom everything’s shareable, sellable, and made to seem unbelievably urgent; how already there’s no longer clear distinctions between art and advertisement, news and opinion, journalism and capitalism, public and private; how by collapsing modes of communication we’re promoting the dumbing down of language to nothing more than beanie baby hieroglyphics.
“It’s fucking retarded!” I shouted with real anger, moved by my feeling moved.
“Worst of all we’ve divested the novel of cultural impact. The novel no longer influences culture because you can’t stream it, tweet it, or scroll through it. Does anyone even read anymore?”
We’re getting dumber, folks.
No one reads literature anymore––especially young people.
Our addictions have become so normalized that it's downright terrifying, if not impossible, for most people to sit down and read a physical book.
That’s why THE AUTHOR by The Author matters.
This book — written by an anonymous A-list celebrity — is literary fiction for the streaming generation. It’s messy, dark, hilarious, and dangerously honest.
Stylistically, it’s like Hunter S. Thompson met with Bret Easton Ellis and David Foster Wallace to write a book for fans of Boogie Nights and Curb Your Enthusiasm.
The Author set out to make literature cool again — to prove that novels can still be as engaging as the best movies and TV shows.
To make us a little bit less stupid and addicted to screens, and more engaged with our own imaginations.
And he succeeded.
