Have I told you I can’t read contemporary novels anymore? I think it’s because I know too many of the people who write them. I see them all the time at festivals, drinking red wine and talking about who’s publishing who in New York. … Why do they pretend to be obsessed with death and grief and fascism—when really they’re obsessed with whether their latest book will be reviewed in the New York Times?
— Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You
Like so much flotsam in the media slipstream, works classified as ‘alt-lit’ have conglomerated into a mass so large and amorphous as to subsume the entire critical surface, making it impossible to tell what, exactly, alt-lit is supposed to provide an alternative to.
Some notable figures in the current alt-lit scene, Jordan Castro and Matthew Davis, have been discussed at length in previous episodes. Others, like Sean Thor Conroe, Sam Pink, Peter Vack, and Honor Levy are being studied by The Meow Library’s research team. Below are samples from the foregoing authors, along with some from bestselling “mainstream” authors Sally Rooney, Rupi Kaur, Stephen King, and Sam Austen. Can you tell which is truly “alt”?
- “Loneliness is a sign you are in desperate need of yourself.”
- “The question is not whether or not one will suffer, I wrote. The question must necessarily be, What will justify the suffering?”
- “And I saw my reflection in a lake and I waited for it to freeze a little bit so I could break it with my boot.”
- “Life is the thing you bring with you inside your own head.”
- “Do you sometimes look up from the computer and look around the room and know you are alone, I mean really know it, then feel scared?”
- “Get busy living or get busy dying.”
This week’s episode will fill you in on who we think is really pushing the boundaries of expression.
This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library.
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