The case for literary optimism

A piece in the New Statesman

For the New Statesman, I made the case for literary optimism. There are points made about fiction, non-fiction, Substack, the revival of literature, and, of course, the common reader.

The fact is that the common reader is still out there. And they can be found in increasingly unlikely places.

The Silicon Valley entrepreneur Patrick Collison said at the end of 2024 that he had read ten classic novels: Bronte, Dickens, Mann, Flaubert, Melville, Eliot, James, Conrad, Woolf, Grossman. Inspired by this, Matthew Yglesias started reading classic fiction too, finishing all of George Eliot’s novels in the first three months of 2025. Kyla Scanlon recently used The Screwtape Letters to analyse the economy. This energy for literature is spreading. Many of my most enthusiastic readers are from Silicon Valley or other non-literary areas. They are reading Tolstoy and Shakespeare. If I want to talk about Iris Murdoch, I am usually better off at a party of STEM and policy nerds than a literature gathering.

I also speculate about why the mood is so often so gloomy among the literati.

Perhaps a lot of the low-beat mood among literary people is not actually about the quality of modern books, but simply about the fact that literature simply isn’t as significant or important as it used to be. One reason why literary people may feel that we are not living in a great period of writing is that the writing that is truly excellent is not the sort of writing they produce. This sounds harsh, but I include myself in this assessment.

So, I think the overall situation is something like this: there is still plenty of good writing, plenty of literary energy, but it is not always in the same places it used to be, and the literary establishment isn’t always well aligned to its audience. We are living through a significant disruption. Instead of responding with despair, we need to adapt. This is fully achievable.

The final section is a call for a new attitude about what is happening online and elsewhere.

Someone is always discovering Tolstoy for the first time. We ought to care a lot more about that.

Read the whole thing at the New Statesman.