Some commentators have offered data to support the narrative: prizes, bestseller lists, Stegner Fellowships, the gender composition of publishing professionals, readerships for fiction. Jacob Savage writes, “not a single white American man born after 1984 has published a work of literary fiction in The New Yorker,” which isn’t quite true: the magazine published Adam Ehrlich Sachs. Since Savage’s claim, the magazine also published Nathan Blum and Andrew Martin.

Here I bring in a new tranche of data: short stories. Over the last few months, with Claude Code, I gathered data for 211 literary magazines, spanning 1841–2026, which amounts to more than 289,000 stories and 63,000 authors. Some of this data—especially twentieth-century pulps and slicks—is drawn from the Fiction Magazine Index, a crowdsourced project created by William G. Contento and edited by Phil Stephensen-Payne. Nora Shaalan provided the foundation for the New Yorker data.

According to this data, women have more than tripled their share of the short stories in these 211 magazines. Women outpublished men in the mid-nineteenth century, underwent a precipitous decline in the 1880s, 1890s, and 1900s, hovered around 20% from the 1910s through the 1970s, before climbing decade-by-decade, only exceeding men in the 2020s, for the first time in 150 years at 54.6%.

In short: men have been receding from the short story, but from such a position of dominance that women have only just passed parity.

I will discuss the data in more detail momentarily and provide a table that allows you to see the trend for each magazine. But first: we have reason to believe my numbers roughly correspond to reality. They are corroborated by those in “The Transformation of Gender in English-Language Fiction” by Ted Underwood, David Bammon, and Sabrina Lee. Underwood et al chart changes in the authorship of books—rather than magazine stories—held by the digital library, HathiTrust. Across 104,000 books, mostly from 1780 to 2007, they find erratic numbers in the early years of the nineteenth century, which stabilize around the 1830s with women around 30%, climbing to parity in the 1860s and 1870s, before dropping to their nadir in the 1920s, under 25%, then slowly climbing to 40% early in the twenty-first century. Our charts don’t map onto each other perfectly, but closely enough that it seems there’s a there there.

Let me address the main reason why Underwood et al’s numbers and mine might be skewed against women: romance. HathiTrust’s holdings come from university libraries and inherit their biases. Do university libraries select against fiction by women? We don’t know. We know they select against mass market genre fiction. But it is probably true more of such fiction is by men. Men dominated adventure, mystery, science fiction, and western. Women dominated romance. Romance was popular from 1900–1960, but it really blossomed in the 1970s and 1980s. As for my data, the worry is that the Fiction Magazine Index underrepresents romance—which it does, it’s true. I have attempted to address this by overrepresenting the Index’s romance holdings in my own data. As far as I know, there is no complete or comprehensive bibliographic data on pulp magazines, so we cannot know for certain how far from exact my data is. But I believe any errors would fail to meaningfully change the narrative. See Underwood et al for further corroborations of the general trend, if you’d like. (Their essay is fascinating and entirely worth your time.)

Not only that: out of curiosity, I ran the numbers for bestsellers and prizes. I used the New York Times hardcover fiction bestsellers from data published by Jordan Pruett in the Post45 Data Collective. That data only runs through 2020. Things might have changed in the last five years. But women are very close to, but have not quite reached, parity.

For prizes, I used the finalists and winners of the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize from 2000-2025. I drew some of this from the Index of Major Literary Prizes, published by Claire Grossman, Juliana Spahr, and Stephanie Young in the Post45 Data Collective. Women represent, again, just under 50%. If we just look at 2016-2025, the numbers are nearly identical to the story numbers for the 2020s. Women climb to 52.7%.

Again and again, it seems that after decades of underrepresentation, women have, in recent years, approached or just achieved parity, which is the backdrop against which we hear about fears that literary men are disappearing.

One caveat. One dataset shows more extensive advances for women: The National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships, published by Alexander Manshel in the Post45 Data Collective. By my calculation, women exceeded parity with 56% of the fellowships in the 2010s and reached 60% in the 2020s, with nonbinary writers winning 9.1%, leaving men with 30.9%.

Fiction in the US has undergone a tremendous demographic transformation in the last fifty years. Men have lost a lot of ground, which women have gained. But the way some commentators have written about it, you’d think men are, as the New York Times headline suggested, disappearing. Hardly! Women have just caught up.

Let’s look a little more at the short story data. I find the details the most interesting. In the early- and mid-twentieth century, magazines were highly segregated by gender, a segregation that has mostly evaporated. In the 1930s, a woman writing short fiction was typically publishing in a magazine that was nearly half women, while a man, in the same decade, was typically publishing in one that was one-eighth women. In the 2020s, a woman typically publishes in a magazine that is 57.2% women; a man, 50.3% women. (In technical terms, Duncan’s index moves from 54.5% in the 1930s to 17.6% in the 2010s. Theil’s index moves from 0.341 in the 1930s to 0.039 in the 2010s.)

How about the extremes? Across 6364 stories published in Adventure (1910–1953) 1.5% were by women. Dime Detective (1931–1953)? 0.4% women. Of the 2613 published in All-Story Love (1932–1939), 90% were by women. Playboy, a major venue for fiction, was about 2% women in the 1960s, 5% in the 1970s, 4% in the 1980s, and 7% in the 1990s.

About one-third of those Playboy stories written by women? By Joyce Carol Oates.

You can explore the visualization below to see how different magazines shifted with time. Most follow the general trend. The New Yorker was 32% women in the 1970s, 52% in the 2020s. Harper’s was 32% in the 1980s, 56% in the 2020s. Ploughshares was 29% in the 1970s, 59% in the 2020s.

A few resist the trend. Women have remained in 30s in Hobart across the twenty-first century. Santa Monica Review has hovered around 40%. Beneath Ceaseless Skies has declined from 53% women in the 2000s to 43% in the 2020s. Threepenny Review: 57% in the 1990s, 46% in the 2020s. The Baffler, with its quite small output, at 34% in the 2010s, 33% int he 2020s. But take a look for yourself, explore:

Methodological Note:

I was conservative in assigning gender. I relied on Wikidata, self-identification, peer-reviewed data, or pronoun inference from three or more reliable sources. I did not infer gender from names (as Underwood et al, for instance, did). Would it make a difference for my results if I resolved all unknown genders? I tested this by doing rigorous name-inference, which I did not use for the final results, but learned that it would raise women’s percentages marginally—as much as 5% in the 1860s, for which our data is quite sparse, and as little as 0.1% for the 2020s, where we have pretty good coverage for gender already. In short, resolving gender would be unlikely to make a significant difference in the narrative these results suggest.

My corpus is far from perfect. It is missing big chunks of important magazines, such as Epoch, Prairie Schooner, and TriQuarterly; it is missing important magazines I couldn’t get because of archival challenges, like Fence, Grand Street, Michigan Quarterly, and Tin House. Again, I don’t think having these would change the story significantly. I selected modern magazines in large part by following Erika Krouse’s rankings. I did not get every magazine she ranks—not even half. At a certain point it seemed like diminishing returns.

I’m sure there are errors in here. If you find some, feel free to reach out. I’d like to make this work better.

My knowledge felt piecemeal. I didn’t know what it added up to. I didn’t know how these writers fit into traditions of the short story. I didn’t know who they thought of as their interlocutors, who they published with, who I was missing. So I thought I might gather some data.

I used Claude Code to build a spreadsheet with every story (with its date, its author, their gender, their MFA if they have one) in Granta, Kenyon Review, Missouri Review, Ploughshares. That worked. I gathered more. I got The Drift and Ecotone and Hobart and n+1 and Wigleaf. I got Argosy and Cosmopolitan and The Saturday Evening Post. I now have 191 magazines, with more than 57,000 writers and more than 264,000 stories.

What use is this? I can do a lot with it. I can run social network analysis to see which writers tend to cluster among the same magazines, giving me an overview of literary communities at various scales. I can see which MFA programs have special relationships with which journals. I can see the gender breakdown over time of the contributors to each journal. Just gathering and getting an overview of the data is illuminating: I had no idea that the early twentieth century pulps were so vast. There is a pulp writer in this admittedly very incomplete dataset who published six hundred and twelve stories, another who published seven hundred and fifty-five, another—god bless H. Bedford-Jones, King of the Pulps—who published eight hundred.

I can also build (heuristic! hyperfallible!) power rankings to see who my education foregrounded and who I’ve overlooked. I build these rankings by putting the story data in conversation with anthologization: Best American Short Stories, O. Henry, Pushcart; and with credentials data I have: who attended MacDowell, won a Guggenheim, a MacArthur, an National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Nobel, a PEN/Malamud, a Rona Jaffe, won or was a finalist for an National Book Award, an National Book Critics Circle Award, a Pulitzer, a Story Prize. I cobbled together a formula that grants fractions of points for each story, a point for each venue, two points for each anthology appearance, one point for NEA or MacDowell, three for a Nobel, and two for the other credentials.

Some of this data comes from the amazing Post45 Data Collective (okay I cofounded it, used to edit it, and sit on the editorial board), which peer reviews and publishes literary and cultural datasets open access: the NEA data comes from there, published by Alexander Manshel, with his team. Major prize data, including the NBA and Pulitzer, came from Claire Grossman, Juliana Spahr, and Stephanie Young’s dataset. I also use Jordan Pruett’s NYT Hardcover Bestseller Fiction dataset. Nora Shaalan helped with the New Yorker data.

I share several variations on the rankings below. There’s the full rankings, which include stories dating as far back as 1841 and as recent as this year. To get a clearer sense of the contemporary short story, I also am sharing a version with only writers who published their first story (in this dataset, not necessarily in their life) after 1980 and another for those who published their first after 2000. I’m cutting these off at the top 1000 for now.

Two things. (1) It’s clear that Joyce Carol Oates is the GOAT. She blows the rest out of the water, even Munro and Updike. I did not know her lore. (2) HUGE CAVEAT!! Before you get mad, remember: this dataset is partial; it is missing a lot; it is missing almost every publication outside the United States—I’m trained as an Americanist and, by training, profoundly provincial; it is missing many years from O. Henry and Pushcart, which I plan to get; it is missing big chunks of some magazines, such as Epoch, Prairie Schooner, and TriQuarterly; it is missing magazines I couldn’t get because of archival challenges and some of these are very important, like Fence, Grand Street, Iowa Review, Michigan Quarterly, and, maybe most of all, Tin House, not to mention the very partial representation of the pre–WWII scene, here. So writers who appeared often in Tin House, say, like Charles Baxter, Stuart Dybek, Deborah Eisenberg, and Joy Williams, should be ranked even higher than they already are. It is, again, a fallible heuristic. But it also has surfaced writers I had, indeed, overlooked. It turns out that Peter Orner and George Singleton and Laura van den Berg are among the most recognized short story talents of our time. I did not know.

Finally: this is a work-in-progress and I am all ears for feedback. I’m still early in this work. I believe it’s valuable to share my work as I go, to make what I’m doing an occasion for public conversation. If you have magazines, anthologies, or credentials you think I should get, let me know. Even better: if you have data you want to share, let me know. If you find mistakes, let me know, if you have tips you feel like sharing about how to make this better, let me know. If you think my ranking algorithm ranks some people too high or some people too low, let me know. I plan on eventually making all the data public, probably next year. I’d like this to be widely useful and to be as robust as it can be. Maybe later I’ll post some other analyses. But for now…

It was wartime but no matter. They were inspired by avant-gardes, ran with Futurists, scorned their professors, gave vivid talks at cafes, and carried on into the night at the home of Lilya and Osip Brik under the auspices of what they called the Society for the Study of Poetic Language, or OPOYAZ. Shklovksy was the group’s enfant terrible, a graphomaniac and trickster who wrote in aphorisms, wrote to provoke, would reject the Bolsheviks, wrangle with Trotsky, go mute under Stalin, and manage to survive into the 1980s as a curious old man, strikingly bald, enjoying a small renaissance.

He is remembered, when he is remembered—anthologized, cited, taught—for “Art as Device,” published some months after he drafted it, in 1917. Specifically, he is remembered for a passage where he says what art is for. “Routine actions become automatic,” he wrote. Our sensorium is blunted by habit. And then:

Automatization eats things, clothes, furniture, your wife, and the fear of war. ‘If the complex lives of people go on unconsciously, then it is as if they had never been.’ And so, what we call art exists to give back the sensation of life, to make us feel things, to make the stone stony. The goal of art is to create the sensation of seeing, and not merely recognizing, things; the device of art is the ‘ostranenie’ of things and the complication of the form, which increases the duration and complexity of perception, as the process of perception is its own end in art and must be prolonged.

Ostranenie became a slogan of modernism. Defamiliarize. Estrange. Make the stone stony. I like Alexandra Berlina’s unruly translation: enstrange, enstrangement, not real words, but neither was ostranenie, which, derived from strannyi, or strange, ought to have another n, which Shklovsky left off by mistake. Many years later, Shklovsky said, “it went off without its n, and is roaming the world like a dog with an ear cut off.” A concept for making new by making strange ought itself have a name that trips us, defies autocorrect. Defamiliarization and estrangement privilege undoing and distance; enstrangement reminds us that the point is to be astonished.

I am rarely astonished like I once was. It feels like an erosion of aging. A peregrine falcon squats on a branch outside my house as if holding watch. Lydia Davis writes a very short story in her surgical deadpan about a mother who tells her daughter to sleep in a hole in the ground forever. I know, as a light tickling at something asleep inside me, that I ought to be astonished. Instead, if I linger over the falcon or Davis at all, it is to explain: Atlanta is a city where falcons live; Davis uses compression, exaggeration, and irony to express repressed emotion. (Express like oil from an olive?) Instances become types, phenomena taken care of by reason. My daughter, in the bath, is astonished by the plop made by bath crayons when she drops them in the water and the pffft that follows from their splash; she looks at me in conspiracy, as if I must be astonished, too. The stars, the president’s quotidian crimes, my wife alight in brown overalls. Shklovsky already saw that routine eats even your wife, the fear of war. What is astonishing is that he still believed that art might astonish, bring it all back.

I could give up on literature. Why not? Maybe this is how it is: after the climax of adolescence, mind sparking at Thomas Pynchon’s sentences, ripping aflame, the intensity only wanes. Why continue? I don’t have to. A choice I made at seventeen, a commitment to books, need not govern the rest of my life. I could put my limited time toward chess or pottery.

Not yet. I will, instead, learn whether I can see what Shklovsky meant. After years of muted but rising melancholia I am embarking on a project to explore perception when reading, to revive my capacity for it. Even in his 80s, Shklovsky could say, “Art is continuous astonishment. Wonder gives rise to a new perception of the world, man feels the world, makes it his own. Because of art it’s as if we take off our gloves, rub our eyes, and see reality for the first time.” Maybe he was full of shit, living his schtick. But maybe not.

But also a funny thing happened.

Almost two years ago, I was robbed by someone who really loves Checkers, the fast food drive-thru chain.

I was on a wilderness canoe trip when Wells Fargo notified me of unusual activity on my debit card. I returned to civilization to find that someone had somehow counterfeited my card—I still held the physical thing—withdrew $1000, spent hundreds more at Autozone, and ate at Checkers. I canceled the card and changed my checking account. Two weeks later, my new debit card, for my new checking account, was, disturbingly, counterfeited by, spending habits DEFINITELY suggest, the same person. The second time, this person again withdrew $1000, spent hundreds more at Autozone, and ate at Checkers. This time also they wrote a $250 check—one of my checks, so they’d stolen those—to “Kush.”

Wells Fargo, at first, only covered the $250 check, leaving me out about $4000. I spent many, many hours on the phone with various people who finally explained to me that, according to Wells Fargo, counterfeiting a debit card is so thoroughly difficult, that they simply didn’t believe me, and thought I was trying to defraud them. I was obviously pissed. I kept calling and I cannot say that I, in the end, acquitted myself graciously.

I also wrote to the FDIC, which did, in the end, lead to Wells Fargo covering, for some reason, just one of the two robberies, getting about $2000 back to me. But I was never able to recover the other $2000. Finally, I gave up. Time passed. I forgot about it, more or less.

Until a few days ago. An unusual looking envelope came in the mail for me from Wells Fargo Customer Care’s remediation department. I opened it:

“Subject: Check for the former Wells Fargo account ending in XXXX

Dear DANIEL N SINYKIN,

We identified that after a review of your account, you are owed additional funds for your previously submitted claim. To address this, we are enclosing a check for $1.00. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.”

Motherfuckers.

I’ll take a moment to explain the graph.

The vertical axis runs from platform on the bottom to publisher on the top. Platform = internet platform. AO3, Wattpad, KDP, Substack, born-digital magazines. I also use it, here, crudely to mark how “online” a work or author is. Publisher = traditional publisher. Someone who is entirely offline and only in public through their publisher will be at the top of the graph.

The horizontal axis runs from heteronomous on the left to autonomous on the right. This is a distinction from sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. In a rough-and-ready sense, heteronomous means the work or author values something other than art (money, popularity, connection). Autonomous means the work or author values art above all.

The grid is a vulgarization of a Greimas square, from the Lithuanian linguist Algirdas Greimas, popularized by theorist Fredric Jameson as a way to organize culture at scale, though this version also owes a lot to Bourdieu’s field theory.

On the autonomous side of platform lit we find a refuge for so-called canceled writers no longer at home with publishers, such as Sherman Alexie, Junot Díaz, and Tao Lin. Here, too, we find young writers disaffected with liberal and left culture who gathered around the neighborhood of Dimes Square in downtown New York City. These are descendants of Tyrant Books: periodicals such as Forever Magazine and The Mars Review; and writers such as Jordan Castro, Madeline Cash, Matthew Gasda, and Honor Levy. Neoreactionary Curtis Yarvin is intellectual godfather of this scene and links it to Silicon Valley through Peter Thiel, who funds some of it. The politics, like that of old avant-gardes such as Futurism and Vorticism, is illiberal, as espoused by Compact magazine, the Red Scare podcast, and Bronze Age Pervert. Substack is the platform of choice.

Like Gay Fantasia, fiction here expresses a sincerity enabled by a rejection of the culture of traditional publishing. “They’re trying to carve out their own space,” writes critic Sam Kriss, “away from the prissy bullshit of the mainstream literary world, where they can write something real.” They strive “toward a mode of writing that’s unmannered, unaffected, and natural.” They want “raw surging nowness.” Unlike Gay Fantasia, the sincerity of this fiction is not in pursuit of fan service or customer satisfaction but Art. They want to create literature that is new and will last.

The editors of Forever Magazine want “prose that isn’t risk-averse.” They privilege “style over plot.” They “really care about language.” Prizing novelty, they make themselves illegible to the industry’s conservative logic grounded in justifying acquisitions by similarity to what has worked recently—until, at least, they find success among their restricted but culturally capitalized audience, which clout-hunters in the industry can then leverage. Unlike the Art Novel, home in the upper-right corner, this fiction is steeped in the internet, which suffuses the style: absurdist, garish, often larded with online jargon. “Our readerly sensibility has become more unhinged,” say the editors of Forever Magazine. “It takes more to get our attention.” The fiction here tends iconoclastic, anti–cancel culture, anti-woke. The leading contradiction is between the impulse toward novelty and a pull toward old ways, often expressed by affection for Catholicism, or Simone Weil. “‘Reject modernity, embrace tradition,’” offers one of the editors of Forever Magazine, as a slogan. “I think that’s reflected in what was initially the sort of godly aesthetic of the website. And now we kind of just want it to be an expansive heaven, something symbolic of ‘forever.’” Similarly, Noah Kumin, editor of The Mars Review, wants “to destroy the literary practice of modernism,” which he defines as “the immense overvaluation of individual subjectivity in literary art” and which, he argues, “has led literature to a dead end.” He wants instead what he calls, borrowing from Aldous Huxley, “perennialism”: “the belief that an ancient wisdom older than (or at least developing separately from) the Abrahamic religions is at the core of a mysterious mode of thought.”

(Curtis Yarvin also links Dimes Square to Silicon Valley rationalism through his early important role with Eliezer Yudkowsky’s blog LessWrong. Yudkowsky expressed his ideas most famously in his novel Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, which runs 660,000 words and 122 chapters and is thus something like All the Young Dudes in a funhouse mirror. Yudkowsky is best known for arguing that superintelligent AI will annihilate humanity. Though he has disavowed Yarvin, he is an illiberal technocrat skeptical of democracy.)

For its illiberalism, its vanguardist fondness for tradition, its flirtations with fascism, I call this type Avant-Fash.

99. The Lost Scrapbook, Evan Dara

98. Hothouse Bloom, Austyn Wohlers

97. Pachinko, Min Jin Lee

96. Lesser Ruins, Mark Haber

95. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers

94. Go Tell It on the Mountain, James Baldwin

93. Matrix, Lauren Groff

92. The Baudelaire Fractal, Lisa Robertson

91. What Belongs to You, Garth Greenwell

90. Erasure, Percival Everett

89. The Awakening, Kate Chopin

88. Confessions of the Fox, Jordy Rosenberg

87. Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston

86. 10:04, Ben Lerner

85. Rejection, Tony Tulathimutte

84. The Intuitionist, Colson Whitehead

83. Boredom, Albert Moravia

82. Sula, Toni Morrison

81. The Conversions, Harry Mathews

80. Outline, Rachel Cusk

79. White Noise, Don DeLillo

78. Day of the Locust, Nathanael West

77. Oreo, Fran Ross

76. Stone Butch Blues, Leslie Feinberg

75. In the Distance, Hernan Diaz

74. I Hotel, Karen Tei Yamashita

73. A Different Drummer, William Melvin Kelley

72. Wittgenstein’s Mistress, David Markson

71. The Mezzanine, Nicholson Baker

70. Just Above My Head, James Baldwin

69. The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston

68. The Talented Mr. Ripley, Patricia Highsmith

67. Herzog, Saul Bellow

66. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, John le Carré

65. Ragtime, E. L. Doctorow

64. Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace

63. The Making of Americans, Gertrude Stein

62. The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje

61. Zeroville, Steve Erickson

60. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

59. A View of the Harbor, Elizabeth Taylor

58. The Secret History, Donna Tartt

57. Two Serious Ladies, Jane Bowles

56. The Beginning of Spring, Penelope Fitzgerald

55. The Wings of the Dove, Henry James

54. The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov

53. A Personal Matter, Kenzaburō Ōe

52. A Mercy, Toni Morrison

51. The Names, Don DeLillo

50. The Flamethrowers, Rachel Kushner

49. Disgrace, J. M. Coetzee

48. Party Going, Henry Green

47. Light Years, James Salter

46. Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison

45. The Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad

44. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark

43. Fools Crow, James Welch

42. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, Italo Calvino

41. Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry

40. The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner

39. The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro

38. Fun Home, Alison Bechdel

37. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce

36. Mating, Norman Rush

35. Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson

34. Hurricane Season, Fernanda Melchor

33. The Recognitions, William Gaddis

32. Speedboat, Renata Adler

31. Mason & Dixon, Thomas Pynchon

30. The Lover, Marguerite Duras

29. The Castle, Franz Kafka

28. Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen

27. Austerlitz, W. G. Sebald

26. Go Down, Moses, William Faulkner

25. The Counterlife, Philip Roth

24. My Struggle, Karl Ove Knausgaard

23. The Neapolitan Novels, Elena Ferrante

22. One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez

21. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen

20. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov

19. Either/Or, Soren Kierkegaard

18. Middlemarch, George Eliot [in the middle of reading now]

17. Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, Marguerite Young

16. The Trial, Franz Kafka

15. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy

14. Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov

13. Septology, Jon Fosse

12. Solenoid, Mircea Cǎrtǎrescu

11. Moby-Dick, Herman Mellville

10. Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert

9. Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy

8. Absalom, Absalom!, William Faulkner

7. Miss Lonelyhearts, Nathanael West

6. To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf

5. Ulysses, James Joyce

4. Beloved, Toni Morrison

3. 2666, Roberto Bolaño

2. Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon

1. J R, William Gaddis

Gay Fantasia

All the Young Dudes, by MsKingBean89, is a work of Harry Potter fan fiction published at Archive of Our Own, or AO3. It is more than 500,000 words long across 118 chapters. It has more than 47,000 comments and 19,000,000 hits, placing it among the most popular works of fiction of the twenty-first century. In fan fiction parlance, it ships, or sets into a romantic relationship, Remus Lupin and Sirius Black. Chuck Tingle, the pseudonymous author of hundreds of books of algorithmic erotica, also writes Harry Potter fan fiction, like Trans Wizard Harry Porber and the Theater of Love. Other titles by Tingle include Bigfoot Pirates Haunt My Balls, Bigfoot Sommelier Butt Tasting, and This American Butt Hosted by Ira Ass, not to mention his Pounded in the Butt series, which arguably culminated with Pounded in the Butt by My Book Pounded in the Butt by My Book Pounded in the Butt by My Book Pounded in the Butt by My Own Butt.

Tingle’s Tinglers share the mechanical repetition of the Slop Novel, but with the repetition retooled to express involuted ironic internet mania. The Tinglers recombinatorily absorb the wild proliferation of niche genres across platforms, such as billionaire romance, monsterotica, and asexual aromance. They distill the logic of the lower left corner of the field, what I’m calling Gay Fantasia. Novels here tend to diverge from heterosexuality and to express, in pursuit of ever more finely categorized readerships, an unbridled inventiveness with gender as with genre, making of both a fantasia.

Mode of production shapes form, genre, and style. The internet facilitates scales and velocities that radically outpace traditional publishing. Relation to capital is highly variable. Amazon’s self-publishing platform, KDP, invites an imagined approximation of the Hayekian fantasy of perfect markets, meeting every readerly desire; because these desires become so niche they negate profitability; they only reify into viability at critical masses for making a living at the top fractions of popularity. Most KDP fiction, then, like all AO3 fanfic, lacks a substantive relation to capital, which evacuates the work of cynicism in favor of an earnest baring of the perversions of desire. Even Tingle’s ironic combinatory genius serves his serious slogan, “Love is Real.” Stylistically the work is amateur, raw, unpolished, often typo-ridden. Whereas the industry uses standard lengths, constrained by market research, distribution demands, and the cost of paper, gay fantasia on KDP, Wattpad, and AO3 experiments with length and thus pacing and narrative time. And foundational is what scale, velocity, and a loose relation to capital enables in terms of the explosive experimentalism with genre.

1

Late in his life the great philologist Erich Auerbach instructed readers how to love the world. Born a German Jew, he lost his professorship at Marburg under the Nuremberg Laws in 1936 and fled to Istanbul where he wrote Mimesis, an account of realism in Western literature from Homer to Virginia Woolf. After the war, he moved to the United States, eventually securing a position at Yale. He smoked, had hypertension. He looked at an ascendant America, an embryonic Israel, Europe in ruins. He wrote, “We must now return—albeit under different conditions—to what the pre-nation-state culture of the Middle Ages already possessed, to the knowledge that the human spirit itself is not national.” He quoted Hugh of Saint Victor, a twelfth-century canon regular. “The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land.” This was not, for Auerbach, about the Christian life to come, but about this life.

II

An apocalyptic fever consumed the Jews of the Pale of Settlement, the western frontier of the Russian Empire, where the tsar mandated Jews live, where the largest population of world Jewry lived. Revolutionary socialists, Narodnaya Volya, The People’s Will, assassinated Tsar Alexander II, bombed his carriage. Rumors of Jewish conspirators sparked pogroms across southern Ukraine—the Storms of the South—catalyzing latent ferment. Narodnaya Volya’s executive committee made its position clear. “The people in the Ukraine suffer worst of all from the Jews. Who takes the land, the woods, the taverns from out of your hands? The Jews. From whom does the muzhik, often with tears in his eyes, have to beg permission to get to his own field, his own plot of land?—the Jews. Wherever you look, wherever you go—the Jews are everywhere. The Jew curses you, cheats you, drinks your blood.” Everywhere, fear. It felt like the end: the end of the Jew in Russia, the end of shtetl life. It felt like the beginning: a new exodus. It was 1881. Messiahs flourished.

America or Palestine. America was vast, absorptive, promised equal rights, freedom of religion, had mostly obliterated the natives. Palestine belonged to the Ottoman Empire, Jews would be subjects of the sultan, who wasn’t exactly keen on their coming—and Palestinians lived there. But it was Eretz Yisrael.

Colonization societies sprung up, hundreds of pioneers established settlements, funded by Baron Edmund de Rothschild from Paris. In 1882, Leo Pinsker published Autoemancipation!, calling for territorial sovereignty fourteen years before Theodore Herzl’s The Jewish State. Far more—tens of thousands—sought support from aid organizations in Paris, London, and New York to go to America, most to the Lower East Side where Jewish socialism blossomed among the tenements. A few were flung across the country to be farmers: Louisiana, Arkansas, Kansas. Sinykins to South Dakota on dispossessed Lakota land, now Jew Flats.

Back in the Pale, the fever broke. Hundreds of thousands—eventually millions—would leave, most to America, but millions would stay, the old world did not end, not yet. Only very few settlers persisted in Palestine and they lived with the supervisors installed by their patron, Rothschild, who wanted them to model simplicity and orthodoxy, to farm small plots and dress like the locals.

∞

Shloyme Zanvl Rappoport did not note the assassination of the tsar in his diary nor the pogroms that came after. He was busy corrupting the shtetl youth of Liozno. Born in a shtetl himself, his family moved to Vitebsk soon after, a small Belarussian city with a large Jewish population. His single mother ran a tavern where he grew up, absorbing street dialects and listening to the gossip and gripes of the drunk and poor. His best friend was a rich kid, Chaim Zhitlowsky. They read together: Haskalah, novels, Rappoport loved Les Misérables, which taught him, “it is enough to give one’s life for a conviction.”

Just seventeen, he went to Liozno and claimed to be a Russian tutor—an early mask in a life rich with them—leading Hasidic children off the path with heretical Haskalah texts. One day he left his diary unsecured, his landlady’s daughter found it, and, delighted, read its denigrations of the townspeople to a group of friends. The next day, one student’s mother told him, “I hired you to teach my girls to read and write, but not for you to write down that my Yakhninka’s nose is dirty, and that my Fridinka has big teeth, and that I go about in a bedraggled dress. I can assure you that even if I wear a bedraggled dress, whatever I put in the garbage is worth more than you.” He stuck around Liozno a little longer before leaving for the Russian heartland, enamored with the narod, the folk, socialist populism, sometimes teaching, sometimes working in the salt mines: “I felt I was in some legendary underground palace. In the light of some ten lamps, everything,” he wrote, “sparkled like millions of diamonds, stunning in its amazing beauty.”

But the beauty did not extend to the miners, subject to the iniquities of capitalism that tore them from their folk traditions. “All this, like slime, sucks in the weaker worker who comes from his home with the best intentions; it depraves him, forces him to forget his home, his family, his village, his agricultural interests, and it turns him into ‘a pure miner,’ in the full ugly meaning of the word.” To save the folk, the tsar—the new tsar—and his ministers had to die.

III

As a teenager in Odessa, Vladimir Jabotinsky was happy, and he was trouble. He skipped school and sassed back at soldiers. He did his classmates’ homework for pay. He wrote a set of essays on what I did last summer, inventing something new for each client. He and his friends produced a newspaper, Pravda, on a hectograph; he was a columnist; he bragged that his editor wielded his blue pencil most with him to avoid the school censor. While Nietzsche lay silenced and suffering from syphilis under his sister’s care a thousand miles to the northwest in Weimar, Jabotinsky cultivated a Nietzschean individualism, a belief in the primacy of the will. He didn’t think much about being a Jew.

In 1898, at seventeen, he—like many young Jews from the Pale—traveled West, to Switzerland, where, without a high school degree, he matriculated as a law student. On Bern’s narrow medieval streets he encountered ex-shtetl Jews, utterly unlike his cosmopolitan brethren from Odessa, and, “with their queer dress and manners,” they inspired in him an “instinctive revulsion.” He wrote, “I looked away in silence and asked: Can this people be mine?”

Nevertheless, he went to a lecture by an eccentric socialist Zionist, after which he wrote, “I don’t know if I’m a socialist, because I’m not yet well enough versed in the theory of it, but I’m certainly a Zionist, because the Jewish people is a dreadful one. Its neighbors hate it for good reasons. Its only hope of avoiding a ‘Bartholomew’s night’”—the massacre of thousands of Huguenots by Catholics in France in 1572—“is to move to Palestine.” For his part, after a few months, he moved to Rome. (He’d only gone to Bern because his mother wanted him to be around Russian Jews.) There he worked as correspondent, culture writer, and theater critic for an Odessa paper and lived a loud bohemian life, forgetting about his people again for a while.

∞

In 1861, Tsar Alexander II emancipated the serfs, more than twenty million people, more than a third of the empire, freed into crushing exploitation, whose freedom made way for the advances of capitalism. Resistance arose in turn. Socialists wrote. They agitated. By the 1880s, a group of socialist Jews in Vilna—today Vilnius in Lithuania—organized secretive reading programs for revolutionary literature. These grew and in 1895 the group sent emissaries to other cities in the Pale to organize the Jewish proletariat. Two years later, they reached a tipping point, and declared themselves a party, the General Jewish Labor Bund in Russia and Poland, or, simply, the Bund.

The Bund was illegal, thus underground. Only a year after its founding, in July 1898, many of its leaders in Vilna were arrested. Bundists in Switzerland, in Bern and Geneva, seized the occasion. Already the Bund was divided over the Jewish question. The internationalists, soon aligned with Lenin, believed that no special attention ought to be given to the Jews, that the Jews should dissolve into the proletariat, that the best route to Jewish liberation passed through class warfare. The nationalists—under the sway of Chaim Zhitlowsky in Bern—argued that the Jews ought to be recognized as a Yiddish-speaking nation and that the left ought to struggle for Jewish rights. A Bundist who possessed a printing press in Geneva took over Der yidisher arbeyter (The Jewish Worker) and made it a Bundist journal, and in its sixth volume published Zhitlowsksy’s essay, “Zionism or Socialism?”

Zhitlowsky, although influential among Bern Bundists, was a major figure in the Bund’s primary opposition on the left, the anti-Marxist Socialist Revolutionaries who rejected the theory that the proletarian revolution must pass through capitalism. To publish Zhitlowsky, then, was controversial. But Zhitlowsky offered a merciless skewering of Zionism, which had become—in the few years since the publication of Herzl’s The Jewish State and the establishment of the Zionist Congress—a manic craze, the Bund’s primary opposition on the right.

“Just as there can never be peace between the bourgeoisie and the worker so there can never be peace between Zionism and socialism,” he wrote. Herzl was petitioning world leaders and pled for Jewish quietism to mollify emperors and kings. Zhitlowsky ventriloquized him: “It has to be shown that the Jewish people is God-fearing, innocent, and far—so help us—from today’s revolutionary ideas; that the Jewish worker will not bring the terrible plague of socialism and class war to Turkey—heaven forbid!” Beseeching Zionist youth, Zhitlowsky wrote, “Everything you do, you are doing together with the bourgeoisie and, in the last resort, for the bourgeoisie. Every step you take damages the holy cause of the Jewish worker! Every penny you can take from a poor Jew is a crime against him.”

∞

On a winter’s night in 1901 the Bern Bundists threw a party to celebrate the twenty-fifth issue of the Bund’s Yiddish underground newspaper, Di arbeyter shtime (The Worker’s Voice). Everyone dressed up and wore red ribbons. They met in their meeting hall. Speeches were given, songs sung. Good feelings overflowed. Throughout, unnoticed, a wizened man sat quietly in the corner, smoking. Then he stood before them on the platform. “Comrades, I’ve just been inspired to write a poem, and have completed it. I would like to read it to you.”

Beneath the salty sea of human tears

A terrible chasm abides

It could not be darker, it could not be deeper

It is stained with a blood red tide

Much of this sea has been filled with sorrows

Endured by the suffering Jews

But only the tears of the poor ones are bloody

The rich cry as clear as the dew

The children of wealth, the enlightened, the clergy —

Into Zion they call the Hebrews,

We’ve heard this old story before from our enemies

“A ghetto for the eternal Jew!”

Messiah and Jewry are both dead and buried

Another messiah is come

The new Jewish worker will carry the banner

To signal that justice is done

The world freed and healed by this hero,

Who dives to the root of its wound.

In Russia, in Vilna, in Poland all hail now

The Great Jewish Worker’s Bund!

The gathered Bundists burst out in enthusiasm, some moved to tears. The poem, published a few months later under the byline Sinani, became a hymn sung by the Bund for decades to come. Its author, who generally went by S. An-sky, was not himself a Bundist. Only some months earlier, in January 1901, he wrote, “The devil knows how a little boy wants freedom—that’s how much I want to go to Bern.” He was thirty-seven but looked much older, was tired of Paris, tired of debating the Dreyfus Affair, ready for the youthful energy of a university town with its Russian Jewish colony of student émigrés. His childhood friend, Chaim Zhitlowsky, offered An-sky—né Shloyme Zanvl Rappoport—his couch. To the dismay of the Bund, they advocated terror to usher in the end of capitalism. In 1902, their comrade in the Socialist Revolutionary Party assassinated Russia’s interior minister, galvanizing dissent. They printed propaganda pamphlets in the tens of thousands, including one that ended with “a folk lay, a bylina”:

At dawn, early in the morning,

The sun came up, the red one,

From the great Zhiguli hills of the Volga.

It rose in the heavens,

It looks around with its bright glance,

It saw free clouds in the sky,

Free fish dance in the waves,

And above the flowers, the blue ones,

There’s no lord, no overseer...

And the bright sun looks at them

It smiles at their freedom.

By 1903, a double agent “reported to the Russian police that An-sky was the center of a ‘big gang’ of Bern radicals.”

∞

“When the shkotsim burst through the roof into the attic, the first thing they did was attack Zaytshik’s daughter. They struck her in the cheek with an object, and after she fell to the ground, they surrounded her.” So begins the testimony of the wife of a cobbler who lived on 11 Nikolai Street in Kishinev, in the Pale of Settlement, in today’s Moldova, as told to the poet Chaim Nahman Bialik. A month earlier a Christian boy disappeared and rumor spread that Jews killed him to use his blood for matzo. On April 6 and 7, 1903, dozens of Jews were murdered, hundreds raped, thousands left homeless in Kishinev. The Jews hadn’t suffered anything like it since the Storms of the South two decades earlier, and this was much worse than that.

Abel Pann, “The Day After the Pogrom,” 1903

∞

Leading Jewish writers penned an open letter, published on April 20:

Brothers! The blood of our brethren in Kishinev cries out to us! Shake off the dust and become men! Stop weeping and pleading, stop lifting your hands for salvation to those who hate and exclude you! Look to your own hands for rescue!

A permanent organization is needed in all our communities, which would be standing guard and always prepared to face the enemy at the outset, to quickly gather to the place of riots any men who have the strength to face danger. We also believe that the government should recognize our just cause in asking for one thing alone: that they let us defend ourselves with our own hand. If the lack of human rights has led us to these straits, where even our blood is unprotected in the eyes of the people of this land—would they also wish to deprive us of the natural right of every living creature to defend itself inasmuch as it is able?

∞

The Central Committee of the Bund delivered a proclamation:

What, then, should we do during the pogroms themselves?

We must answer violence with violence, no matter where it comes from. Not with sweet words but with arms in our hands can we prevail upon the frenzied pogromists. We mustn’t hide in attics but must go out face to face, “with a mighty arm,” to fight these beasts.

Let not the Kishinev pogrom weaken our faith in our sacred ideal. With hatred and with a threefold curse on our lips let us sew the shrouds for the Russian autocratic regime, for the antisemitic band of swindlers, for the whole capitalist system. May the number of conscious and active fighters for socialism keep growing; may the solidarity with our fellow workers of other nations keep on growing!

Down with anti-Semitism!

Down with Tsardom!

Long live international proletarian solidarity!

Long live socialism!

∞

The morning after he learned about Kishinev, Jabotinsky burst into an editorial meeting at his Odessa paper, “turned to the non-Jews on the staff, berated them and the entire Christian world for what had happened, and stormed back out, slamming the door behind him.” Since returning to Odessa in 1901, he had become a convert to Zionism, reading Moshe Leib Lilienblum, Leon Pinsker, and Theodor Herzl, and had taken up the cause of Jewish self-defense. He showed up with two friends one evening at Jerusalem, a secret militia in Odessa, glanced around, and said, “You look dead tired; let us spell you for a while.” He worked overnight printing flyers while the others slept: “Let there be an end to the shameful heritage of centuries in which we went like sheep to the slaughter,” the flyers closed. “All for one and one for all! To arms in our own defense!” After Kishinev, Jabotinsky “toured the sites of devastation, spoke to survivors, and visited the injured in the hospital.” He translated Chaim Nahman Bialik’s poem, “In the City of Slaughter” into Russian—a passionate call for resistance written out of Bialik’s experience gathering witness testimony—which became a sensation.

Four months later, Jabotinsky attended the Sixth Zionist Conference—his first—which featured a dramatic, surprising proposal.

∞

Theodor Herzl was, by age, a contemporary of An-sky and Zhitlowsky, but from another world, born outside the Pale in Hungary to wealthy, German-speaking, assimilated Jewish parents who moved to Vienna, the fin de siècle Vienna of Brahms, Freud, and Wittgenstein. Like Jabotinsky fifteen years later, Herzl studied law then left town to serve as a foreign correspondent—in Herzl’s case, to Paris to write for Vienna’s Neue Freie Presse. He and An-sky might have passed each other on Champs-Élysées or sat near each other at cafés in the early 1890s, scribbling their feuilletons. If so, and if Herzl recognized An-sky as an Eastern European Jew, he might have pitied him, or recoiled in shame.

Centuries of subjection had warped the Jews, Herzl thought—coerced by those in power to be merchants—into a “money worshipping people.” He wrote, “at some dark moment in our history some inferior human material got into our unfortunate people and blended with it.” He bore a special distaste for Jews from the Pale, who, according to scholar Jacques Kornberg, he saw “as economically parasitic, shunning productive labor, physically feeble and timid, and wholly given over to an overly cerebral Talmudism.” He disdained Yiddish as a mongrel jargon. For most of his life he believed that Jews should assimilate into European society.

But in the 1890s, with the rise of antisemitism in Austria, France, and Germany, he began to feel that Jews would need to act boldly to claim honor under the gentile gaze. He proposed a mass conversion of Austrian Jews to Christianity, performed “with festive processions” in front of St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna, in alliance with the Pope. He dreamed about challenging leading Austrian antisemites to duels. “If he were shot,” wrote Kornberg, “outrage would be unleashed against antisemitism for bringing about such a senseless loss of life. If his opponent were shot, Herzl would graciously express his sorrow at his trial and eloquently expound on the Jewish question, moving the awed jury to acquittal.” Though a lifelong liberal, he spitefully imagined mass Jewish commitment to socialism.

Then, in early June 1895, he was overtaken by the idea of a Jewish state. He wrote feverishly. “My only recreation was listening to Wagner’s music in the evening, particularly to Tannhäuser, an opera which I attended as often as it was produced, only on the evenings when there was no opera did I have any doubts as to the truth of my ideas.” Once, in the ancient past, when they had a state, a kingdom, the Jews were a proud and heroic people. With a state, they could be again. They could transform their learned passivity into strength. They could be European. “We will have a university and an opera,” he told a friend, “and you will attend the opera in your swallow tailed coat with a white gardenia in your button hole.”

He published The Jewish State in 1896 and held the First Zionist Congress in 1897. He quickly accumulated a mass following. He traveled, petitioning world leaders for land where Jews would be sovereign, maybe in Argentina, maybe in Palestine, maybe in Sinai.

In 1903, shortly after Kishinev, the British came to Herzl with an offer, land in East Africa for his Jewish state. “The whole country bears considerable resemblance to the Sussex Downs, and, in parts, to an English park,” reported Britain’s Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain. “English roses bloom profusely, and all English fruits and vegetable can be cultivated.” Why such magnanimity? The British had just completed the Uganda Railway, navigating more than five hundred miles from Mombasa to Lake Victoria, at great cost. Imported Indian and local African workers had died in considerable numbers from illness or were eaten by lions. The point was to secure Britain’s imperial claim to the region and rebuff the Germans. But after all that, no one was taking the trains. They wanted Jews to take the trains.

To Herzl, it was a coup. Here it was. Kishinev underscored the urgency: Eastern European Jews needed to be removed to safety. If you will it, it is no dream. He unveiled the offer—which, though most the land was in Kenya, came to be called the Uganda Scheme—at the Sixth Zionist Congress in Basel in August 1903.

∞

Jabotinsky reported from Basel for the Odessa paper. He attended a caucus for Orthodox Jews and another for Hebraists. Herzl, of course, gave the keynote. “Unbending and magnificent, he has a profile like an Assyrian king’s in an old bas-relief,” Jabotinsky wrote. Despite his carriage, he was, Jabotinsky ambivalently concluded, after assessing his writing and his oratory, “a man of mediocre abilities who is nonetheless a great figure—a genius of no special talents.”

Herzl presented the Uganda Scheme. He had the backing of most Zionist leaders and Western European Jews. The vote was over whether to go ahead with an expedition to survey the land and consider the offer. It passed 295–176. Most those who voted no were Eastern European Jews and they were horrified. They revolted. They left the hall. Many wept. “Think,” wrote Jabotinsky, “of what it is like to belong to a tribe that must weep over its first political victory in 1,800 years!” For his part, Jabotinsky voted no, claiming in his memoirs years later that he had no good reason, that he did so just “because.” But in a dispatch at the time, he wrote, “Zionism leads only to Palestine.”

In a letter to a friend, he wrote, “I took the trip and it was boring and stupid and I wasted five hundred rubles doing it. At the congress I got whistled at,” heckled during his one short speech. “And the next day, that is, at night, I was caught by a policeman in flagrante delicto with a Zionist woman on the cathedral grounds.”

∞

On July 3, 1904, at the age of forty-four, Theodor Herzl had a massive heart attack, and died.

∞

On January 13, 1905, Nahum Wilbuschewitz stood on the deck of the steamer S.S. Africa at the entrance to Mombasa’s Kilindini Harbor. The temperature was a sultry eighty-six degrees. The young man leaned his five-foot, eleven-inch frame over the railing, patted his brow with one of the dozen handkerchiefs he had brought with him, and peered through rimless spectacles at the bustling Indian Ocean port. Mango trees and coconut palms swayed in the meager breeze. Barefoot porters pushed handcarts down gangplanks, across the pier, and up through the city’s alleyways that snaked between walls inset with ornate wooden gates. Balconies teetered overhead from whitewashed buildings. Minarets trimmed in green presided over the jumbled chaos. This was Wilbuschewitz’s first glimpse of Africa.

Wilbuschewitz—a name he shortened to Wilbusch—was the only Jew on the expedition. The other leaders, Major Alfred St. Hill Gibbons, an army veteran, and Alfred Kaiser, a naturalist, had considerable experience on the continent. Gibbons split them up to better cover the territory, which meant they would each write separate reports. But Wilbusch, who was supposed to meet up with Kaiser, who had established the main camp, got lost. He was lost for days. He lost his compass, too. He was terrified. He was starving. He ate locusts. Finally he was rescued by a group of porters bringing rice to the main camp. Once Wilbusch got there, he stayed there. He only explored the land for one out of their four weeks.

Gibbons wrote a favorable report. Kaiser and Wilbusch were negative. But Wilbusch’s report, in Gibbons’s estimation, was made up of “crude conjectures of a very limited and unmethodized experience, and I cannot recommend that it be taken into serious consideration.” Wilbusch did not recognize, for instance, that the rivers were dry and the grasses yellow because it was the dry season.

Or it’s possible that he did, but that he purposely sabotaged the mission. It’s unclear how much was incompetence and how much ill will. Historian Adam Rovner claims that Wilbusch was a double agent, working for Herzl’s adversary, Menachem Ussishkin, who was organizing an all out campaign against the Uganda Scheme across the Pale. Wilbusch attended the Sixth Congress and voted against Herzl. He then surveyed Palestine for the Russian Zionists. Ussishkin wanted Wilbusch to establish a factory there. From East Africa, Wilbusch got a message to Ussishkin. “The children of Ham will inherit the land in Africa, the children of Shem—the land in Asia.” Ussishkin took this to mean, “the Uganda question is over and done with.” And it was. At the Seventh Zionist Congress, with Herzl dead and unable to defend his plan, its detractors seized on Wilbusch’s report, and the Uganda Scheme was overwhelmingly defeated.

∞

“The soul is greater than the soil, and the Jewish soul can create its Palestine anywhere,” said Israel Zangwill, a prominent British novelist and playwright and, in Herzl’s absence, the leading advocate for accepting Britain’s East Africa offer at the Seventh Zionist Congress. Delegates began debating at nine in the evening and continued until four. After an adjournment, they voted down the British offer at noon. Within hours, Zangwill had gathered his compatriots at a nearby hotel to split from the Zionists and hold the first conference of the Jewish Territorialist Organization. In coming years, they would consider Angola, Honduras, Iraq, and Libya as sites for autonomous Jewish settlement.

∞

An-sky, Zhitlowsky, and the Socialist Revolutionaries (SR) took revenge for Kishinev on July 28, 1904, when an SR threw a bomb in the carriage of Russia’s Minister of the Interior, Vyacheslav Pleve, killing him. Pleve had been Director of Police when Tsar Alexander II was assassinated two decades earlier and led an aggressive campaign to snuff out the group that produced the assassins, Narodnaya Volya, predecessor to the SR—antipathy ran deep. A letter in Pleve’s name circulated that contributed to Kishinev’s incitement. It was forged. But the letter was convincing because Pleve, loyal to autocrats and the landed gentry, was an antisemite. One of the conspirators, on hearing the news, “dashed a glass of water on the floor and,” per a witness, “gnashing his teeth, shouted, ‘That’s for Kishinev!’”

An-sky was in Paris for a meeting of the SR’s Foreign Organization. It was going poorly. “Pleve came to the rescue,” he wrote, “everyone was fighting, frowning—suddenly, bang! Hugs, kisses, champagne, hysteria.” Through the winter and into the spring he edited a series of hagiographic pamphlets celebrating fallen SR assassins. He traveled across Germany, fundraising for the SR. He also assembled a committee for Jewish self-defense that drew from groups otherwise hostile to each other: the Bund, Vozrozhdenie, Zionism. He kept moving that spring and summer, which wore on his body. He developed terrible hemorrhoids. In October, workers in Moscow and St. Petersburg staged a general strike. The SRs escalated with direct action. The pressure worked: the tsar issued the October Manifesto, committing to liberal reforms. But over the next two days, reactionaries exploded across the southern Pale in hundreds of pogroms.

∞

When they come they’ll come for you. An axe through the door, boots down the stairs, into this cellar where you hide with your mother and brother and sisters—Beili just five, a game to her, let it be—asleep on the cold dirt, October nights, no fire to warm you. You are nine. Unlike Beili, even Zalman, who’s seven, you know what pogrom means. That’s what they said, the goyim next door, your landlords, when they begged you to leave the heap of logs you call home for three nights and hide with them, beneath their feet (you hear them shuffle and stomp): “Cossacks,” “pogrom.” It passes you over this time. But when you next see the sun they have staved in the skulls of Jews in Semenivka and raped its women as they have across the Pale of Settlement these past two days.

Heading home after cheder you loiter in the tavern among shadows, dodging vodka breath, spilled kvass. Bundists lecture on Marx, Zionists fight over Uganda, Hasidim whisper of the Messiah to come. What is certain: Haskalah is dead in Europe. Progress shmogress. Emancipation a false god. Take arms or flee. Many, hundreds of thousands, have fled like father to America where Haskalah survives, there are jobs, you might own your home, Jews can be Jews, and the streets are paved with gefiltefish. Here if someone leaves a crust on their plate you eat it. If someone leaves soup in their bowl, you drink it.

Mother is unwell. She bakes through the night and takes to the street to sell bread with the sunrise. Luba, the oldest, works as a buttonhole maker at the clothing factory. Father was a jeweler here and is a jeweler in America and occasionally sends a money order. Once he had a sign outside your hovel but they tore it down before he left. You have enough to send Luba to America after a year and after another enough for the rest. A train to the border, steal into Germany at night, coyotes extort most of your money. A train to Rotterdam, a boat to London, a train to Liverpool, a hotel where the cockroaches march up out of the sink’s drain and take surveillance positions along the room’s seams. A ship to Montreal, a train to Sault Ste. Marie, an examination for lice, fleas, and trachoma. A train to Minneapolis, to father and Luba, where what little baggage wasn’t lost costs so much in customs that you forget it and begin with nothing. You are eleven, you and Zalman (call him Sol) and Beili (it’s Bess) assimilate quickly, you excel at school, take a job as an usher at the Orpheum Theater, see Sarah Bernhardt and Eddie Foy. You’ve matriculated into the University of Minnesota’s College of Dentistry when the army calls you up to fight Pancho Villa. You arrive at the border at Llano Grande, nothing but cactus, dig holes to sleep in. Time telescopes upon return, marriage, children, mother one day puts her head in the oven and turns on the gas, every year you remember to send season’s greetings into American Jewish World. You never know that every Jew who stayed in Semenivka was taken into a birch grove and shot. You grow old and die in Calabasas in 1981 but not before giving an oral account of your life, which is transcribed, digitized, embedded in a family tree, and read by your first cousin’s great-grandson decades hence, which compels him to try to understand your youth, to immerse himself in the scholarship on life in the Pale of Settlement, and to study what world Jewry dreamt before the State of Israel and what might still be possible.

∞

By November 1905, An-sky thought his revolution was happening in Russia. He couldn’t believe he was missing it. “Now every day is a year, every hour a phase,” he wrote. “In a few weeks or months of inaction you could sleep through the situation.” He decided to return. On December 4, he was in Berlin: “a revolution that one can’t miss is under way. The situation isn’t defined yet, and for that reason I must go now, to help it become defined.” He translated the Internationale into Yiddish. At the border, he learned a warrant remained in effect for his arrest. He retreated to Königsberg and leaned on connections in Russia to request amnesty. While he waited, a counter-revolution swept Moscow. His comrades and friends were arrested. His euphoric apocalypticism deflated. He entered Russia on New Year’s Eve, already disillusioned.

IV

An old man roamed the Pale, from shtetl to shtetl, and with him a retinue of younger men. He wore a rekel, a black frock coat, and was called Reb Shlomo. First thing they did was pray at synagogue, then invite the local men to their inn for whisky. Reb Shlomo asked questions, the local men spoke at great length, and Reb Shlomo blazed with dveykes, levitating off his seat. Reb Shlomo sought out healers, ancient women, and explained in a voice broken by the years that he was once rich but now was poor, his eyesight was failing him, he needed magic to make money. He would pay her for as many spells as she would share. She often shared. His retinue wrote it all down.

They sang with Hasids. They collected stories of dybbuks. Reb Shlomo convinced an old man to sell him the finger he’d sliced off as a child to avoid conscription in the Russian army.

This was, of course, An-sky. It was 1913. He was fifty but appeared, as always, much older, with his thick white beard and his engraved wrinkles. As a teenager, Les Misérables convinced him, “it is enough to give one’s life for a conviction,” and now his conviction was ethnography, which he envisioned as a totalizing encyclopedic project to save the folklore and ephemera of the world of the shtetl before it vanished. He developed an impossible questionnaire with 10,000 questions. He received the blessing of the academic authorities and Jewish philanthropists of his day, although they believed him a quixotic dreamer. He hauled a phonograph with him and recorded songs. He took photographs. He aimed to collect “old books, manuscripts, documents, Jewish art objects: mizrabim, ark curtains, carvings from pulpits, menorahs, decorated Torah scrolls, religious objects, women’s old adornments, old outfits, relics, objects connected to the memory of famous people or well-known events”—and fingers. Like modernists from Warsaw to Paris to Harlem, he believed that the path to national renewal passed through primitive folk traditions.

He was right about the vanishing shtetl. In 1914, WWI erupted. In 1915, the strictures of the Pale collapsed, Jews scattered. In 1917, the Bolsheviks abolished it. From then until 1921, the Russian Civil War, Reds versus Whites, decimated the shtetls of Ukraine, killing tens of thousands of Jews. Stalin forbade Shabbat and banned Hebrew; Soviet Jews, if they survived the Holocaust, forgot, many of them, over the years, that they were Jews.

∞

The British wanted a reason to explain their imperial ambitions for Palestine. And they wanted to stoke Jewish ferment to lure America into the war and tamp down Russian opposition to it. So on November 9, 1917, Lord Balfour published his declaration to Lord Rothschild, having consulted at length with Zionists but not with Palestinians, that should Britain win, it would establish in Palestine “a national home for the Jewish people.” (It made a separate, if less public, pledge to support Arab independence, also to curry support during the war.)

The next day, Vladimir Jabotinsky’s wife and son joined him in London. They went to the movies. Jabotinsky loved the movies. He’d had no part in the Balfour Declaration. But he was, by now, a committed Zionist, committed to Palestine, and had spent recent years lecturing across the Pale. Vladimir Nabokov’s father called him “the finest orator in all of Russia.” He’d also decided against socialism, for capitalism. He wrote, “Young Jews should be told: ‘Back to the shop counter! Back to the stores, the banks, the stock exchange!”

Jabotinsky had his own quixotic scheme. Early in the war, believing that Britain would win, he imagined a Jewish Legion fighting alongside the British in Palestine, making the case for a postwar Jewish state. He petitioned the commander of the British forces in Egypt, who turned him down. He had trouble securing meetings at first in London. He went to Copenhagen to sell the idea to the Zionist Executive, who did not support it. He struggled to acquire signatures for a petition from London’s East End Jews. But he didn’t stop. He plied what connections he had in London. He trained as an officer. Finally, in July 1917, the British approved a Jewish battalion, the 38^th. It underwent basic training in Plymouth while Balfour signed his declaration and Jabotinsky went to the movies with his son. The British took Jerusalem before the 38^th could get there. Jabotinsky saw action in the Jordan Valley. His Jewish Legion, which added the 39^th and 40^th battalions, played a small part in the war. But it gave him credibility. And it made him famous.

∞

One man, at least, understood Jabotinsky’s Jewish Legion from the beginning. An-sky had long advocated Jewish self-defense—even terror in the name of revolution. The war had put an end to his ethnographic project; instead, he traveled to Galicia; the Russian army was laying waste to the shtetls it crossed; An-sky entered a synagogue torn apart, stinking of shit. In the summer of 1915, he gave speeches to fundraise for Jabotinsky.

But his obsession was a play. He kept writing, revising, reading it aloud, asking for feedback. He read it that fall to Jabotinsky, who was then in Russia. It was called The Dybbuk, it drew from the supernatural tales he’d heard as Reb Shlomo, and it became the most staged Yiddish play ever.

On November 8, 1920, An-sky, fifty-seven-years old, died of a heart attack.

∞

In 1918, after the Russian Revolution, the Bund campaigned for an election in Kiev. They issued pamphlets and posters, including one that announced, “THERE, WHERE WE LIVE, THERE IS OUR LAND!”

V

It is 1933. It is the Eighteenth Zionist Congress. The delegates are about to declare their protest against Nazi Germany, they are reading their declaration: and paramilitary youth storm the hall, whistling, jumping, dancing, clapping. In their midst, attentive, hands folded, with a faint smile, sits Vladimir Jabotinsky. This is Betar.

Born in Riga in 1923, it grew and grew, with Jabotinsky as its leader in perpetuity. “Its members practiced martial exercises,” wrote a historian, “were taught calisthenics and techniques of self-defense, drilled at marching and parading, wore military-style uniforms on formal occasions, were organized by rank, company, and battalion, had their own special salute.” It was his dream, Jabotinsky wrote, “to turn Betar into a worldwide organism that will be able, at a single command from its center, to execute instantly, with many tens of thousands of hands, the exact same thing in every town and country.” Was this, asked his critics, making men into a machine? “I propose that we answer proudly,” wrote Jabotinsky: “Yes, a machine!”

In 1925, at a Paris café, Jabotinsky founded the right-wing Revisionist Party. Six years later, with the collapse of Chaim Weizmann’s centrist General Zionists, it surged, taking twenty percent of the vote at the Seventeenth Zionist Congress. Now it was clear. There were two men struggling to claim Zionism, each believing himself the true visionary. Jabotinsky and David Ben-Gurion, the leader of Mapai, the labor party.

Ben-Gurion deemed Betar fascists and called Jabotinsky Vladimir Hitler.

Jabotinsky allowed himself to serve as a cipher. On the one hand, he was consistent in his published writing about his disdain for Hitler and his rejection of fascism. On the other hand, he embraced a paramilitary organization, which he founded, that exalted him as the unitary expression of its voice. Yes, a machine!

∞

One young Betarnik rose fast from the rank-and-file to regional commander in the east, to member of Central Command in Warsaw. In 1933, Menachem Begin was twenty years old. Like Jabotinsky before him, he traveled the country, now Poland not the Pale, to lecture on behalf of the movement.

∞

In 1935, Jabotinsky embraced shilat hagolah—Diaspora negation—that every Jew should be a Zionist, that every Jew would live in Palestine. The next year, Jabotinsky was named the supreme commander of the Irgun, which spun off from the Zionist military in Palestine out of frustration, to wage a fiercer struggle against the British imperialists and the Palestinians.

Jabotinsky restrained Betar and the Irgun. In 1938, in Warsaw, he urged Betar not to vote for a war of national liberation, to retain an official policy of self-defense. The leading voice to advocate for conquering the homeland now was Begin. Jabotinsky rebuked him. Begin wept.

In practice, Jabotinsky, banished from Palestine by the British, kept distance from the Irgun’s acts of terror against Palestinian civilians, exercised plausible deniability. Threatened with knowing too much, he said, “One doesn’t ask papa.” But with Nazis advancing, and almost nowhere for Jews to go, he changed his mind. “There is no war other than war against innocents,” he wrote, “if you don’t want to harm the innocent—die.”

He died, in the Catskills, at fifty-nine, of a heart attack, in 1940.

VI

Late one night in 1937 Bernard Goldstein used himself as bait. He walked into Miller’s Café, the hangout for the National Radical Camp (ONR) in Warsaw, Hitlerite fascists. It was down the street from the offices for ABC, ONR’s daily paper, an antisemitic rag. The Onerowcy taunted Goldstein, one raised his fist. Goldstein threw a bottle. It smashed against the wall. That was the sign: fellow Bundists rushed in to crack fascist skulls. Just as quickly they scattered, listening from sidestreets as the ambulances came.

“Only the Bund waged an organized fight against the antisemites,” said the Secretary General of Jabotinsky’s Revisionists, based in Warsaw. “We did not consider that we had to fight in Poland.” The opposite: Revisionists worked with the Polish government toward the shared goal of moving the Jews to Palestine. Betar imitated Polish nationalist youth.

The Bund maintained a militia that defended Polish Jews from antisemitic hooligans. It manned park gates on festival days, maintained informants who warned of imminent attacks, and avenged pogroms. But the Bund was also much more, a whole world. At its core, it organized workers: building unions, coordinating strikes. It promoted Yiddish, ran schools, fought evictions, led hikes, taught choirs, raised money for the ill, held summer camps and winter camps. Its children’s group, SKIF, and youth group, Tsukunft, grew to many thousands of members. The Bund’s Warsaw club featured a library whose reading room was always full; it hosted lectures, reading groups. “It was like an anthill,” wrote Goldstein, “seething with life.”

The Bund reached the peak of its power at the end of 1938 when it won seventeen of the twenty Jewish seats on Warsaw’s city council, accompanied by wins across the country. One of its leaders, Henryk Erlich, said that year, “What can a Jewish Palestine be, under the best of circumstances? If a Jewish state should arise in Palestine, its spiritual climate will be: eternal fear of the external enemy (the Arabs); and eternal struggle for every foot of ground and for every bit of work with the internal enemy (Arabs).” Erlich wondered, rhetorically, “Is this a climate in which freedom, democracy, and progress can grow? Indeed, is it not the climate in which reaction and chauvinism ordinarily flourish?”

VII

Sir John Shaw, long narrow face, grand forehead, right eye a bit bigger than the left, an old Repton boy, ever since a company man for the Empire, rose up the chain in the Gold Coast and came here, to Palestine, Chief Secretary, quite a good bit of trouble, this mess with the Arabs and the Jews, to the King David, gorgeous innit, gem of Jerusalem, pink Palestinian limestone, not a bad spot for offices, good enough for emperors and kings, potentates and princes, what’s the date again, July 22, 1946, when it happens: oh, oh, oh. The chandelier comes down. Dust and smoke. He steps into the corridor. Sightless black. Stops in time. The floor falls away. The building is gone.

The Postmaster General flew. The blast lifted him from the hotel, launched him across the street, and plastered his body against the wall of the YMCA.

Thirty-two minutes earlier, the Irgun arrived at the King David’s service entrance dressed as Arab laborers in a stolen delivery truck. They held the clerk and his colleagues at gunpoint. Inside, under the direction of Gideon—alias of Yisrael Levy, barely twenty, child Betarnik, joined the Irgun at fourteen—they placed seven milk churns each loaded with fifty pounds of explosive. By the time they got out, the Military Police were waiting. The Irgun killed two and took off on foot, catching their backup car and speeding off.

Menachem Begin, their commander, would be pleased.

Ninety-one died. The British began to wonder whether it was worth it.

∞

In 1947, Leyvick Hodes—a teacher and the son of a teacher; chair of the teachers’ union in Warsaw for more than a decade before the war; a prolific writer; a member of the Central Committee of the Bund; now in New York City—wrote an essay on the fifty-year struggle between the Bund and Zionism. After the war, after the Holocaust, Zionism was on the march. This, argued Hodes, was a shame. He held fast to Bundism: against the romantic attachment to a mythologized homeland, do’ikayt, hereness, the fight for the good life for all, here, where we are rooted:

“The idea of the Bund is deep belief in humankind,” he wrote. “The Zionist thinks he can run away from evil. Belief in humankind is not popular today. In these last years we have all seen it become deeply debased, trampled, and spat upon. But if man is by nature a beast, no amount of running away will help. If there is no tikkun, no redemption for mankind, then there is no redemption for the Jews. The beast will hunt those who run from it and find them everywhere. If the belief disappears, then every hope disappears. The victory of the Zionist idea is a victory of a failure to believe in mankind, it is a complete victory for hopelessness.”

Toward the end of the essay, he wrote:

“The Bund has always fought for continuity, for creative national life, for do’ikayt, for the right to remain rooted in the ground where the Jewish masses live and fight. This very idea received from Nazism the most painful blow. The remnants of the Jewish masses waste away in the camps, wander homeless along the roads, or float like splinters on the foaming waves of the stormy post-war world. But with every day it becomes clearer that the path to healing these wounds leads not through increasing the number of helpless wanderers, not through further uprooting, but through building and rebuilding. The work of rebuilding in Poland and the development of Jewish communities in France and Belgium are gigantic achievements not only for the remaining Jews in those countries, they can rightly be viewed as acts of the greatest historical importance for Jewish survival in the broadest sense of the word. The efforts to rebuild and to secure Jewish life in Europe robs Hitler’s heirs of the fruits of their victory over the Jews. The Bund has always pushed the Jewish people toward a creative national life, and even the smallest project—a workers’ cooperative, an orphanage, a school, a library—built and secured in the countries that should be, according to Hitler, ‘Juden-rein,’ is an expression that that force still lives, that in the depths of Jewish life in Poland and in other countries springs still trickle, which must and which want to flow again in fruitful streams of national creativity and continuity.”

He then fell ill and spent the rest of his life, the next ten years, in bed.

∞

Before dawn, one hundred thirty Zionist irregulars, some Irgun, some from the Lehi, the deranged Stern Gang, gathered on the Sharafa Ridge—today, Mr. Herzl, site of Yad Vashem—above the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin, a few miles west of Jerusalem, with its seven hundred and fifty denizens who were observing a truce with the Jews, stonecutters living on a rocky hillside, near a quarry, with their families. The irregulars, many of them teenagers, were armed, if poorly. Each carried two grenades. They planned to raid the village to resupply their bases and increase morale. Irgun commander Menachem Begin lay in bed thirty-five miles to the northwest, in Tel Aviv. It was April 9, 1948.

An Irgun truck, mounted with a megaphone instructing the villagers to flee, got stuck in a ditch; it’s unlikely anyone heard it.

The irregulars descended. They worked from house to house. They expected a quick victory, but resistance was fierce and lasted through the morning. After they took control of the village they went berserk and massacred old men, women, children. “An already wounded man was shot,” said Fahimi Zeidan, who was twelve, “and when one of his daughters screamed, they shot her too. They then called my brother Mahmoud and shot him in our presence, and when my mother screamed and bent over my brother (she was carrying my little sister Khadra who was still being breastfed) they shot my mother too.” They killed one hundred Palestinians. They ransacked their homes for anything valuable. They rounded up a few dozen survivors and paraded them through the streets of West Jerusalem.

Word spread quickly. Palestinians took flight. The massacre at Deir Yassin catalyzed the exodus of hundreds of thousands, abandoning hundreds of villages, into refugee camps, into diaspora.

∞

The Bund did not disappear, it scattered. It reconstituted as the International Jewish Labor Bund in 1947 in Brussels. It was strong in New York, Paris, and Melbourne. It had chapters in Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Rio de Janeiro, Mexico City, Los Angeles, Shanghai, Johannesburg, Montreal, and elsewhere. It faded with Yiddish across the decades, dissolving in 2005. Attempts to rediscover it, even revive it, if not in Yiddish at least with do’ikayt, have surfaced in recent years, in writings by Benjamin Balthaser, Daniel Boyarin, and Molly Crabapple, in a journal, Der Spekter, in a reincarnated organization incorporated as a nonprofit in the state of Iowa in 2024, and in what Jacob Plitman, writing in 2018 for the relaunch of the leftist Jewish Currents, named an emerging diasporism. Many now refuse even diaspora or do’ikayt as slogans, denying Israel the power of the center against which they define themselves as Jews.

VIII

Behind the Prime Minister, a face. Projected, tremendous. Hair shaved two inches above either ear, a deep sidepart, a curl at the forehead. Skull tapered in a V to a knob of a chin. Thick brows, lightly bunched. But it’s the eyes: direct into the lens, wrapped round by bold circular black frames. I have it, they say. A charismatic opacity for which Polish Jewish youth cheerfully became proud, noble, and cruel, and died. Betar, Irgun. It is 2023. It is a century since he wrote “The Iron Wall,” which is why the Prime Minister is speaking today on Mt. Herzl: to say that Israel is “continuing to successfully implement these principles.” The principles of the Iron Wall.

“Culturally they are five hundred years behind us,” wrote Jabotinsky. They are committed to their land as natives; they will not cede it willingly. “They feel at least the same instinctive jealous love of Palestine as the old Aztecs felt for ancient Mexico and the Sioux for their rolling prairies.” As everywhere, “the native population resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of ridding itself of the danger of being colonized.” The problem: “Colonization can have only one aim, and Palestinian Arabs cannot accept this aim.”

What must Zionists do? “Zionist colonization must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population,” and it will not stop. Zionists must build an Iron Wall, “a strong power in Palestine that is not amenable to Arab pressure.” Only by militant cruelty can Zionists crush the Palestinian resistance.

“We, the students of Jabotinsky,” says the Prime Minister, “are committed to Israel remaining a Jewish and democratic national state.” The Prime Minister’s father, Benzion, a tendentious scholar of the Spanish Inquisition and a zealot, was Jabotinsky’s secretary—Jabotinsky whose given name was Vladimir, but whose Hebrew name was Ze’ev, meaning wolf.

IX

On March 15, 2028, at the age of seventy-eight, the Prime Minister had a massive heart attack, and died.

X

Imagine the exodus. They wrap their menorahs in Israel Hayom, unscrew their mezuzahs. Rouse the children early, their clothes laid out the night before. “Mama?” Holiday nerves, the freedom of a new dispensation. “Are we really going?” Seven million unsettlers. They leave the doors unlocked, the keys under the mats. Out of Ashkelon, Haifa, Tel Aviv. Dismantle the Iron Wall. To New York, São Paolo, Buenos Aires. Disperse. To Paris, Amsterdam, Istanbul. Seas will part. To Johannesburg, Melbourne, Tokyo. A great undoing. Last one out turn off the Iron Dome. To Mexico City, Los Angeles, Vancouver. El Al’s last flight. Tikkun olam. Manna from dew. Going home.

Notes

He smoked Damrosch, David. Comparing the Literatures: Literary Studies in a Global

Age, 72–73

We must now return Auerbach, Erich. “The Philology of World Literature,” 264–265

An apocalyptic fever Frankel, Jonathan. Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism, and theRussian Jews, 59

The people in the Ukraine Frankel, 98

Sinykins to South Dakota Clarren, Rebecca. The Cost of Free Land

supervisors installed Frankel, 126

Liozno Safran, Gabriella. Wandering Soul, 23–26

I felt I was in Safran, 39

All this, like slime Safran, 40

Vladimir Jabotinsky was happy Halkin, Hillel. Jabotinsky, 8–9

cultivated a Nietzschean Horowitz, Brian J. Vladimir Jabotinsky’s Russian Years, 22

In 1898, at seventeen Halkin, 17

with their queer dress Halkin, 17

I don’t know if I’m a socialist Halkin, 18

emissaries to Belostok Frankel, 203

Only a year Frankel, 215

Just as there can never be peace Frankel, 272–273

Everyone dressed up Medem, Vladimir. A Legendary Jewish Socialist, 239

a wizened man sat quietly Safran, 99–100

The Devil knows Safran, 95

a folk lay, a bylina Safran, 99

reported to the Russian police Safran, 96

When the shkotsim Bialik, Chaim Nahman. “Victim Testimonies of the 1903 Kishinev Pogrom,” np

Brothers! “Proclamation.” Posen Library of Jewish Culture & Civilization, np

What, then, should we do “Proclamation of the Jewish Labor Bund.” Posen Library of Jewish Culture & Civilization, np

turned to the non-Jews Halkin, 48

You look dead tired Halkin, 47

money worshipping people Kornberg, Jacques. Theodor Herzl, 162

at some dark moment Kornberg, 164

as economically parasitic Kornberg, 168

with festive processions Kornberg, 116

If he were shot Kornberg, 124–125

My only recreation Kornberg, 35

We will have a university and an opera Kornberg, 178

Argentina Shumsky, Dmitri. Beyond the Nation-State, 80

Sinai Rovner, Adam. In the Shadow of Zion, 54

The whole country Rovner, 53

Unbending and magnificent Halkin, 55

“Think,” wrote Jabotinsky Halkin, 58

I took the trip Horowitz, 38

On January 13, 1905 Rovner, 68–69

crude conjectures Alroey, Gur. “Journey to a New Palestine,” 40

The children of Ham Rovner, 76

The soul is greater Almagor, Laura. Beyond Zion, 23

dashed a glass of water Safran, 114

Pleve came to the rescue Safran, 114

He developed terrible hemorrhoids Safran, 122

When they come they’ll come for you Krishef, Jacob Leonard. personal letter, np

Now every day is a year Safran, 123

An old man roamed the Pale Deutsch, Nathaniel. The Jewish Dark Continent, 44

Reb Shlomo sought out healers Safran, 204

impossible questionnaire Deutsch, 66

old books Safran 189

The British wanted a reason Halkin, 104–105

the finest orator Halkin, 73

Young Jews should be told Halkin, 79

Jabotinsky had his own quixotic scheme Halkin 98–107

One man, at least Safran, 249–250

In 1918 Crabapple, Molly. “My Great-Grandfather the Bundist,” np

It is 1933 Heller, Daniel Kupfert. Jabotinsky’s Children, 212

Its members Halkin, 145

to turn Betar into Halkin, 151

Vladimir Hitler Heller, 204

One young Betarnik Heller, 218

Jabotinsky embraced shilat hagolah Halkin, 197

he urged Betar not to Heller, 232–233

One doesn’t ask papa Halkin, 208

There is no war Heller, 235

Late one night in 1937 Goldstein, Bernard. Twenty Years with the Jewish Labor Bund, 370

Only the Bund Brenner, Lennie. “Zionist-Revisionism,” np

The Bund maintained Goldstein, 270

a whole world Jacobs, Jack. Bundist Counterculture in Interwar Poland, 3–19

It was like an anthill Goldstein, 25

What can a Jewish Palestine be Goldstein, xx

Sir John Shaw Golani, Motti. Palestine Between Politics and Terror, 1945–1947, 141

The chandelier comes Hoffman, Bruce. “The Bombing of the King David Hotel, July 1946,” 599

The Postmaster General flew Walton, Calder. Empire of Secrets, 78–79

Thirty-two minutes earlier Hoffman, 587

alias of Yisrael Levy “Yisrael Levy, 64, Dies.” New York Times, November 5, 1990, B12

a teacher and the son of a teacher “Leyvik Hodes.” Congress for Jewish Culture, np

The idea of the Bund is deep Leyvik Hodes. “Facing the Future,” trans. Madeleine Cohen, 5

The Bund has always fought Hodes, 6

Before dawn Morris, Benny. “The historiography of Deir Yassin,” 86

Sharafa ridge Hogan, Matthew. “The 1948 Massacre at Deir Yassin Revisited,” 316

resupply their bases Hogan, 313

An already wounded man Hogan 319

paraded them through the streets Morris, 86

The Bund did not disappear Slucki, David. The International Labor Bund after 1945, 2–7

an emerging diasporism Plitman, Jacob. “On an Emerging Diasporism,” np

continuing to successfully implement Netanyahu, Benjamin, “Excerpt from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Remarks at the State Memorial Ceremony for Ze’ev Jabotinsky.” Prime Minister’s Government Press Office, np

Culturally they are five hundred years behind Jabotinsky, Vladimir. “The Iron Wall,” np

On March 15, 2028 Service, Pervis. The Book of Life, 8922

Bibliography

Almagor, Laura. Beyond Zion

Alroey, Gur, “Journey to a New Palestine”

Ansky, S. The Enemy at His Pleasure

Auerbach, Erich. “The Philology of World Literature”

Balthaser, Benjamin. “When Anti-Zionism was Jewish”

Bernstein, Sanders Isaac. “Sonic Bloom”

Bernstein, Michael André. Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History

Catlin, Samuel. “Auerbach’s Abraham(s): Biblical Narrative and the Genesis of Critical Reading”

Clarren, Rebecca. The Cost of Free Land

Cohen, Madeleine. “Do’ikayt and the Spaces of Politics in An-sky’s Novella In Shtom”

Cohen, Madeleine. Here and Now

Crabapple, Molly. “My Great-Grandfather the Bundist”

Damrosch, David. Comparing the Literatures: Literary Studies in a Global Age

Danforth-Appell, Jon. “Against Zionist Realism”

Deutsch, Nathaniel, The Jewish Dark Continent

Frankel, Jonathan, Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism, and the Russian Jews

Goldstein, Bernard. Twenty Years with the Jewish Labor Bund

Halkin, Hillel. Jabotinsky: A Life

Heller, Daniel Kupfert. Jabotinsky’s Children

Hodes, Leyvick, “Facing the Future,” trans. Madeleine Cohen

Horowitz, Brian J. Vladimir Jabotinsky’s Russian Years

Hogan, Matthew. “The 1948 Massacre at Deir Yassin Revisited”

Howe, Irving. World of Our Fathers

Jabotinsky, “On the Iron Wall”

Jacobs, Jack. Bundist Counterculture in Interwar Poland.

Jacobs, Jack. “The General Jewish Workers’ Bund”

Kornberg, Jacques. Theodor Herzl

Krishef, Jacob Leonard, personal letter

Lewinsky and Mayoraz, Eastern European Jews in Switzerland

“Leyvik Hodes,” Congress for Jewish Culture

Meir, Natan, Stepchildren of the Shtetl

Meyers, Joshua. “A Portrait of Transition”

Mor, Liron. Conflicts

Morris, Benny. “The Historiography of Deir Yassin”

Nathans, Benjamin, Beyond the Pale.

Plitman, Jacob. “On an Emerging Diasporism”

Rovner, Adam, In the Shadow of Zion

Safran, Gabriella, Wandering Soul

Schainker, Ellie. Confessions of the Shtetl

Service, Pervis. The Book of Life

Shtakser, Inna. The Making of Jewish Revolutionaries in the Pale of Settlement

Shumsky, Dmitri. Beyond the Nation-State

Slucki, David. The International Labor Bund after 1945

Zimmerman, J.D. Poles, Jews, and the Politics of Nationality

Zipperstein, Steven. Kishinev

1

An editorial assistant at a Big Five publisher finds her position challenging. She likes translated fiction of the kind published by Deep Vellum and New Directions. When I spoke with her she was reading, and thrilled by, 2666. At work, the president of the imprint was “hosting romantasy readings and talking about trends.” They started with A Court of Thorns and Roses. Next they read Alchemized, which originated as Harry Potter fanfiction. She fields the bulk of submissions for her two bosses, who don’t share her taste. One is “really interested” in the popular Japanese and Korean genre of “healing fiction” about magical cats. “A lot of those books,” she said, “are, from a technical standpoint, not very well written.” She struggles to advocate for literary fiction. She might receive “an intimate, beautifully written story” in which “not much happens.” She expects her bosses to say, “But is there a murder? Does a bomb explode at the end?”

2

The scholar Mark McGurl, in Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon, takes surprising solace in self-published KDP fiction. The size of the total pool, the direct-to-consumer market, and the Darwinian selection that has ensued has led to a proliferation of genres subdivided into finely adapted niches, especially within what has become a universe of romance. McGurl judges Cocky Bastard, with its “real sense of humor,” superior to “the idiotic Cocky Roomie.” If writers, here, submit to consumer demand, they do so—in books like Cocky Bastard, The House of Enchanted Feminization, and across the great manic oeuvre of Chuck Tingle—in such a way as to leave McGurl with a sense of cheerily anarchic optimism, a final faithfulness in the idea that the sheer excess of the human animal and its pleasures refuse to be bounded by capitalist enclosure.

3

Carmen Giménez, executive director of Graywolf, speaking from the Twin Cities under CBP and ICE occupation, told me:

Aesthetic risk is a signature of Graywolf but political currency supersedes aesthetic risk for me right now. I acquired a novel, a very straightforward novel, by a Peruvian writer named Karina Pacheco Medrano. I don’t know if Graywolf would have taken the book if I hadn’t taken it, because it’s a straightforward, moving novel. But for me, this is a book about the Shining Path. There are one or two other books published in the US that I could find about the Shining Path. We’re talking about domestic terrorism, we’re talking about the state acting against its own people. That felt more important to me than finding an experimental book that doesn’t have the letter E in it, or is written in postcards. Peruvian writers are completely overlooked in the US. This novel is going to have a great deal of political currency for us as a roadmap.

Giménez emphasized her commitment to Latin American literature. “Latin American translation has never felt more germane,” she said. “Novels from Latin America, where neoliberalism and oligarchy have gone the way that it’s going here.” She added: “what is aesthetic risk without the cultural context? It’s just play.”

4

In February 2026, critic James Marriott wrote on Substack that “almost all bestselling fiction is romantasy slop.” Publicist Kathleen Schmidt replied, “Well that’s an elitist take. If people are reading, I’m happy.”

*

We learn a great deal by studying these judgments. Those judging range in the power they hold: editorial assistant; Albert Guérard Professor; executive director; critic for The Times; president of a marketing and PR firm. They work in different fields: publishing, academia, criticism. Their power and their fields constrain their judgments and set the terms for salient conflicts, because their judgments are conflictual. In publishing, jobs are won and lost. In the academy, judgment tends to serve prestigious over popular fiction by default.

Marriott (again, a critic) and Schmidt (a publicist) reveal the normative character of judgment and its poles in the present (“romantasy slop” vs. “people are reading”). Ought we tell people what to like (because some literature is better) or let people like what they like (because we don’t want to be elitist, because taste is a lever for class domination). In A Defense of Judgment, Michael Clune stages a stark battle between these positions. He argues that scholars, in recent decades, have abjured judgment in favor of equality and thus traded “the very possibility of a form of value beyond market determination” for consumer choice. What looks like aesthetic populism, a democratic impulse, is in fact capitulation to neoliberalism. He invites scholars to reclaim aesthetic judgment against equality toward living better lives.

From the pole of equality, a paper from December 2025—“Why Slop Matters”—co-authored by cognitive scientists, literature scholars, and philosophers, argues that AI slop should be taken “seriously” because it has “social” and “aesthetic value.” To make the case the authors turn to a famous essay by art critic Clement Greenberg from 1939, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch”:

Some of what Greenberg maligned as kitschy is now thought of as having obvious cultural value. Tin Pan Alley songs are referred to as the “Great American Songbook,” while Norman Rockwell has his own museum…. More generally, Kitsch—along with comparable concepts such as Camp and Pastiche—has been rigorously theorized since Greenberg’s time as its own worthwhile aesthetic genre. Still, some might argue that AI Slop is different: that it is uniquely malignant within humanity’s long history of leveraging scalable, mechanical systems for cheap, popular output. That’s what Greenberg said, too.

Benighted elitists make judgments that distinguish them from the hoi polloi—slop is bad—while in fifty years they might be the ones writing redemptive theories of slop and cutting the ribbon at the Slop Museum. Their aesthetic judgments boil down to rationalizations for superior taste. They ought to heed the masses. Call them vulgar Bourdieusians.

Becca Rothfeld, in contrast, defends anti-democratic aesthetic judgment on political, ethical, and aesthetic grounds. “If democratizing politics would go some way toward improving culture,” she writes, “the reverse does not hold: democratizing culture has gone no way toward improving politics. It has only left consequential inequalities intact, while depriving us of the extravagance that is our human due.” The political impulse behind the equality of art is hollow and robs us of the heights of aesthetic experience. She elaborates a philosophical position, “aestheticism,” in which “aesthetic values partially ground moral values at least sometimes.” Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, she argues, “is respectful toward women by dint, in part, of its lyrical treatment of its protagonist’s plight,” whereas Wes Anderson’s “Grand Budapest Hotel is disrespectful because it is precious and because it is about the Holocaust.” Its preciousness, its tweeness, its cutesiness disrespects the Holocaust. Slop disrespects everything it touches. Better judgment makes us better people. Rothfeld is sympathetic to Kant; she argues for judging art on its own terms. She believes in “right and wrong judgments.” If we judge slop bad, it’s bad, regardless of whether most people like it—and we should tell them so.

Framed as an argument between equality and judgment, democracy and aesthetics, slop and Flaubert, Bourdieu and Kant, the debate is intractable, which is why it persists. But such framing abstracts too far from the scenes, the sites, of judgment. Inspired by Wittgenstein and Cavell, I offer three theses that we might remember when we feel ourselves falling again into a familiar intractability.

Thesis 1: Aesthetic judgment is pervasive. “All consumers occupy an equal plane free from the imposition of others’ values,” Clune claims. “All values pass through the process of equalization and emerge as market values.” It is only possible to make such claims if one conflates publishing with frictionless subsumption into the neoliberal abstraction of “the market.” One virtue of studying publishing is to disabuse us of such reductive thinking and to see, instead, publishing as a complex field of aesthetic conflict within departments and houses and across sectors. Publishing is pervaded by judgment, by people attempting to impose their values on others. The editorial assistant who loves Bolaño saves her limited symbolic capital to advocate for literature she not only believes in, but thinks might realistically win over the editor who likes “healing fiction” about magical cats. Editors are always strategizing to advance their taste. In academia, too, which Clune presents as having abjured judgment in favor of knowledge production, judgment pervades. Aarthi Vadde, in her forthcoming monograph on literature in the age of Web 2.0, hopes to model how to “appreciate works that might initially flummox people and consequently end up discounted.” The authors of “Why Slop Matters” defend slop by attributing to it “aesthetic value”—slop’s aesthetic value, they argue, justifies epistemological care.

Thesis 2: Aesthetic judgment is differentially constrained. Every judgment occurs under duress. Some are freer than others. Laura B. McGrath has shown how literary agents come to embody a sense of judgment attuned to the market, a merging of what they like and what the market likes, what McGrath calls “corporate taste.” The editorial assistant can make one judgment at home and another at work. Rebekah Jett, an editor at Scribner is baffled by how to judge at Scribner, with everything that Scribner means, under private equity’s new commercial imperatives. How to balance Scribnerian quality with the logic of comps and track. “We get ourselves tangled,” she said. This is the point of independent publishing: to be freer in judgment. They are not free. Dan Simon of Seven Stories has to pay his mortgage. Nonprofits must lure funders. But they are freer. Publishers, and everyone who works for them, are differentially constrained by financial structure: private equity, conglomeration, independent for-profit corporation, non-profit entity. Critics are meant to judge: it is their job. That does not mean criticism is free. As editor of the New York Times Book Review, Gilbert Cruz, in the role since 2022, has made a more consumerist, populist publication. On Substack, critics position themselves against the mainstream, claiming to say what cannot be said elsewhere, even as the platform logic incentivizes network-building that can look like obsequiousness, playing to the site’s evolving subcultures. In academia, too, judgment is differentially constrained by rank, by the values of grant-giving organizations, and by inherited traditions that dictate what is worthy of study.

Thesis 3: Aesthetic judgment is plural, various, and strange. Consider McGurl’s fondness for Cocky Bastard, The House of Enchanted Feminization, and the oeuvre of Chuck Tingle. On a Bourdieusian reading—taking after Nietzsche’s will to power—we might say that McGurl, as an endowed professor at Stanford, praises self-published erotica to demonstrate, publicly, that he no longer needs to obey the dictates of academic literary criticism’s normative taste for high art; he is distinguished by his perverse claims for the lowest. But we might also entertain a Sedgwickian reading. We might contend that the established conventions that guide how we discuss aesthetic judgment flatten complex topographies. We might point to Eve Sedgwick’s Axiom 1 from Epistemology of the Closet: people are different from each other. She writes, “the sister or brother, the best friend, the classmate, the parent, the child, the lover, the ex-; our families, loves, and enmities alike, not to mention the strange relations of our work, play, and activism, prove that even people who share all or most of our own positionings along these crude axes may still be different enough from us, and from each other, to seem like all but different species.” Following Sedgwick, we might credit McGurl’s taste as his own and his endowed chairship as liberating him to express it. Both Bourdieu and Sedgwick are right. I acknowledge Bourdieu’s truth in Thesis 2. Our judgment is too often coerced; it is always structured by fields of power under capitalism. And within us, in our private selves, we are different from each other, plural, various, and strange: the fight for freedom from domination is also the fight for the freedom for difference.

Our study of aesthetic judgment ought to be into judgment’s sites, judgment’s site-specificity. Rather than the either-or of judgment or equality: an acknowledgment that judgment happens everywhere all the time, that it is differentially constrained, that it is strange. Attention to the sites of judgment allows us to recognize that, in practice, judgment must often be tactical and can, within one person, differ across personal and professional contexts. The site—a Big Five office in Manhattan; a Stanford classroom; Substack; Bookforum—tells us about the material conditions and sociological norms that constrain judgment. Who is judging? What are their roles? Why might it matter to them to say Solenoid is great, Sally Rooney disappoints, or slop matters?

But in 2015 something changed. She broke her pattern, publishing four novels. For the next few years she alternated between six or seven, before settling into a steady seven from 2021 through, at least, 2026. Why? It seems a baffling decision from someone whose career was defined by the aspiration to be taken seriously as an author over against her mechanistic brand.

The novels tell the story. I have not read all seventy-eight that have come out since 2015, but I have read enough. In these novels, appearance reflects morality. A character is good if she looks younger than her age, bad if she looks older. She is good if she’s beautiful, bad if she’s ugly. Wealthy characters win moral redemption. The poor are revealed as morally corrupt. Steel’s world has diminished from one where she defended her aesthetic autonomy to one where she insists she is morally good because she is rich. At the level of style the principal quality of her new work is mindless repetition. “Think of Steel as Gertrude Stein with a Lifetime subscription,” writes Tom Comitta. The repetition begins with the dedications, always to her children, in slight variations. “To my brave, wonderful children.” “To my brave, beloved, / wonderful children.” “To my wonderful so greatly loved children.” They continue with wishes for happiness, safety, and wisdom, worded a little differently each time. Neighbors, from 2021, opens with Jack (“overweight”) and Debbie (“heavy”), live-in housekeepers for a wealthy actress, who steal from her. The third paragraph starts, “It was the perfect job for Jack and Debbie.” The fifth, “It was the perfect situation for Jack and Debbie.” Jack and Debbie do not end well.

For a long time, it was common sense in publishing that an author could only publish so much before outpacing her readers and damaging her brand. When James Patterson wanted to publish more than one book each year, his editor told him “he’d cannibalize his own sales.” He did it anyway. “When you put down a book that you just liked, you don’t say, ‘Oh, good, I get to wait a year until I read the next book.’ You want to read the next book right away,” he said. In 2008 he published eight, then eleven in 2009, thirteen in 2010, and more every year since, shattering industry norms. It took a few years before Steel followed suit, taking advantage of the new rules. In doing so, she eliminated the friction between aesthetics and capital from her work, submitted wholly to the latter, gave herself over to mechanicity, became an exemplary novelist of real subsumption. She writes for Delacorte, a commercial imprint of Penguin Random House, a conglomerate not itself wholly subsumed, but she reads like a private equity fever dream.

The aesthetic, such as it is, with its ersatz prose and fascist politics, resembles nothing so much as AI slop. The authors of “Why Slop Matters” define slop as characterized by its “superficial competence,” “asymmetric effort,” and “mass producibility.” They defend its value by saying people want it. The suits who run the Big Five would be happy to have the alibi. Call it the Slop Novel. Feed them slop!

There are about 340 million people in the United States. How many of them, do you think, want to be writers? Wattpad, the social media creative writing app, alone has about 18 million monthly users in the US. But let’s say most of them are lurkers. Let’s say, for the sake of this very loose thought experiment, 3.4 million Americans want to be writers, 1 in 100. (If you disagree, feel free to run the numbers below with your own estimate.)

The best way to achieve traditional success is to attend a strong creative writing program. Poets & Writers list 253 MFA programs in the US. Let’s say the average cohort size is about 20 and round the annual number of new MFA students to 5000. Let’s say a generation is 25 years. So that’s 125,000 MFAs, or 3.7% of our initial 3.4 million.

But if you want traditional success, you have vastly better odds with a top program: Columbia, Cornell, Michigan, Stanford. Let’s make a case study of the best program, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

The Post45 Data Collective has published datasets with: every graduate of the IWW; their advisor; a century of major literary prize data, including winners and judges; everyone who has won an NEA literature award; and a century of NYT hardcover fiction bestsellers. I built an additional dataset of everyone who has attended MacDowell, one of the most prestigious writers’ residencies. These datasets, plus Claude Code, enabled me to analyze the pipeline, and the odds. Let’s take a look.

From 1931 to 2014, IWW graduated 3006 students. That’s a few generations, but we’ll keep going with our numbers: 3006 is 2.4% of our 125,000. Of these 3006, 2468, or 82.1%, never went to MacDowell, won an NEA or a major award, or hit the NYT bestseller list. So that’s 538, or 17.9%, who move on.

The best thing an Iowa grad can do, per this data, to maximize success, is aim next for MacDowell and an NEA. 206 (6.9%) attended MacDowell, on average six years after graduation. Those who attended MacDowell were 7.8x more likely to win a major prize than those Iowa grads who didn’t. 300 Iowa grads (10%) won an NEA, on average eight years after graduation. Those with an NEA are 14x more likely to win a major prize than Iowa grads without. 64 (2.1%) Iowa grads went to MacDowell and won an NEA. They are 44.2x more likely than Iowa grads with neither to win a major prize.

How many Iowa grads then go on to win a major prize? 125, or 4.2%. It takes on average five years to go from MacDowell to a major prize, six years with an NEA. Who are these writers? The most awarded in our prize database: Philip Levine, Mark Strand, Jorie Graham, Joy Harjo, Yiyun Li, Charles Wright, Rita Dove, Denis Johnson, Donald Justice, Charles D’Ambrosio, Stuart Dybek, James Alan McPherson, Sandra Cisneros, Ann Patchett, and 111 others.

Only 24 Iowa grads hit the NYT bestseller list. It’s a fiction list, and 1778 of the Iowa grads have a specified fiction degree, so those odds are 1.3%. We’re talking about John Irving, Elin Hilderbrand, Kent Haruf, Allan Gurganus, Jane Smiley, Ann Patchett (again), Adam Haslett, Ayana Mathis, and sixteen others.

(I have ten years of international bestseller lists from countries around the world, from 2013-22. It’s not at parity with the other data. But for what it’s worth, only two Iowa graduates hit these lists. Kent Haruf in Italy in 2020 with the translation into Italian of Where You Once Belonged, and Ava Dellaira in Mexico in 2019 with Love Lettersto the Dead.)

So. Who managed do it all (by these metrics?). Only two: Justin Cronin and Jayne Anne Phillips. By the extremely idiosyncratic metric of having been heard of by this scholar of 20th and 21st century US fiction, we lose Justin Cronin. (I’d never heard of him!) He attended Harvard before going to IWW and is perhaps best known for a vampire trilogy beginning with The Passage. Phillips has led an extraordinary career. She hit the NYT list early, in 1984. She has judged major prizes 23 times (6th among Iowa grads). She attended MacDowell eight times (3rd most), won two NEAs. And she culminated her career with a Pulitzer in 2024. Given her background, she is exceptionally exceptional: she was born in a small West Virginia town and attended West Virginia University before going to Iowa. She beat extraordinary odds—the wildest, wildest odds—to reach the pinnacle of the literary field.

Because, when doing these kinds of analyses, which I’ve done for a long time, without have the new massive firepower from the Post45 Data Collective + Claude Code, I’ve come to think of Zip Code as Destiny. Where you’re born determines so much about your odds. You’re just at a profound advantage if you’re from 06883 (Weston, CT) or 10514 (Chappaqua, NY) or 10007 (Lower Manhattan, NY) or 02468 (Newton, MA) than if you’re from just about anywhere else. You have the money, the connections, the sociolect to get into an Ivy+ school, which makes it vastly easier to get into Iowa, which makes it vastly easier to win further credentials.

But what this analysis has also shown is that it’s still, even if you’re born with all the advantages, stupidly difficult to succeed in the literary field. Even if you graduate from Iowa, with the best, most prestigious MFA, you still have better than 4 of 5 odds that you’ll never go to MacDowell, or win an NEA, or win one of a number of major prizes, or hit the NYT bestseller list. You’re actually extremely unlikely to do the last two. And if we go back to our initial 3.4 million aspiring writers in the US? Your odds of doing all the above are .000059%. You literally have a better chance of being hit by lightning this year.

This is an admittedly narrow analysis, done with the data available to me right now. It would be amazing to combine this with publishing industry data, literary agent data, figure out how that plays into the odds. But we can guess. All of this is reason to celebrate the DIY punk ethos advocated here by Lincoln Michel, the upstart literary worlds of The Metropolitan Review and Zona Motel and Book Post. As I wrote for LARB a few years ago: “Today when asked for advice about how to be a writer, I say: Find writing you love and follow it. Make those writers your writers. Read each other, publish each other, create literature that speaks from where you are. Take as your model Belt Publishing or Cave Canem or Deep Vellum or Dorothy: A Publishing Project or Hub City Press or Sublunary Editions. Fuck the Poetry Police. Learn from others. Think collectively. Make an aesthetic of your own. ‘Poets, descend,’ writes Ferlinghetti, ‘to the street of the world once more.’ Out from the shadows, into the light.”

***

CAVEAT: There are probably some mistakes here, though if so, I suspect they are minor. I used Claude Code to run the numbers, do cross-dataset analyses. There are complications around matching names that sometimes appear differently in different datasets. I encourage you to go into the data and check my work—and see what else you can find! All the data is available at the Post45 Data Collective, except for the MacDowell data, which I’ll send you if you email me and ask. There’s so much more that could be folded into analyses of literary prestige and sales. What I’ve done here is really just tip of the iceberg, meant to inspire more work rather than have any pretense toward being comprehensive.

This morning I decided to try Claude Code. Everything has changed.

I had heard that Claude Code is transformative. I had heard about vibe-coding. But my god.

Before AI scrambled the world of what’s called digital humanities, I used to do some occasional coding in python for literary analysis. I wrote code line by line, often borrowing chunks from elsewhere, Stack Overflow or whatever. I was super slow. I’d often hit errors and it might take me an hour or more to fix each one. It was a ton of work; I usually had to build my own datasets painstakingly; sometimes the results were worth it; often they weren’t.

There’s no coding with Claude Code. Not like I used to. It’s all vibe-coding; it’s all, that is, just writing in natural language, telling Claude Code what you want it to do. I’ve only played with it for a couple hours, but what it can do is amazing. What I did in two hours this morning would have taken me literally weeks in the before times.

I decided to pick up where I left off a couple days ago. I thought I’d see if, more than just analyze the NEA dataset, Claude Code to synthesize that data with two other datasets and analyze them together: one with 100 years of major literary prize winners and another with 100 years of New York Times bestsellers. It presented me with thorough overviews. I’m only going to present two quick results here, for now.

First, I’ll continue with the analysis about Iowa. As Claude summed it up, “The Iowa Pipeline Runs Everything.” Just 10 MFA programs produce 50% of all MFA-holding NEA fellows. More than half of that 50%—26.6% of all MFA-holding NEA fellows—are from Iowa. Top feeder schools into Iowa’s MFA: Yale (13), Harvard (13), Brown (8), Stanford (7), UC Berkeley (6).

Second, of the ~7000 writers in the three datasets, only 51 have been an NEA fellow, have won a major award, and have hit the NYT bestseller list. With a composite score built with a formula that modulates for the different scales of the different categories—prizes x3 + NYT_weeks/10 + NEA_grants + judge_appearances/5—I ranked these 51. This gives us something of a power ranking of writers who bridged commercialism and prestige in the US since 1965. But it’s also a weird list, because a lot of major writers never bothered with the NEA, so we don’t find the BIGGEST of the biggies here: Saul Bellow, Don DeLillo, Joan Didion, Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, John Updike. Instead we have Denis Johnson, Alice Walker, Annie Proulx, Jonathan Franzen, Jhumpa Lahiri, Joyce Carol Oates, and David Foster Wallace. See what you think.

#1 Robert Penn Warren // Composite Score: 27.7

#2 John Irving // Composite Score: 18.8

#3 Richard Ford // Composite Score: 18.2

#4 Anthony Doerr // Composite Score: 17.2

#5 Denis Johnson // Composite Score: 17.1

#6 Edward P. Jones // Composite Score: 16.5

#7 Alice Walker // Composite Score: 16.1

#8 Eudora Welty // Composite Score: 15.4

#9 Mary Oliver // Composite Score: 14.4

#10 John Gardner // Composite Score: 14.2

#11 Nelson Algren // Composite Score: 13.8

#12 Annie Proulx // Composite Score: 13.2

#13 Jonathan Franzen // Composite Score: 12.2

#14 Robert Stone // Composite Score: 12.1

#15 Michael Palmer // Composite Score: 12.0

#16 Jhumpa Lahiri // Composite Score: 12.0

#17 Joyce Carol Oates // Composite Score: 11.6

#18 Elizabeth Spencer // Composite Score: 11.6

#19 Louise Erdrich // Composite Score: 11.2

#20 Jeffrey Eugenides // Composite Score: 10.8

#21 Jane Smiley // Composite Score: 10.8

#22 Michael Cunningham // Composite Score: 10.6

#23 Adam Johnson // Composite Score: 10.5

#24 William Kennedy // Composite Score: 10.2

#25 Jayne Anne Phillips // Composite Score: 9.9

#26 Charles Johnson // Composite Score: 9.1

#27 Wallace Stegner // Composite Score: 9.0

#28 Gail Godwin // Composite Score: 8.4

#29 Justin Cronin // Composite Score: 8.4

#30 Robert Morgan // Composite Score: 8.3

#31 Jennifer Egan // Composite Score: 8.1

#32 Lorrie Moore // Composite Score: 8.1

#33 Annie Dillard // Composite Score: 8.0

#34 Robert Coover // Composite Score: 7.5

#35 Billy Collins // Composite Score: 7.4

#36 David Foster Wallace // Composite Score: 7.4

#37 Mona Simpson // Composite Score: 7.3

#38 Harriet Doerr // Composite Score: 7.2

#39 Paul Bowles // Composite Score: 6.6

#40 Rosellen Brown // Composite Score: 5.9

#41 Paul Auster // Composite Score: 5.9

#42 Karen Joy Fowler // Composite Score: 5.5

#43 Alice Adams // Composite Score: 5.2

#44 Tayari Jones // Composite Score: 5.1

#45 Richard Price // Composite Score: 4.6

#46 Reynolds Price // Composite Score: 4.5

#47 Isaac Bashevis Singer // Composite Score: 4.4

#48 Jane Hamilton // Composite Score: 4.3

#49 Ottessa Moshfegh // Composite Score: 4.2

#50 Pete Dexter // Composite Score: 4.1

#51 Isabel Bolton // Composite Score: 4.1

After a couple hours, I hit the limit for my Claude subscription and have to wait until 4PM to continue. Mostly, this is because, with my wife, who is a video artist, we asked Claude to build a dataset of artists who have exhibited at the Whitney Biennial, their gender, their undergrad and grad institutions, and whether they have been to Sharpe-Walentas. It’s working on it.

When I co-founded the Post45 Data Collective, my dream was to publish open access literary and cultural datasets that we could, one day, analyze together to get a clearer view of how power and prestige work in the literary world.

Suddenly, with Claude Code, everything I imagined I might, someday, be able to do, has become imminently within reach. I’m so excited.

UPDATE:

I thought I’d see what a Power Ranking looked like without the NEA. This one attempts to balance both sales and prestige. Updike, Roth, Morrison, and Bellow are now four of the top six. McCarthy and DeLillo make it a bit further down. No Didion or Pynchon.