^{(Content warning: The introductory essay in this issue contains mentions of sexual assault.)}

Hi!

In the New York Times this month, Bret Stephens—a man who really ought to just pull the trigger and legally change his name to “Christ, this asshole again”—wrote a piece complaining that straight white men don’t win literary awards anymore.

Stephens posits, “If today, as a reader, you recoil at the thought of a time in which minorities were systematically marginalized when it came to the literary world’s public honors (and so much else), shouldn’t you also recoil now that the tables have been almost completely turned?” He argues that literary prizes are now a topsy-turvy world where the straight white men are the ones who are really being discriminated against, when you think about it.

Stephens supplies exactly the same kind of rigor to his argument as the snotty rich ninth-grade boy who raises his hand in a chilly February classroom and then smugly inquires, “But why isn’t there a white history month?”

Dummy, it’s because every month is white history month.

And Bret, you dummy, you don’t get to whine about this because men still hold an outsized share of powerful positions in the publishing industry. Those powerful men still systematically prefer books by and about men. Men still write more than 75% of all new history books, and more than 70% of all biographies published are about male subjects.

I could spend all afternoon listing statistics like this, but I’m not going to litigate this particular issue any further because, frankly, it’s a waste of my time to point out to an idiot that water is wet. No, straight white men are not being discriminated against in the publishing industry. You dummy.

But I do want to point out that in his column, Stephens tags one writer, the novelist Alexander Maksik, as an outlier.

“Maksik, who is Jewish, is, to my knowledge, white, male and straight — details that, in a sane world, should have no bearing on whether his book deserves to make the longlist,” Stephens whines. He concludes, with an embarrassing, dramatic flourish worthy of the aforementioned schoolboy: “In this world, sadly, it makes him the lucky token.”

So let’s talk about that “lucky token,” shall we? At his publisher’s request, I did an onstage event with Alexander Maksik for his debut novel, You Deserve Nothing, here in Seattle about 15 years ago. I recall that he was charming and the event went well.

Then, a short while later, Jezebel reported that You Deserve Nothing, a novel about a thirtysomething teacher at a prestigious school who has a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old student, seems to be based on Maksik’s own experiences as a teacher. Elissa Strauss writes:

According to former students I spoke with, in the spring of 2006 Alexander Maksik lost his position teaching at the American School of Paris (ASP) for having an affair with a seventeen-year-old student. Their relationship allegedly lasted over a semester, and ended when Maksik was quietly dismissed by the school shortly after the young woman, named Marie in the book, had an abortion. The students said nearly everything that happens in the book happened in real life, and almost all the characters are based on real people.

A couple years later, in a distressingly sympathetic profile for the Associated Press, Maksik appeared to confirm the story:

“I was in bad shape, and this thing had happened and I wondered how I allowed it to happen, how I had made all these decisions,” says Maksik, whose graying hair is offset by his youthful, open expression.

“And it was a very upsetting time for me. I was humiliated. I was ashamed and angry at myself and angry in general. And this was the only thing I thought I could do,” he says. “It was an effort to make sense of what had happened, and an effort to turn this horrible experience into some version of art.”

“Maksik is in privileged company when it comes to turning private experience into literary material,” the AP cooed in the piece. The poor little youthful baby had a “horrible experience” in an “upsetting time,“ you see, and he bravely turned it into “art.”

Please do me a favor and don’t read the fawning AP rehabilitation piece. Instead, read Strauss’s Jezebel piece, in which she talks to the former student who was allegedly the inspiration for the character Marie in the book. Strauss reports that…

…she is disgusted that he is getting literary kudos for re-telling her very real story. She said Maksik included a number of very personal things she told him in confidence in the book, and that she has worked for the past five years to move past the shame and guilt she felt as a result of the affair only to re-encounter it all again in a widely praised novel.

Strauss concludes, “Maksik never asked her for permission.”

At the time, I wrote a blog post sharing Strauss’s piece and apologizing for taking part in the onstage conversation with Maksik. I felt sick about promoting a book that in retrospect felt to me so predatory and exploitative from an author who allegedly abused his power over a student and then sold that alleged abuse as art. I don’t have access to my email from those days, but I recall someone from Maksik’s publisher sent me a huffy “how dare you” kind of email for speaking out, accusing me of betraying their trust by publicly sharing this negative story. But from where I sat, it was the literal least I could do.

Before the pandemic, I routinely took part in a lot of literary events: onstage interviews, panel discussions, group readings, that sort of thing. In the busy seasons of fall and spring, I would often take part in two events a week. It’s exhausting to even think about these days.

But during the pandemic, a dark thought occurred to me. How many authors had I promoted and shared a stage with who eventually turned out to be sexual abusers? In my head, I counted them: There were the creeps who hit on students in their writing classes, the monsters accused of sexual assault, the freaks who sexually harassed women at conventions and readings around the country, and more. I eventually lost count. I know the number is more than twenty—likely way more. And with each year, as more stories come out and more past abuses are revealed, I know the numbers keep rising.

So, no: I don’t know exactly how many abusers I have promoted in my career writing and talking about books and literature. I have no earthly idea how many victims those abusers have harmed between them. But I can goddamn well tell you three things for sure:

The vast majority of these abusers are straight.

The vast majority of them are white.

And all of them are men.

I also know that the publishing industry has done virtually nothing to stop the next generation of abusers from taking root. There have been no institutional reforms. The system of book publishing and promotion still favors egomaniacal and sociopathic creeps who will feed on the pain of others if they can wring even a moment’s pleasure out of that experience. It’s a sick system. But it makes a handful of people very rich, so I guess we’re just supposed to live with it—or we can drop out of the community, which I suspect lots of people (including generational talents whose work we will never get to read) have done.

Anyway, I say all that to say this: Bret, you dummy, I don’t give a single rat’s eyelash if straight white men never win another literary award. There are much bigger problems to be solved.

I’ve Been Writing

For the Seattle Times, I wrote about ten of the best paperbacks to be released in September. And I also profiled Pine Books, the newest bookstore in Pike Place Market. It’s a unique bookstore in a space that has been a continuous home to independent bookstores for 65 years.

And yesterday, I guest-co-hosted the Pitchfork Economics podcast to interview Brendan Ballou, an author who has written a very important book. Did you know that when you sue a corporation, your case might be sent to a secret private court funded by the same corporation you’re suing? It’s called forced arbitration, and it’s a reality for tens of thousands of Americans every year. You might have heard of the man who sued Disney because his wife died at a Disney theme park, only to have Disney claim that he couldn’t sue them because his wife had at one point agreed to the Disney+ terms of service. That’s just one infuriating story in Ballou’s book.

I’ve Been Reading

I enjoyed Hildur Knútsdóttir’s creepy and propulsive debut thriller, The Night Guest.

As a teenage fan of Batman: The Animated Series, I found I Am the Night to be a pretty interesting story detailing the improbable birth of an excellent cartoon.

And as someone who loves the stand-up comedian Taylor Tomlinson, I finished her memoir with a nervous sense that I should be worried about her.

R.F. Kuang is one of the best young authors today. I thought her latest book, Taipei Story, was an interesting literary almost-memoir that takes dead aim at her most important themes without the glamour of genre that she typically employs to make her explorations more palatable to general audiences. It felt a little like a great acoustic record from a band known for their giant stadium-rock anthems, which I mean as a compliment.

I’m recovering from COVID, so I’m going to stop here and get some rest. Please get your COVID and flu shots as soon as possible. I know a lot of folks who have been taken out by illness this month. Sick season is coming earlier than usual this year, and the bugs seem especially infectious.

Take care,

Paul