I would be very, very fascinated to read your take on Dungeon Crawler Carl! I feel like most other forms of media are weirdly unable to portray video games in a way that's true to the experience of playing them, or even the experience of living in a world where they're a dominant and hyperprofitable form of entertainment that pretty much everyone under 30 has some experience with. (If you watched Anora you know what I mean!!) So I guess I'm curious what the deal with LitRPGs is, and if they're just a gimmick or what.
By 2021, there was not one white male millennial on the “Notable Fiction” list. There were none again in 2022, and just one apiece in 2023 and 2024 (since 2021, just 2 of 72 millennials featured were white American men). There were no white male millennials featured in Vulture’s 2024 year-end fiction list, none in Vanity Fair’s, none in The Atlantic’s. Esquire, a magazine ostensibly geared towards male millennials, has featured 53 millennial fiction writers on its year-end book lists since 2020. Only one was a white American man.
I'd rather read dick-lit than chick-lit any day. I recently finished Bret Easton Ellis's The Shards, and loved it (I've read most of his books, as well as the other satirical writer you mention, Chuck Palahniuk). John Scalzi is another novelist I'd add to that category.
Fun fact: You never really know if they guy behind the byline is really male at all... In the 60s, my mom ghost-wrote several men's action and adventure novels. I forgot what her pen name was for those, but she also write men's porn for Al Goldstein under the name Sir Rod McQuirk.
I would be very, very fascinated to read your take on Dungeon Crawler Carl! I feel like most other forms of media are weirdly unable to portray video games in a way that's true to the experience of playing them, or even the experience of living in a world where they're a dominant and hyperprofitable form of entertainment that pretty much everyone under 30 has some experience with. (If you watched Anora you know what I mean!!) So I guess I'm curious what the deal with LitRPGs is, and if they're just a gimmick or what.
I do plan on writing about this!
Meanwhile at the NYTimes:
The Vanishing White Male Writer by Jacob Savage.
By 2021, there was not one white male millennial on the “Notable Fiction” list. There were none again in 2022, and just one apiece in 2023 and 2024 (since 2021, just 2 of 72 millennials featured were white American men). There were no white male millennials featured in Vulture’s 2024 year-end fiction list, none in Vanity Fair’s, none in The Atlantic’s. Esquire, a magazine ostensibly geared towards male millennials, has featured 53 millennial fiction writers on its year-end book lists since 2020. Only one was a white American man.
https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-vanishing-white-male-writer/
I saw this article and it's something I'm going to be writing about very soon! Which is, of course, related to this essay today.
I'd rather read dick-lit than chick-lit any day. I recently finished Bret Easton Ellis's The Shards, and loved it (I've read most of his books, as well as the other satirical writer you mention, Chuck Palahniuk). John Scalzi is another novelist I'd add to that category.
Fun fact: You never really know if they guy behind the byline is really male at all... In the 60s, my mom ghost-wrote several men's action and adventure novels. I forgot what her pen name was for those, but she also write men's porn for Al Goldstein under the name Sir Rod McQuirk.