“Doesn’t the very uselessness of the great unread of contemporary fiction bring it into ironic alignment with the work of genius in the great tradition of aesthetic theory?” McGurl asks in Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon.

(Judging by the typos and formatting errors he discovered in his research, many may not have been read even by their authors.) These thousands upon thousands of unopened mysteries, romances, and post-apocalyptic fantasies surely hold secrets of contemporary life-maybe even more so because they haven’t been read.

The literary theorist Mark McGurl has argued that a significant percentage of these e-books are novels that nobody has ever read. Much of this output is enabled by Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing platform, on which anyone can upload a Word document and turn it into an e-book. Bowker, the company that assigns ISBN numbers to all new books, calculated that in the United States in 2018 there were 1,677,781 new self-published works. We are living in a golden era of publishing. Matt Weir ▪ Winter 2023ĭetail from a painting by Romanian surrealist Victor Brauner (1903–1966) (Yannick/Flickr)īy Mircea Cărtărescu, trans. Yet in his fiction, he often speaks through narrators hostile to publication and recognition. The Romanian writer Mircea Cărtărescu boasts a long, international-award-winning bibliography of poetry and prose.

Surviving the zombie apocalypse abyss