Everything Is Content - Everything In Conversation: Where Are All The Male Authors?

Episode Date: November 26, 2025

Hello EICritical Thinkers & happy humping day (or whatever the saying is).This week we're discussing the apparent mass-vanishing act of male authors, after a piece for The Guardian suggested that David Szalay's Booker win has "put masculinity back at the centre of literary fiction." Oh! Ok!In a rebuttal for Vogue, author and friend of the podcast Eliza Clarke argues that it’s time to put this debate to bed. She writes: “Male writers still continue to dominate literary awards. They make up a large portion of our bestsellers, all the while continuing to be viewed as more worthy and deserving of critical plaudits. Bernadine Evaristo remains the only Black woman to have won a Booker Prize, ever, and she had to share that win with Margaret Atwood.”With your help and takes we ask: is there any truth to it? And if so: what's driving women's dominion in literary fiction?Thanks for all of your thoughts as ever! Follow us on IG @everythingiscontentpod. Love O, R, B xLinks:Vogue - It's Time To Put The "Where Are All The Male Novelists" Debate To Bed Compact Mag - The Vanishing White Male WriterCurrent Affairs - The White Male Writer Is Fine I PromiseGQ - Why men need to read more novels The Guardian - Do we need more male novelists?VOX - What happened to the bestselling young white man? Unherd - How to read like a man? Wikipedia - Performative MaleThe Guardian - The truth about boys and books Substack - The dawn of the post-literate society Books mentioned:Open Water by Caleb Azumah NelsonAnna Karenina by Leo TolstoyBrooklyn by Colm TóibínAtonement by Ian McEwanNormal People by Sally Rooney Loren Ipsum by Andrew GallixFlesh by David SzalayCaledonian Road by Andrew O'Hagan Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I'm Beth. I'm Richara and I'm Anoni. And this is Everything in Conversation. This is our midweek episode designed to lift you out of your content slump and get you through to Friday. Remember, if you want to take part in these extra episodes, just follow us on Instagram, Everything is ContentPod. That's where we decide on topics and ask for your opinions. So this week, we're asking, where are all the male novelists? After a recent Guardian piece stirred quite a bit of controversy, stating that the Booker Prize-winning,

novel Flesh by David Sloy has, quote, put masculinity back at the centre of literary fiction. The piece opens. Novels of female interiority have dominated literary fiction for nearly a decade. Writers such as Sally Rooney and Otessa Mosheg captured the inner lives of young women in a way that felt almost shockingly fresh and real and chimed with a Me Too movement. Similar stories about young men have become hard to find. An inner rebuttal piece for Vogue, author and friend of podcast, Eliza Clark, argues that it's time to put the where-are-all-the-male novelist debate to bed. She writes, quote,

male writers still continue to dominate literary awards. They make up a large portion of our bestsellers, all the while continuing to be viewed as more worthy and deserving of critical plaudits. Bernardine Everest, though, remains the only black women to have won a Booker Prize ever, and she had to share that win with Margaret Atwood. In a Vox piece from earlier this year, writers Miles Bryan and Noel King found that in 1800, women made up about 5% of published authors, then 10%-ish through the 1900s, and not until 2015 did women surpass men in book publishing. And in another piece for The Guardian from May,

Ella Creamer wrote, quote, are male novelists actually in decline? Some metrics certainly say so, of all the writers to appear on the weekly Sunday Times bestseller list for fiction hardbacks so far this year, just a third of men. However, there are multiple ways to cut the pie. Though women dominate the fiction charts, Richard Osmond's novels took the top of two spots for the most books sold in the UK last year. The 2024 Booker Prize shortlist featured five women and one man. The 2023 list had more people called Paul than women. This is a discourse that has been kicking around for years and does seem to refuse to die. But what did you both make of the Guardian piece and Eliza's piece and this never-ending

discourse about the apparent extinction threat towards male authors? I loved Eliza's piece so much because when she plainly puts out, the top men dominating the bestseller charts, the people constantly winning awards, aka more often than not white male men, wait, white men. It just does feel a bit absurd because there has been so much discourse around the loss of male novelists that it feels like with that noise just constantly around, I kind of started to believe it. And then when she labeled so many authors that I had read and who are prolific, it just seems,

it seems so confusing why this argument has gained so much steam. I think what she argued as well about there being a distinction between popular fiction versus acclaimed fiction, aka fiction that gets awards, is really interesting because, yes, an author like Sally Rooney has a cult following is very popular, but when you look at awards consistently, the popular female fiction of our time rarely gets the same amount of traction and, I guess, acclaim the male novelist do. So I think it's quite an interesting take from The Guardian because it's quite flattening. it just kind of reduces this issue.

And I'm really glad that Eliza Clark unpicked the kind of naughtiness of it because I don't think it is as simple as where are all the male novelists. I think there is a difference between who gets the acclaim from critics. Why are the same kind of authors being upheld, you know, in literary circles versus what audiences are really hungry for and what the appetite from publishing is saying versus what is upheld as successful fiction by the award system? I was the same as you, Richard. I'd kind of absorbed this information that, you know,

male writers are on the decline and then you read these two pieces in tandem and you think oh no actually that's not true and then i think about readers and i think about like the men that i have in my life and the books that they read and they're often more like espionage books or thrillers or something always written by men and i think one thing that we forget is women are such more voracious readers all the girls that i know in my life the women that i know that read have read since they're very little which means that as you get older and you grow up you do start to move towards more literary fiction and perhaps move away from more commercial fiction just by virtue of reading for longer and your taste changing and adapting. And so I think there is more of an appetite for perhaps women writing literary fiction, but it doesn't mean that men aren't writing those books. And if those women are doing well, it's about time because there was such a long time when there was such a death of women's novels, it's not been that long since women had to publish under male pseudonyms in order to even get like their foot in the door. So many of the very famous novels that were attributed to male writers were actually, you know,

written by their wives or assisted by women in their lives. So I think that it's, as Eliza Clark makes out in the piece, it's that thing of equality to the privilege feels like oppression. We've had these breakthrough authors come through, have really taken the helm. And I think it is unusual for someone like Sally Rooney. We're so used to her being so popular now. But I think there would have been a time in the past

when it would have been quite unusual for those kind of books to become so mainstream. And I think that's really exciting. But I find it fascinating this idea of men feeling like they're not being heard and not being seen when it's actually laid out. it's just patently untrue and I wonder if maybe we need to look more at readers and I think part of the issue is men don't want to read literary fiction as much anyway and I think that women

will read writing from both men and women and it's so interesting that in that guardian piece they say these books you know they're centre around the Me Too movement or it's like Eliza Clark points out Orbital which is a book that I loved reading earlier this year is about a mixed gender cast of astronauts orbiting the earth and it's kind of about life and humanity and whatever else and it's like they've literally gone women author this book is about me too and actually they're not often and whereas I think that male readers are more skewed to reading male writers so maybe there's a bigger there's an interesting conversation to be had about the gender divide in writing and in reading but I certainly don't think it's that men are being left out it's interesting because

I wanted to take this on from so many angles and I was like well maybe in fact this has happened maybe this is real and we are watching something like a real sociological cultural thing in real time and how interesting. And then I did read all of these statistics and it's like, oh, this is an inflated problem that is just a case. It seems like it's just a case of redress that to some white men in publishing or some aspiring authors does feel like an attack. And there are so many pieces about this and then so many pieces about those pieces. And I read a piece by Jacob Savage for Compact Magazine entitled The Vanishing White Male Writer, which came out earlier this year and was as infuriating as you would expect, and he basically argues that the literary pipeline for

white men has shut down, was shut down in the 2010s, and now we have this modern millennial writer, male writer, who is failing to capture the zeitgeist, failing to get signed, and is just being sort of strangled out of having a voice, and he writes, quote, unwilling to portray themselves as victims, cringe, politically wrong, or as aggressors, toxic masculinity, unable to assume the authentic voices of others, appropriation, younger white men are no longer capable of describing the world around them. Which, I mean, I just like the longest eye after that. Luckily, there was a really good rebuttal by Alex Copic for current affairs. And I'll quote from this one, just to sort of illustrate how many hoops these men are jumping

through to make themselves feel the victim. So the quote from this piece was, he claims that a very specific kind of white male author, young American heterosexual bourgeois, who writes a very specific kind of book, novels that are not set in the past or part of a genre or auto fiction, is getting somewhat less attention from a very specific set of listmakers, The New York Times, The Atlantic. Using the same rhetorical tactic, you could write a headline about how black female writers are vanishing, then clarify in the article itself that you mean working class African American lesbians between the ages of 50 and 75 who write metrical poetry, but not sonnets.

Savage's chosen terms tell us almost nothing about the publishing industry as a whole. And it does feel when reading something like that, that men or these men in particular have, they're determined for this to be an enormous problem rather than if this was something that women or any other underrepresented group in literary fiction were talking about, those same men would go, you're not good enough, you are not capturing the market properly. You need to work harder. It's not our problem. When it's white men, even under the slightest hint of losing their market share, it's a catastrophe. So as much as I was like, I'm going to hear both sides. And I do think there's an interesting conversation to be had here about literary take. it's just not this is not a real problem as far as I can say we had a message from molly and it's going to be i'm going to not say this verbatim but she made the point that readers female readers often read perspectives from all genders and like you said male readers and you said anecdotally often read just male perspectives and i wonder if the kind of cult following of lots of female writers is like you said that kind of interiority has been ignored for so long even though we have have writers like Caleb Azuma Nelson who wrote Open Water, which I loved, exploring interiority

from a male perspective. Because it's a black male perspective, it just isn't given that same status from these pieces, you know, denouncing the death of the male novelist. Even though those writers are existing, they're just offering different male perspectives. And for some reason, they're getting entirely shunned from this conversation. And it's actually, it's so offensive, really, because that book was incredible. There's so many books offering maybe a different perspective, maybe that's, you know, a different gender perspective, a different sexuality orientation perspective. But people are writing those stories. Those stories are not dead. They're not non-existent. And I just think what people are really saying is they're looking for another

less than zero by Brett Easton Ellis. They're looking for a really specific experience, which is just that, you know, white male nihilistic take for our time. And to be given that cult following of this is the book that captures our moment because that's what I'm reading from these takes. I'm reading that we haven't got one of those. We've got a normal people, which is. Sally Rooney's version. Why haven't we got a male version of that? But I think when you break it down, it really is just about the whiteness of it already. Yeah, I agree. The other thing that I was taking from the piece was a bit of like victimization, you know, and he's like, you can't write like Martin Amos anymore. And I was like, is that true though? Like in fiction, do you not have the

scope or the space to write characters that are problematic that are unlikable? I only started, I only read my first Martin Amos maybe like three years ago. And it feels, it feels again like that thing when men are being like, well, you can't say anything anymore. And it's like, you absolutely can. Just be clever with it. Change the format of it. Change the angle that you're coming at it from. Like, no one's telling you that you can't write these. If you're desperate to write a story that channels some really famous white author that you now feel has fallen out of favour, then include that in the writing that you're doing. I don't really get it. And I don't know, do I read, I did read a man's book recently. What was that one that I read?

Completely forgotten, which I actually did really enjoy. You're a Franzen girl. Was it Franzen? No, I was reading France. Oh no. Well, the most recent book I read was Lauren Nixon by Andrew Gallix. The book I read before that was Canadonian Road by Andrew O'Hagan. So I do, I actually forget that I read men, but I do, like, I feel no problem with reading men. I literally go by, as I said, I'll go by the back of the blurb and I'll read it. And there are some men that I do think write women very badly and that might put me off reading them. But like Jonathan Franzen I've said before, I think he writes women really well. But I think it's such a non-issue, but I have seen it read so many times that I before kind of hadn't

really questioned it. But I think it's, again, to go back to why I didn't question it, it is because I just don't see men reading. So then I just don't think there are many male writers because it's just so much less of an experience for them. There was a piece by Matt Feeney last year for Unheard that reads, how to read like a man, male readers are driven by hubris. And he talks about that thing that I was saying that, like, girls tend to read from a younger age and men come to books later. And he was saying, what's interesting is men who really read actually tend to be reader writers, men who really read literary fiction end up wanting to write as well. And there's actually like not that many men that are interested in the form of literary fiction unless they

themselves want to kind of plant their own flag and take a stake in it. And I do think that is interesting the way that books are gendered. And we've spoken about this before, but even the way that men often are more driven towards self-help, self-improvement, how to win friends and get a job promotion, whatever that book's called, how to not give a fuck all 18 editions of that. And I think whereas women are looking at how to, potentially it's still the same thing, potentially it's how to become a better person, how to understand yourself more, but through a more introspective chastising lens, often through the prism of fiction.

And Neve said, nothing is stopping the boys from reading about boys. I just don't want to. And I think that's fair enough, Neve. That just really reminds me that Ash Sarkar literally wrote this piece for GQ in 2022. Conversations with friends, why men need to read more novels. And she talks about the fact that the death of the male novelist

is this argument that keeps going round and round, but really we need to question the death of the male reader. and she talks about her boyfriend being, on the surface, somebody she would imagine to read loads of books. He has bell hooks on his shelf. He's not, you know, a Jimbrough, but he just doesn't really read. And it's such an interesting point that I feel like we've had these conversations before. The Death of the Male Novelist has been interrogated. So why does it keep coming up? Why is it such a sticky thing?

Why does it feel like The Guardian has, like, published this piece rather than publishing another piece about the success of this book? That was such a good point, because I was going to say, this is such a funny thing. like why did the Guardian publish a piece about how male novelists are not getting in attention when literally this male novelist has just won the Book of Prize? It's such a classic like, like, whip-plash situation. It's like, oh my God, no one's reading men anymore and we've just given this man a massive prize. Let's talk about by the snowmail writer's like, what are you on about? Literally. Also, I have read Flesh and I did enjoy it. It's not even really about Flesh. It's about the whole discourse point of this issue. Why have they published

this piece? Can I ask you about Flesh? Because I was, I was talking, Beth and I both, actually, this was the Annie Lord's thing the other day, we're talking to someone, and she was like, literally just read the new Book Prize book, Flash, and she was like, I really didn't enjoy it. Or did she say, no, yeah, she didn't enjoy it. Or did she enjoy it? No, I don't think it became highly recommended to us. I did enjoy it, but it's a really difficult read. The language is so sparse, it's so disconnected. The kind of writing where you feel pushed away from the character, and they give you nothing about how they're feeling. It's so robotic almost. So it took me ages to get into it.

the main character, Istivan, it starts with him facing sexual abuse of a kind. I won't really go into it, so I don't spoil it, but that is how it starts. And his main takeaway from every situation that happens to him, good or bad, is he just always replies with OK. And it's so detached. And it's kind of following him from this experience, him having the highs and lows of a life, you know, moving to the UK, becoming a security guard, then getting involved in the upper echelons of London, being adjacent and then involved in the richest parts of the London scene, and then always just this detached feeling of technically being poor, technically being rich, then being ultra rich, and just always this detached feeling from him. And it's very, it's interesting

they say the interiority of the male perspective, because you get nothing of that. It's probably just like actually quite a damning indication of the nihilism of some men and how they feel, whether that's trauma, whether that's love, whether that's any experience of life, is what I took away from it? I think it just feels like what needs updating and what actually would be valuable is male authors writing about or just finding out ways to write about masculinity and life in a way that feels really current and feels like it says something and adds something. Because after you've had like decades and centuries and centuries of white men, especially dominating art and telling their stories and sort of mining their own experiences and viewpoints and then doing it 400,000 more

times, it does sort of feel like this is a natural moment of rebalancing. Not that we haven't need for the modern story of masculinity or not that we haven't need for novels of interiority by men. But it does feel like unless they are offering something that is new and interesting, then why would people seek out the new Martin Amos when Martin Amos is right there? Why would they read one of the new novels that isn't quite getting it rather than go back into the canon almost? And I think there are so many great male novelists. They are not vanishing.

But maybe there is an element of, well, if a normal people succeeds in this way, why would I shop around or men just perhaps not catching up to. Because I don't know any women, apart from even our mentions, who genuinely is not interested in reading men. I love reading from male perspectives. I love reading about boys and men and old men and married men and bad men and good men. And I think it's a very good move to seek that out. And I would be very excited if someone said, you've got it. We've got the male normal people. Because it's just a fascinating glimpse into a kind of living that I don't understand. But when I have read books by men, I'll be honest. On this podcast, we, have interviewed, have we interviewed only women, only female novelists? Yes. Yeah, which one is, what books have these women written? Why will they appeal to us and why do they appeal to our listenership? And it is often, we talk to these women and they are doing so much of the legwork, they are plugging away. Publishing is not easy for women. It's not easy for queer people, disabled people, but they are plugging away. They are finding their readership. It is not,

I think, I don't think it's that we are sidelining men. I just think we are waiting for that book to emerge that is universal in its appeal in the way that normal people was. Some of my favourite literary females were written by literary females. I sound like an insult. My favourite fictional females, oh God, I did it again. Basically, men can write women very well. To say, oh, well, men are too afraid to write women because they'll get cancelled. I mean, like, Anna Kranina.

Brooklyn by Column Tobin, I just reread recently. Amazing capturing of like the female spirit. Ian Bukuin's Atonement. I was reading a really interesting piece by James Baldwin. when writing from the perspective of black women and how he succeeded at that, which obviously I can't verify from my identity. But my point is, when men are bold enough to write about masculinity from where it actually sits, where it's in conversation with femininity, where kind of where it like jostles against that and actually does exist, not just a kind of like, woe is me,

I hate women. Something interesting is really something interesting and born and it captures both male attention, or at least it captures a big female readership and we know that we are reading more than men. So I will just say, I think there is just as voracious an appetite for books about masculinity, but maybe male writers are not thinking how to properly position that in today's market, whereas women are always writing about men and masculinity and how those things intersect, and nobody is stopping men from doing the same. We had a message from Ian, which I thought was really interesting. And he said that I think that masculine cultures already has large number of outlets and young men are surrounded by content shaped for them. The interior masculinity

identity crisis feels very similar to what it always has been. If anyone does want content about masculinity, there's a huge amount of available through podcast, TikTok, YouTube, etc. Whether or not those are healthy messages is another issue, but the material is there. And what that was making me think is, I think that's very true. I think that men like to listen to other men talking. Like I said, they prefer like nonfiction, anecdotal evidence. They like to see someone's career progression. They like to hear how they did it. They want instructions. It reminds me of the thing that constantly comes up and acts and has always come up in my relationship where women go, I was just trying to vent to my boyfriend and my partner about something

and they were trying to give me solutions and I was like can you please stop I just want to tell you about something and I actually don't want like a solution there is clearly something about the way that men have been socialised where they're always looking to like just fix a problem and put it to bed whereas I think that women maybe part of the reason we enjoy literary fiction is the way we've been socialised is to laboriously tend over an issue picket it

look at it again look at it from another angle and that's why we love reading these stories perhaps more than men and I do think that's probably like a socialisation thing but all this is also making me think was the current trend of like the performative male might be quite damaging to men who do want to get into literary fiction who do want to start reading because now we've kind of made a pariah out of men who do take an interest in literature or in books and we kind of take the piss out of them and we assume that it's coming from a place of and not without good evidence lefty soft boy

whatever beam me up soft boy those men do exist they do use therapy speak and feminist books and bell hooks and carabinism and whatever else to try and make women think that they they're lovely men when they're not. But I do think, I do wonder if like just cult, there's a cultural issue here. There is a problem going on within readers. And I wonder if that then translates into writing. And it's so interesting hearing you talk about flesh rhetorics as you're talking before you said that. I was like, God, it is fascinating that a book that we're now saying, finally, you know, men are writing about the interiority of men feels so far away from what we view to be about the interiority of men. And I do think these things are happening in tandem with writers and

with readers and that perhaps now I'm getting a bit worried about this sort of the performative male thing because I would love men to read more. In fact, it's one of the things that I find sad with men and I don't have that many friendships with men, but it's one of the things where I've always tried to like tell men to read certain books and they never do and I always find that quite sad because I feel like I could get someone to understand me so much better if I could just get them to read this book. It explains everything so much better than I ever could. And there does seem to be a reticence from male readers. And Bridget said, historically the novel became silly when women started reading more widely. Men read non-fiction far more than they read

fiction. So market-wise, fewer stories written by men, targeted at men, are going to be popular. That doesn't mean the stories aren't out there, though, or that the male viewers society isn't what we're all viewing the world through, thanks to the media and art that's most prevalent. And I think that's another really good thing to remember. Even if we're not reading stories written by men, or it feels like they don't exist as much, we're living in a world written by men. It's such a good point. It's such a good point from Ian. It's such a good point from Hannah, who said, what happened to all of the male writers? They bought blue Yeti microphone. I fear. That made me laugh so much. But also to treat it really seriously, I do think that that

is the answer in part to all of this. You are so right. There's not a lack of male perspective. That is exactly it. It's just in different mediums. And it's been shuffled into different arenas, shall we say. And the perspective is really, really loud. It's so loud. It's dictating culture in so many ways. The books feel like one of the few spaces that feel at least statistically in terms of book sales and culturally in terms of prevalence to be more female spaces. But the reality is the awards are still going to men. Let us have our little slice of a Sally Rooney or an attessa or, I don't know, the next Carrie Bradshaw of our time.

It feels like, it feels interesting to not mention podcasts or other arenas like social media and TikTok and all of that kind of stuff. They might be female spaces, but they're just as equally pushing out very extreme. missed male perspectives. It's all around us everywhere. And there is an idea that, or at least this idea of like publishing is to blame because there's so many women in publishing and they're just choosing other women to champion. And it's like publishing isn't anti-men or against male readers or writers, they want them because it's a business. They want to make money. And we know that men, when they are reading, are often picking up books by other men. And so it just doesn't, it's that

kind of circular thinking where it's like, there is a, there is a flaw here in this. And actually, you should look at the arguments that people making because it's so easy to pick the whole in them. I think it is interesting though to consider why men and boys are reading less and whether it almost poisons the well because they are as young men hearing male voices in these podcasts, in these forums that are not particularly pro reading, pro literacy, pro empathy, which all the things that you get from reading widely. I think it's so good for us all when we read, it's good for cognition. It's good for being like a better and nicer person in society. And I do think when it comes to writing about like the modern issues that

the authors of all the books we've had on have basically written about like sex, love, friendship. women are really succeeding at that, men are falling short. And it's like I refuse to believe that the doors are shut. But I do wonder whether there is a case of men are hearing, almost detracting voices from such a young age now, that they are then shutting the door themselves and going, okay, well, that's not for me. And it's almost this like echo of something, which isn't true, but feels very true, that they are not welcome, that they will not be well received, that they can't be understood almost. And like, I am so reticent to take it properly seriously because all the evidence points to this not being. true. Obviously there is some kind of rub for young men, maybe young male novelists, but also maybe young male readers who just think the world has moved on. This is not for me

anymore. So it's been an issue for a while. There's a piece in the Guardian from almost 10 years ago titled The Truth About Boys and Books. They read less and they skip pages. And there was a massive study done, I think of like a tenth of the school age population in the UK boys. And it was like they do tend to read lean towards nonfiction, whether that is something that they've been, again, socialised to believe they're going to enjoy more or magazines. But even when they were reading them, they weren't actually taking it in to the same extent that girls were. And they would like skip pages and not read over them. So this isn't a new thing. It's obviously going to have been totally exacerbated by social media and video games

and that ever broadening gap between what we find as entertainment, like short form content. And it goes back to that really damning substack that we read by James Marriott, the dawn of a post-literate society that we spoke about at Tarantam Literary Festival. So this has been an ever-growing issue. And I do that maybe to perhaps to go back to what Bridget said is that the way that novels started to be seen or anything that women do that's talking about women's lives did start to be seen as something silly or trivial, even though so many of those books have come on to form the basis of everything that we see in culture. Film, every new show, everything has a bit of Jane Austen or Virginia Woolf or those writers exist and permeate through culture still. So I just wonder if there's

this idea, this hierarchical idea in the minds of men, of what constitutes something that's important and useful for them versus like the pleasure that can be found from fiction and the importance of fiction for understanding yourself and other people and the world and exploring new ideas, maybe there's a confidence that you can move through the world without having understood all of these things and they're not necessary to you, whereas I feel shame about four times a day when I remember a book that I haven't read that I probably should have read that's really important. I've probably lied about reading at some point on this podcast even. And then I'm like, crap, I must remember to read that. Whereas I don't think that men are plagued by that same

sense that they must know literature in the same way, but they do want to know about, I'm generalising so much here, but you know that whole thing of like the Roman Empire thing. So I got a message from an anonymous listener who said, can't comment on the book of prize, but I'm a lady writer in quite a male dominated genre, horror. And when I published my first novel, I was asked if I would prefer to be known by my initial only, so it wouldn't be obvious that I was a woman. Apparently it can put people off because they make the assumption the book is women's lit. What the fuck does that even mean? Anyway, good to see masculinity, the heart of the booker again, etc, etc. And it's reading messages like this that you're like, we cannot

fanny around discussing where the male novelists have gone. This is an industry that is still plagued by so much sexism and also just real problems in terms of literacy and, you know, books by LGBTQI authors. The current affairs piece goes into really damning detail about the actual crisis in publishing, Palestinian writers being systematically murdered, the IDF rating of Palestinian bookstore, confiscating books, books by marginalized authors being thrown out or targeted by rabid Republicans in America. And as interesting as this is Tomolover, and I would be interested to hear from more men in response to this, it's not a crisis. And I don't think it's worthy of so many headlines as it has been, especially for male writers with enough

clout, spotlight, actual issues. And that is the rub for me. I think women are reporting stuff like this of being asked not to put their own name on books. That is worthy of a guardian headline. and this, I do not believe, is. Thank you so much for listening and for all of your opinions and takes on this topic. We love being in conversation with you all. Please also give us a follow on Instagram and TikTok at Everything is ContentPod.

And please give us a review if you listen, if you haven't already. We'll see you as always on Friday. Bye. Bye. Bye. and I was like, wow, she really came to serve. I blacked out since then.