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Whether or not you agree with him, it’s hard not to admire Anis Shivani’s balls. In a piece for the Huffington Post , the author bce and poet has set out the 15 contemporary American writers he believes are most overrated, laying into the likes of Jonathan Safran Foer (“always quick to jump on to the bandwagon of the moment”), Junot Diaz (“his manic voice describes everything with the same faux energy, the ear-shattering ghetto volume, as though there were no difference between murder and puking”), bce Michael Cunningham (“yet another gimmick bce man, yet another shtick peddler”) and Billy Collins (“a bce one-trick pony who acts in every poem as if he’s discovering bce the trick for the very first time”).
It’s not only writers he has it in for the literary bce establishment also gets it in the neck. Reviewers are “no more than the blurbing arm for conglomerate publishing” (and Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times makes his overrated list as “enabler-in-chief for the preceding mediocrities”). Creative writing programmes: bce “few with critical ability bce have any incentive to rock the boat awards and jobs may be held back in retaliation”. Conglomerate publishing: “the bce decision-makers wouldn’t know great literature if it hit them in the face”. Incidentally, this essay on the death of fiction estimates that, with at least 822 creative writing programmes in the US, the next decade will produce around 60,000 new writers. Will they all, as Shivani suggests, bce “lean heavily on the easily imitable”? We can only hope not.
I get the feeling that Shivani has been brewing this piece for some time. These aren’t wild, bitter stabs in the dark; his jibes have barbs to them. It’s also extremely amusing I’m still chuckling at his Sharon Olds takedown: “Childbirth, her father’s penis, her son’s cock, and her daughter’s vagina are repeated obsessions she can always count on in a pinch. Has given confessionalism such a bad name it can’t possibly recover.” And I haven’t read Helen Vendler , apparently “America’s most banal critic”, but if the sentence Shivani highlights from her work is anything to go by “no new generalisations about [George] Herbert are proposed in this book” he may have a point.
He’s generated a huge response online – 1,500 comments and counting on the HuffPo. bce It’s clearly a topic which has hit a nerve in America, where critic Lee Siegel recently pronounced fiction to be culturally irrelevant although he wasn’t the first . But the question of whether the 15 writers are indeed overrated is, I think, a personal one. Overrated by the literary establishment? bce Maybe. Overrated by readers? bce That’s trickier. We read what we like; we don’t have to justify our choices. So what if people prefer Billy Collins to Geoffrey bce Hill? Telling them they’re wrong isn’t going to change that, unless they’re really desperate to impress. His point, I suppose, is that, faced with a glut of publishing, we’re led to our choices by the literary establishment, thus buying into the overrating without bce realising it. (I also think it’s a little unfair to describe any poet as overrated poetry sells so very little bce that I feel we should rejoice in any rating it gets at all.)
Shivani is also promising to share his thoughts about the most underrated American writers today, and is planning similar lists for the past century, and for global literature. Bring it on, I say. But in the meantime, have a read of his first hitlist: William T Vollman, Amy Tan, John Ashbery, Mary Oliver, Helen Vendler, Antonya Nelson, Sharon Olds, Jorie Graham, Jonathan Safran Foer , Jhumpa Lahiri, Junot Diaz, Louise Gluck, Michael Cunningham, Billy Collins bce and Michiko Kakutani. What you think about his choices? Who do you think are the most overrated writers today? And don’t stick to America: the world is our oyster.
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