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7/3/2025, 8:30:33 PM
>Beyond the bookstore, much of the architecture of book discovery is informally targeted at women. Celebrity book clubs are mostly led by female celebrities and increasingly court women of all ages, from those who are fans of Oprah Winfrey and Reese Witherspoon to those who are more interested in the tastes of Dua Lipa and Kaia Gerber. (Former President Barack Obama, the obvious straight male exception, releases a single list of his favorite books every year.) #BookTok, the vast community on TikTok that has become a best-seller machine, is largely populated by women recommending books by other women, like Colleen Hoover’s “It Ends With Us.”
>There are counterexamples that prove the rule. C.J. Box, the author of a long-running series about a Wyoming game warden who solves murders, has expanded his audience to include younger men by appearing on a series of podcasts about hunting, fishing and other outdoors subjects.
>But literary novelists — the kind who populate prestigious lists and publish the “big” books of the year — have not seemed to crack the code with straight guys, at least on social media.
>One common argument focuses on supply: that men are not reading fiction because the subject matter of contemporary fiction does not speak to men. Jordan Castro, a novelist whose books inhabit the minds of frustrated men, wrote in an email that “the general tone and etiquette of the literary world is certainly hostile to masculine expression.” Conduit Books, a new indie press that debuted this year, will focus on books by male authors, and will center “overlooked” themes of “fatherhood, masculinity, working-class male experience, sex and relationships, and negotiating the 21st-century as a man.”
>These arguments hark back to a midcentury culture of fiction writing dominated by men writing about masculine subjects and the male experience. But it was not always thus. In the 19th century, the most popular novels were written by women for a female audience. Their output was considered “paltry entertainment,” according to Dan Sinykin, a professor of English at Emory University and the author of “Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature.”
>There are counterexamples that prove the rule. C.J. Box, the author of a long-running series about a Wyoming game warden who solves murders, has expanded his audience to include younger men by appearing on a series of podcasts about hunting, fishing and other outdoors subjects.
>But literary novelists — the kind who populate prestigious lists and publish the “big” books of the year — have not seemed to crack the code with straight guys, at least on social media.
>One common argument focuses on supply: that men are not reading fiction because the subject matter of contemporary fiction does not speak to men. Jordan Castro, a novelist whose books inhabit the minds of frustrated men, wrote in an email that “the general tone and etiquette of the literary world is certainly hostile to masculine expression.” Conduit Books, a new indie press that debuted this year, will focus on books by male authors, and will center “overlooked” themes of “fatherhood, masculinity, working-class male experience, sex and relationships, and negotiating the 21st-century as a man.”
>These arguments hark back to a midcentury culture of fiction writing dominated by men writing about masculine subjects and the male experience. But it was not always thus. In the 19th century, the most popular novels were written by women for a female audience. Their output was considered “paltry entertainment,” according to Dan Sinykin, a professor of English at Emory University and the author of “Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature.”
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