It’s often been noted, yet bears repeating: Americans are reading less than ever, and that includes kids. For adults, reading reduces stress, improves sleep, slows cognitive decline, helps us live longer, expands our knowledge and, in the case of fiction, may even help us develop empathy. Kids who read get all those benefits, too, plus greater likelihood of academic success. Yet we beat on, boats against the current of what’s good for us, continuing to read less each year.
Last week, New York Times columnist David Brooks added another wrinkle to the conversation, arguing that literary fiction once occupied a prominent place in American culture, but has gone AWOL in recent decades, driven partly by an excess of “Colleen Hoover and fantasy novels and genre fiction” and partly by the rise of progressive political orthodoxy. One could parse eternally what constitutes “literary fiction” (i.e., “highbrow”) as opposed to “genre fiction” (e.g., romance, horror, fantasy, sci fi), as well as the extent to which those designations are valid—and whether they really matter. But, with the caveat that genre fiction can also be smart and tell us valuable things about our world, I’m willing to lean into Brooks’s premise that some distinction exists there. I also agree with him on several other counts:
- Literary fiction used to occupy a larger share of bestseller lists.
- It would be good if Americans read more books, especially more books that challenge them.
- We all have stunted attention spans, which has weakened our proclivity for reading challenging books.
- An excess of political orthodoxy can hinder critical thought and creativity.
Yet reports of literature’s death appear to be greatly exaggerated. True, Brooks might observe that I’m not “old enough to remember when novelists were big-time,” but I’ll counter that I’m young enough to have written a dissertation on twenty-first-century literary fiction. So here goes.
First, genre books have long sold big. As Brooks notes, literary greats Vladimir Nabokov and J.D. Salinger published some of the best-selling books of the early 1960s. But can you name the #1 seller in 1964, the year after Salinger’s Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters ranked third? It was John le Carré’s spy thriller, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Two years after that? The notoriously “melodramatic, lurid and camp” Valley of the Dolls. Since their debuts in the 1970s, Stephen King and Danielle Steel have sold astonishing numbers: 350 million and a billion copies, respectively. In short, pulp is hardly a new phenomenon.
Second, there is no shortage of highbrow novelists today, and to the extent that Americans are still reading, many are reading their work. Brooks may gloss over Barbara Kingsolver’s achievements as “reliably left-wing,” but that doesn’t change the fact that she’s a two-time winner of both the UK Women’s Prize and the Pulitzer Prize who can claim ten bestsellers. Other recent Pulitzer recipients, including Colson Whitehead and Anthony Doerr, have also sold millions of books. The New York Times bestseller list ended 2024 with Percival Everett’s James at the #1 spot. The year prior, Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake debuted at #1. Contrary to Brooks’s assertion that “interest in contemporary writers overall has collapsed,” critically recognized novels continue to sell—and that’s whether or not they are perceived as “progressive.”
Still, I can buy Brooks’s argument that literary fiction “plays a less central role” in American life than it once did. It certainly doesn’t take center stage today. And I wasn’t around to witness the early eighties, when Brooks recalls “vastly more book review outlets,” so I won’t argue about the cultural vibes back then.
But I wonder about the extent to which literary fiction has simply come to occupy a cultural space that is less visible to Brooks and his peers. Is it possible that, in part, he’s mistaking an evolution for a disappearance? Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro’s most recent novel, Klara and the Sun, has over four hundred thousand Goodreads ratings, and his most popular, Never Let Me Go, has over eight hundred thousand. Trevor Noah’s March 2025 interview with critically acclaimed novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie surpassed three hundred thousand YouTube views within two weeks; Adichie’s most famous TED Talk is now approaching fifteen million views. BookTok catapulted sales of Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles—a retelling of the Iliad—from a humble twenty thousand copies to over two million. I’ll grant that BookTok doesn’t primarily trade in works inspired by Greek mythology, but it is one of multiple vibrant, online spaces where discussion of literary fiction lives on.
Genre fiction is undoubtedly having a moment, and if that gets more people reading, all the better; novels don’t have to be highbrow to boost our brain health or our empathy, nor do they have to be highbrow to be intellectually provocative. What genre fiction hasn’t done, however, is supplant literary fiction. We aren’t reading as much as we should, very true, but the sorts of novels that that Brooks admires are still here, and they still matter. For the sake of literacy, as well as the creative, emotional, and cognitive development of children, let’s do our best to get them reading something—and all the better if it’s something truly worthy of their attention.
