“The effort needed to accurately recall the original wave of Alt-Lit in detail is not worth the cognitive bandwidth it would require. All that needs to be said is that several predominantly American, poorly-dressed trust fund adults wrote entirely in lowercase, pantomiming literature in ‘sentegraphs’ or moron-grade single-sentence paragraphs. A few slumming academics hopped on board, and the self-important HTMLGiant scene was born. The Internet was still young enough that this was considered noteworthy, and the growing parade of pseudo-writers was allowed to announce its continued existence on endless, monotonous, functionally-identical blogs. The pseudo-writers were at least young, and America worships youth, so the lack of any underlying talent or imagination went unremarked for a relatively long time.
The collapse came from within, as the internal contradictions became too much even for the ‘writers’ and ‘poets’ involved. Like all faux-naive movements, Alt-Lit’s collision with reality destroyed it. The ‘affectless’ and ‘ironic’ scene was done in by a MORAL PANIC. The proto-Me Too platforming of prudish dilettantes like Marie Calloway clashed disastrously with the realization that seemingly-harmless Readers of Depressing Books and raving wilderness poets were in fact inept sexual predators, or ‘unsuccessful rapists,’ to apply an epithet once thrown at Wyndham Lewis (the ‘Alt-Lit males’ were never terribly virile, is one way of putting this…we can imagine them flaccidly slouching towards abuse without ever quite achieving it).
Suddenly it was over, and no one cared. There were no trenchant, relevant, or lasting Alt-Lit stories, and no novels of note. There was no poetry worth reading. There was nothing to ‘rediscover,’ nothing that would interest the future. With nothing to even attack, there was nothing for anyone to defend. The defunct self-promotional schemes shriveled like old balloons. What little written material existed at all was ‘autofictional’ to the point of mere diaristic transcription. The prose remained remedial: beneath parody, and easily-replicable by modern AI models.
But now, as America drops decisively into global irrelevance, the middle-aged millennial midwits of Alt-Lit struggle to rise from the couch and achieve true significance at last: even to transmit their deficiencies to Gen Z like a congenital prose disease. This is known as Alt-Lit 2.0: Dimes Square. Literarily Botoxed and Ozempiced with ‘Internet slang’ into a semblance of timeliness, the no-longer-terribly-young Gen Z gamely plays along. The trust fund New Yorkers and pseudo-writers are still there, but now they have Issues, Politics, Religion and, apparently, Peter Thiel/Curtis Yarvin funds. An anonymous mediocrity from the original scene like Jordan Castro links the toneless omphaloskepsis of the 2010s with the rehabilitated, low-testosterone Huysmans Flips of the 2020s through his embrace of the old aeon cliches of Christianity: wet cardboard prose AND monotheist morals.
The retreat into Christianity suits the moment, as the slave philosophies of original sin and vicarious atonement are perfect for those wishing to absolve themselves of responsibility for their own artistic and cultural failures. The worshipful submission to authority in the form of Big Tech is the natural next step. Now that middle age is applying the screws, the writers of Alt-Lit have only cliched Tradition™ to cushion their rapid decline. Pseudoscience and New Age homilies of the worst Terence McKenna kind rush in to fill the emptiness within, in a sort of reverse liposuction of the intellect: an injection of only the flabbiest ideas to fill the cerebral and spiritual void. Autism must be cured. The Kingdom of Heaven must be a progressive, growing community. Health tips and diet plans must be shared, and ‘Sincerity’ achieved.
Is bad style an heirloom this time, or a hereditary curse?
Will the cringe vibes shift again?
Will there be a New New Sincerity?
A Nouveau Neo-Romanticism?
Alt-Lit 3.00?
Generation Alpha sentegraphs?
Generation Beta Redemptionists?
There is in fact one term which denotes the highest aspirations and lowest achievements of all of the above.
That term is Neo-Passéism.”
— Justin Isis
“Back when I was an underage girl, Alt-Lit was not only actually still alt, but, regularly, and in the conceptual aggregate, actually cool. ‘Knife Girl’ was cool. Marie Calloway was cool. horse_ebooks, HTMLGIANT. Arch, tossed-off constructions like ‘in a shit-talking way.’1 Entire books of single-sentence paragraphs (🤯)! Hyperlinks, chat transcripts, glorified Erowid reports. Plagiarizing real-life…in a not-shit-giving away. Fucking people you probably shouldn’t...for the story. Publishing your shit-posting (!) Twitter (!!)…as a book (!!!). And it was cool because of, you must remember, the lit to which alt-lit was then alt. In a milieu where mainstream litfic was craft-obsessed and self-important, when it was still trying to swim out of the backwash of the literary Jonathans, and you couldn’t even let loose with hysterical realism anymore because James Wood said so, alt-lit was truly subversive. It was irreverent to all this belaboring that the middlebrow seemed to require; it did not insist upon itself. In its underdog days, alt-lit embodied a sprezzatura which the corporate-cringe Zillennialism of ‘brat’ could never hope to reverse-engineer.
Obviously, infuriatingly, things have changed. Our relationships to both the internet and literary fiction are completely alien to what they were since the publication of Richard Yates, or The Sarah Book, or even as late as literally show me a healthy person (all alt-lit books of literary value). Not only are alt-lit authors being published by the Big 5 and prestige journals (Mr. Fuccboi himself is in the Paris Review), but everyone is practicing alt-lit now, as Sam Kriss documented in The Point—erasing any discernible stylistic difference between posting and writing, or at least trying very hard to contrive a facsimile of the sprezzatura of posting. Everybody writes stuff like ‘in a shit-talking way’ now. Like Kriss points out, the result is unexciting to readers who are on the same internet as these authors, which is, again, fucking everybody—there’s a Tweet out there I can’t find wherein the author says whenever they read fiction about the internet, they think ‘I’d rather be scrolling.’ Contentwise, the now-mainstream brainrot autofiction is essentially longform social media–dull little feel-bad fables about MFA students in idpolitically fraught situationships and unethically polyamorous configurations wherein their characters in a neurotic deadpan judge their rivals’/frenemies’ characters, flaunt their perfectly curated tastes in theory, products, and art, signal their takes on recurring culture war discourse, and perform a kind of pre-emptively self-aware narcissism that never interferes with their IRL status as an e-boy/girl/them. And much like Twitter has a house style, so does it: and this style is so insidious that it’s not just the internet poison Kriss describes, or the interchangeable, blasé brat-minimalism anti-prose Rhian Sasseen wrote about in The Baffler, or the compulsive, hyperspecific name-dropping identified by Greta Rainbow in The Walrus which serves as a shorthand for actual description (although it is all of that); it’s also seeped into the fucking RHYTHM of the sentences. Open any legacy journal or hot new Dimes Square Clout Review or the Leftist version thereof, and you’ll see what I’m talking about. Do some scansion, and it will quickly become permanently noticeable to a point approaching psychosis. There’s this homogenized sing-song-y-ness to so many people’s prose nowadays which I find nearly physically intolerable: pseudo-Iambic (frequently with slant rhymes or even real rhymes); post-Lishianly quasi-consecutional; mono-, at most bi-clausal; sentence fetishizing, but strictly of the same five sentences. It’s like people are unintentionally writing or editing themselves into couplets; it’s that horribly abused Virginia Woolf quote about style being rhythm taken to the extreme. Worst of all, it’s tryhard as fuck. It is so visibly overwritten in its attempt to sound detached and posting-adjacently sprezzaturic that it ends up sounding precious and contrived as a nursery rhyme. And it is all so exhaustingly boring I could cry.
In the Baffler piece, Sasseen calls the aesthetic flatness of alt-lit easily imitable, arguing that the ‘sarcasm’ of the today’s derivatives ‘functions as a protective armor’ which exposes ‘no hypocrisies’ or risks any stakes. I think this fear or paralysis is more stylistically driven, and less about vulnerability or nakedness than cringe: an aesthetic paranoia carried over from chronic internet abuse, which this mode requires for creative output. No matter how unflinching their story is, or how uncomfortably the characters are portrayed, they believe they must never stray too far from acceptable bounds of sentence-level self-indulgence or experimentation, lest they become an aesthetic lolcow. To intentionally attempt, say, Nabokov- or even McCarthy-level fireworks would be unthinkable; genre or political fiction or other such dorky aesthetics would spell a social death. As a result, their work is only ever in conversation with each other’s, and (maybe) a slim acceptable canon, even if they read more widely than that (and many claim they do).
Kriss concludes the Point essay by asking, in enraged despair, what it would possibly take to make literature ‘genuinely vital and necessary again.’ He has two ideas: terrorism and writing about something other than ourselves. I prescribe a third: RETVRN to formal rigor. I think it’s becoming very clear to everyone that the edgelord has no clothes and that many practitioners of whatever alt-lit has degenerated into write this way because they’re hiding a moderate-to-severe skill issue. That’s not the case? Okay, prove it. Bring back games of skill like Oulipo or extremely long grammatically correct sentences or novels in verse. Incentivize peacocking and showboating, and the deep study and pastiche of literary movements and scenes which engaged in such peacocking and showboating (it’s easy to forget how fun hysterical realism was). Gatekeep: your influences should prove your high taste level. Cringe at those in their thirties still doing this babyvoice. And the vibe shift is already here. This blog post is honestly late to the game; I suspect all these pissed-off thinkpieces may have already served as a death knell for alt-lit. You saw it in people’s vehement defense of brodernism, in the choice of authors (nary a neo-alt-lit-kid to be seen) hand-picked by Blake Butler for the inaugural issue of his new magazine, in the rise of publications like Apocalypse Confidential, whose sensibility could not be more different from alt-lit, in the interest in Neo-Decadence. Going mainstream kills coolness. It happened to the modes alt-lit replaced; it’s happening to alt-lit. There will probably be a lot of stylistic overcompensation in its stead, but that’s the circle of life. And who cares? It’s fun.”
— Seth Wang
“Not too long ago and elsewhere, I half-jokingly compared the Neo-Decadents (and their war against Neo-Passéism) to the Hand, that microcosmic organization of psychedelic garbage men from Grant Morrison’s THE FILTH comic book series, who were tasked with disposing of the psychic waste products and spiritual droppings of 21st century Western consumer culture. More recently, after having reread the novel EN ROUTE by J.-K. Huysmans, I think I can also liken this Neo-Decadent crusade to the doctrine of Mystical Substitution, that Dolorist belief that the contemplative orders (and, by extension, the mystics and lay religious in general) take upon themselves the sins of the world and embrace divine suffering, allowing themselves to become both lightning rods of demonical fluids and also expiatory victims, so that the sinners need not suffer, and thus imitating by example the Passion of the Christ. This was all in the back of my mind as I considered the topic of Alt-Lit produced by the untalented minimalist New Yorkers with poor fashion, and I eventually concluded that to tackle this subject I would need to venture grim-faced into territories of supernatural pain not often encountered outside the sadomasochistic hagiographies of Blessed Lydwine of Schiedam.
Still, nobody likes a complainer, and no one ever said that the Path of the Space Monkey was an easy one. The primary problem with writing about Alt-Lit (and one of the only things more boring than actually reading Alt-Lit novels is reading articles and thought pieces about Alt-Lit) is simply that there’s no there there. After all, there are only so many ways in which one may eviscerate a void, and it’s hard to artfully harvest copious amounts of bile when the target of one’s vituperation is such a proverbial nothingburger; even amongst people who like the source material, I notice that they’re not averse to describing much of it as ‘vapid.’ Certainly the case may be made that there’s something to be said for an art form that either celebrates or strives to articulate the Mundane (one could argue that Warhol made a career out of this), or which creatively depicts life amongst young urbanites in what was then contemporary Brooklyn (I’m thinking of Meredith Gran’s webcomic OCTOPUS PIE), yet for whatever reason I find that most Alt-Lit writers fail to hit this mark. Much of their work that I’ve encountered in the past has struck me as being either lazy urine-stream-of-conscious Burroughsian word-salad, or self-consciously numb zombie derivations of Bret Easton Ellis, only without his trademark dark humor and social satire. What DOES unite them is a complete inability to not only create flesh-and-blood characters, but even to craft simple narratives.
In his novel THE WOMAN WHO WAS POOR, Léon Bloy famously dismissed Schopenhauer as ‘that awful pedant…who spent his life studying the horizon from the bottom of a well.’ But I would say that the bottom of a well is a vantage point that the typical Alt-Lit writer can only dream about achieving; they seem categorically incapable of looking beyond their own navels, and it’s telling that, in the Wikipedia article devoted to the subject, the word ‘self’ is oft encountered. The fatal flaw of Alt-Lit, I feel, is its noted struggle between the twin poles of Sincerity and Irony, or, in other words, Modernity’s Scylla and Charybdis; is it any wonder, then, that the final product birthed by the energy generated by two such repellant concepts should be nothing less than a conceptual and aesthetic abortion? And furthermore, can literary greatness be expected from a community whose chief members and adherents are/were either ass-kissing careerist networkers (at best) or flesh predators (at worst), postmodern sex pests vizarding their trivial perversions behind Mountain Goats music and American Eagle brand habiliments? For let there be no mistake, despite the liberal/progressive politics espoused by its figureheads, Alt-Lit has always struck me as being very white, very straight, and very male.
In summary, I think the time has come in which we as a species collectively cleanse our souls and memories of all traces of the stain of Alt-Lit, that wretched by-blow spawned from diseased trust fund hipster gonadal tissue.”
— James Champagne
“Aspartame as Transgression™ and Sincerity™. Crass, without learning from Crass. Nu metal nouveau roman. Psychonauts who trip with knockoff Google Maps. Fake step-mom and step-sibling romances...general sickomaxxing. Foot fetishists who go straight for the fungus. Soft-boiled eggs you can slurp. If such language invokes vivid pictures in your head, you already have a better imagination than the entire Alt-Lit polycule, which fundamentally misunderstands the utility and functionality of minutiae in writing. The art of ‘maximalizing banality’ means to them what is abhorrent to all other strains of genius and hack alike. No Alt-Lit piece of any length can compare to Robbe-Grillet, or even Nicholson Baker’s THE MEZZANINE in this respect. The tip of an iceberg is a mirage to them. Mirages to them, also, are the very Millennial and Generation Z(eitgeists) they claim to tap into more directly than their forebears and contemporaries. So irrelevant is their portrayal that, plausibly, they give us a premature glimpse of the psychology of the Future-Passéists of the 2060s and 2070s. Did you really think literary progress was a sustained upward curve?”
— Colby Smith
"Semi-serious question: does ‘writing’ that would have us ‘read’ as if a new ‘tradition’ had burst revolutionarily forth from such ‘Alt’ origins as Alt-Lit's not, with that very label, command our consciousness of this premise whenever we measure its literary merit?
Serious-as-a-statutory-rape-allegation answer: of course it does, and herein lies perhaps Alt-Lit's most oblivious self-incrimination: whenever it obligates us to contextualize along the lines of its aesthetic heritage (always), not only are we permitted to hang pedantic shit on it for its sins against literacy, but we're invited to do so via the matter of material presentation.
So, then, to note art direction and book design in begroaning Alt-Lit's offerings is to fairly and thoroughly appreciate the work and its failures. In those areas, Alt-Lit's atrocities are notorious and many.
They're obvious targets for critical whacking, to be sure—yet a Hitler-shaped piñata is still a piñata. Moronic cover design, sense-assaulting formatting, myriad editing offenses mentioned elsewhere in this article, no doubt: Alt-Lit's reputation for anti-stylistic nihilism has preceded it since v1.0, when its perceived novelty first qualified it to ape the Novel. But if stupefying typos, ‘sentegraphs,’ and worse squeeze the laughably convenient excuse of textual ‘sincerity’ to popping point, the print-on-demand era sees that clout-chaser-infected zit utterly BLOW. In making Amazon Kindle Direct orders as flippantly as if hitting 'publish' on any of this decade's ‘socials,’ minimally proactive authors of recent waves of auto(complete)-fiction expose a characteristic indifference to the material functions of print publishing, like it were merely another exercise in ‘sharing’; here, ‘post-irony’ is sincere in the way Tourette's sufferers are. Despite their goal of appearing to function IRL, these publications compulsively reveal obsessions with virtual life nevertheless.
On the flipside, if we grant every ISBN-less grotesquery the same ambiguousness with which what purpose did i serve in your life might have once found a certain dubious legitimacy, we still observe what limited and limiting definitions the Alt-Lit legacy imposes. Whether we accept this ‘sincerity’ as meme-slang vernacular manifest or perma-connected detachment dispatched with perma-connected detachment, the range of possible rationales for such contemptuous exhibitionism is as narrow and web-derived as the language it contains…and even when that language isn't internet-speak, its packaging is.
This is Alt-Lit adhering to its own terms, inheriting its unholy, incestuous pedigree. To deviate would be to abandon Alt and actually embrace Lit. Thus, its best efforts can only hope to be as much books as audiobooks are books: they promise writing, but deliver something secondary, something only half book-like, more the performance of a book than anything satisfying to those who like to read.
Neo-Decadent books, on the other hand..."
— Dan Heyer
“‘Autofiction’ is such a vast and reckless category that deserves to be dismissed almost immediately. A more narrow definition, temporarily allocated, latches this wily signifier to an Anglospheric subset of literature in the last decade or two that has more to do with the attendant aspects of a writer and their brand than it does with style or any traditional metrics for talking about literature. So, instead of referencing Henry Miller, whose work can be described as autofictional, we usually are talking about people like Ben Lerner or Sean Thor Conroe.
If celebrity is the metastasis of individualism, autofiction, subordinately, is the metastasis of the modern author. It is the logical extension of the author as brand. We were fools to think that the mania for the life behind the figure, the princess-d-eification of culture, wouldn’t spread into the novel.
The most unfortunate result of so closely linking the life of the author and the work, to form the holy union of ‘brand,’ is the fact that many writers are writing about themselves (writers), writing or thinking about writing. There are notable exceptions, of course, of people who were something else, often soldiers (for some reason), who then became writers and wrote about that past. It’s all quite stratified and, as the Neo-Decadent line goes, often ignores the bizarre mass of humanity. As a writer who lives in New York, I don’t often want to read a book about a writer living in New York. Autofiction written by say, a Posadist hacker in Somalia, could be an aim.
I do think some have walked the line well, playing on the unfortunate situation of writer-as-brand. Honor Levy, for example, seems to play with this dynamic in her fiction and its marketing.
I’ve written before about a ‘possible’ result of going through the writing-for-writers (or worse, for ourselves) that is so common today, where every book is written for a singular recipient: the novel as DM.
I propose we merge these different strains that define the contemporary literary scene: take a mass of content barely read, the explosions of anonymity and instant response of the forum, the apogee of the digital message, mix in a bit of the messianism of the occult communists, and then jettison completely the ‘writing for oneself’ of the unconcerned avant-garde (to me the fact that writing pleases the writer or aligns with their taste is something that should go without saying) and affirm this idle reader in the future. What if a truly decadent late modern practice directed every single text towards some undefinable singular future reader? What if we anticipated the tastes of these fantastic people with whom we have no idea how to relate? Would we portray ourselves differently?
Postscript
The bear rattled around the cage inside a storage car on a train en route to the newborn city. It had everything, said the shivering handlers who hated and loved the bear. With its matted fur and ancient eyes, it represented the height of their power and their complete lack of it. Both had been born under pale moons in horrible conditions, at the edge of towns devoted to tearing minerals from the earth and exterminating anything that got in the way of progress, their families picking at the scraps left by the machine march of progress over the plains, over the mountains, in the wooden glens and rock-strewn hills of that once-harmonious land.
The storage car was hot, and the men had their shirts off. Their metal staves, topped with rusted lassos, were gripped tightly in their chapped hands.
Following the river, the train turned around bends, and as the men looked outside, they saw more and more houses, the spires of churches, and the smokestacks of factories, slender accomplices against the grey-brown coastal sky.
These shivering men with wide eyes, shaded with violence and fear, looked through the gap in the car and saw civilization gathering. Somewhere far away, a ship sat in dry dock, being welded. A row of cypresses buckled and swayed under a sudden, intense wind.
Exhausted by a heat that smothered their fear, the men fell into sleep. They dreamed of the cages that waited for the bear, the city handlers that would take him and install him in what they’d heard was a glittering new zoo with moss and ponds and tropical birds from everywhere. Information sheets talking about all the animals, plaques bearing the names of the donors, among which was probably the man who had built the tracks that guided their provincial train towards the city.
When they awoke, they sat in a vast train yard, and they could see the tops of skyscrapers in the distance, hear the eternal din. The city, pregnant with the land; the handlers pregnant with experience. Ready.
A man in a suit met them and handed over a stack of paper money. The handlers dissolved into the city; one drinking himself to death, the other writing letter after letter to his family back home. His children would grow up and go to school in the city, and their children would move to the suburbs, afraid of the people who arrived in droves carrying differences. And then their children would go back to the city, carrying nothing except an aimless fear and a pregnant self.
The bear snarled, but could not be heard.”
— Ben Dreith
art by Aaron Lange and Dan Heyer
Tao Lin denouncing Tom Wolfe’s proto-alt-lit term “K-mart realism.”
I was around when alt-lit broke on the scene. It was always reactionary. Deliberately solipsistic and irrelevant-- pushed forward by segments of the established literary scene in response to more dangerous alternatives which have been since then wiped from literary memory. Not an exaggeration.
I came