Much great writing is now actually living in the realm of the fanfic and the self-published. This is not the death of art; if anything, it speaks to art's creation having become so prolific that there is no publishing-house gatekeeper that can contain it.

It's hard for me to take seriously a "Where are all the novels?" critique when there is currently a very active long-novel-title-to-multi-hour-anime pipeline running at white-hot intensity. Perhaps the author missed them because they're in Japanese.

> ... the twentieth century may have widened the subject matter of the novel, but it has failed to deepen it

Even if we were to deny artistically creative 20C novelists their depth as a mere retread of the nineteenth century's, whatever that means, I don't think that the same terms of dismissal would apply to comic books, graphic novels, hypertext novels and hypertext graphic novels, or novels written with radio or audiobook dramatization in mind, all of which do allow mature thrills to be expressively enhanced and intermingled -- not only cheap thrills.

Scott Miller had a good idea about the importance of the novel form, however: "Maybe I'm just thick ... but whenever novels run out of simple intrigue, they tend to fall into a sort of formulaic display of personal insightfulness, and beyond the scope of about a chapter, one insightful individual carries on in fiction a lot like the next. That said, I have nothing against intrigue, even porn; if I were honest with myself, I'd probably put INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE on a list of 20." [1]

[1] http://www.loudfamily.com/askscott1997.html

I'm skeptical of the loss of the novel. Of late, I've started reading more than I have in years. I'm trying to find new authors and subject matter, and also revisiting some old favorites.

Still, there is a huge problem: discoverability of new authors. This is a problem in lots of areas, but I feel like it's particularly bad here. There are many new authors trying new things but how to find them amid a sea of rough drafts that should never have been published? Most of the time when I try a recent new author's work I am greeted with something that reads like fanfic.

Then there's AI slop, which is apparently flooding Kindle thanks to grifting influencers like (apparently) Andrew Tate teaching people how to do this. That's only going to make it harder.

Wondering how people here look for new authors. The best I've found has been to look in certain genres or subject areas of interest, look for up-and-coming works, then read a sample. I can usually dismiss trash within a few pages. But it's still time consuming.