I spent several hours today perusing the essays and banger posts of a fresh, bright voice on the Internet: Liza Libes, an iconoclastic novelist who describes herself as “rebuilding literary taste one book at a time.” She writes on X, Instagram, and her website about “literature, beauty, art, culture, and big ideas.” Discovering her was like taking a bath in sunlight.
Liza grew up in New York in a family of ex-Soviet refugees. She is a classicist, deeply entrenched in the glories of Tolstoy and Dostoyevski, passionately advising certain translations against others. But what thrills me about this woman is her outspoken criticism of so many golden calves in today’s culture and writing industry, including what is taught in universities. Here are a few scintillating excerpts:
“The publishing industry has spent years blaming readers for not reading while refusing to publish the kinds of serious, ambitious books that would actually get people reading.”
“The average “literary” novel today reads like a LinkedIn post with sex scenes.”
“Six months of reading great literature will improve your writing more than six years of writing workshops. Some of the greatest writers to have ever walked this planet are college dropouts who never took a creative writing class in their lives or busy professionals who studied finance, medicine, engineering, or something completely unrelated. But what these people all had in common is that they were voracious readers. This bizarre idea that you need a writing degree to succeed (and I say this as someone with two English degrees) was created by a generation of stuffy academics who have forgotten that great literature is, always has been, and should be for everyone.”
“The quickest way to destroy literature is to convince people that beauty and morality are irrelevant to art.”
“People love to say audiobooks ‘aren’t really reading,’ but pick up any Victorian novel and half the characters are sitting around after dinner listening to someone read a novel aloud. Hell, go back to Homeric times, and literature wasn’t written down at all—it was performed. Audiobook people aren’t cheating—they’re reviving a lost literary tradition.”
“I always see these self-deprecating posts from writers about how their sentences are terrible and their plots make no sense and it’s like, well, that’s probably why you haven’t made it yet. In order to succeed as a writer—or any sort of artist—you have to truly believe that you’re better than everyone else because eventually, you’ll have to prove it—and that mindset will push you to do everything it takes to actually become the best of the best.”
“When I was a kid, I didn’t have many friends, so I talked to my imaginary friends. Four-year-old me would be thrilled to learn that, twenty-five years later, I still talk to imaginary friends—but now for a living. It’s called being a novelist.”
“Sydney Sweeney is back with a salacious new ad for a sports betting company, signaling not just the end of wokeism in advertising but the dawn of a new cultural paradigm that we must all approach with caution. The resurgence of masculinity in our culture has done wonders for a society tired of being told that the opinions and desires of its men don’t matter; at the same time, it has also ushered in a new era where men are encouraged to give into their appetites. The logical conclusion of such a dynamic is an advertising campaign featuring the world’s hottest woman encouraging young men to gamble on sports. This is where the pendulum risks swinging too far. I am all for the return of masculinity, but if we are to avoid total degeneracy in our society, then it is our duty to restore not only masculinity but also chivalry and virtue along with it.”
And here is a link to a brilliant essay by Liza, lambasting the new TV series “East of Eden” for its moral relativity, contrasting it with Steinbeck’s book of the same title, which she calls “the second-greatest novel ever written about the power of personal agency: it reminds us that when faced with evil, we have the power to choose good, no matter what we may have gone through in the past.”
You don’t have to agree with everything this woman says to admire her courage in saying it and her original take on so many issues affecting us today, particularly writers. You’ll find videos of her interviews, as well as her thought-provoking (shorter) observations, on ‘X’ at: https://x.com/pensandpoison. For all of her wonderful essays, visit Liza’s website at https://www.pensandpoison.org/.
Jessi Rita Hoffman … book editing by an industry professional