Major Arcana
By John Pistelli
Belt Publishing, 352 pages, $24.95
There’s been a recent trend of writers, mostly men, asserting the need for a new kind of fiction writing that will supposedly fix the publishing industry and draw in new readers. I am sympathetic to this movement, which I have been informally labeling “rebellion literature.” The better versions of it go beyond the standard anti-woke or reactionary talking points to offer ideas about what a renewal of the novel would look like. Metropolitan Review editor and novelist Ross Barkan has suggested we might pull inspiration from the classics, move past the novel of consciousness and its autofictional heirs, and tackle bigger themes in an epic, maximalist style. The writer Alex Perez (like Barkan, a Compact contributor) believes that “male and working-class fiction, especially working class of any gender would bring in more readers,” as he told me over DMs—a crystallization of points he has made previously in more provocative terms. Karl Wenclas, editor of the Detroit-based small press New Pop Lit, goes short instead of long but has a similar urge for innovation. His press, he says, is “reinventing the short story” and is looking for stories relevant to the cultural moment that also offer “ways to better reach general readers.” He’s not afraid of mashing up genre elements and literary ones, and notes that “literary writers should not be averse to the use of plot.”