The usual suspects — rampant narcissism, shore-to-shore MFA programs, the malignant validation-sweepstakes of social media — combined in 2021 to produce a great sludging wash of Gawd-awful fiction, all of produced with the signature 2021 twist: writing anything, whether it’s history, cross-stitch instructions, the tech manual for a Lenovo AMD-A6, or especially your own boring autobiography, and straight-up lying by calling it fiction. The two obvious reasons for this, cynical opportunism (fiction sells better than nonfiction) and overweening egotism (what, the authors ask, could be more interesting than I?), underscore a more subtle one: to pre-emptively critic-proof their garbage by blurring the lines that differentiate any one kind of writing from any other kind of writing.… Lês fierder