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A Reader's Manifesto

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A Reader's Manifesto is an article written by Brian Reynolds Myers and published in the July/August 2001 issue of The Atlantic Monthly magazine. Myers described the article, which saw no end of responses from admirers and critics, as "a light-hearted polemic" about modern literature.

Myers published under "B.R." to avoid being mistaken for another Brian Myers, a poet. Beyond his native English, he is fluent in German, Korean and Mandarin. He was raised in his mother's native Bermuda and then in South Africa. He went to college in Germany, majoring in Russian socialist realism, with a minor in Korean studies--ultimately earning a Ph.D. in North Korean literature. He worked awhile in China, at an automotive dealership, then bought a house in New Mexico. Myers was particularly concerned with what he saw as the growing pretentiousness of American literary fiction. He was skeptical about the value of elaborate, allusive prose, and argued that what was praised as good writing was often in fact the epitome of bad writing. His attack concentrated on E. Annie Proulx, Cormac McCarthy, Paul Auster, David Guterson, Don DeLillo, and (in the conclusion) Rick Moody, all of whom enjoyed a great deal of acclaim from the literary establishment. Myers leveled many of his harshest charges at literary critics for prestigious publications such as the New York Times Book Review, whom he accused of lavishing praise upon bad writing because they did not understand it and therefore assumed it to have great artistic merit.

Myers used a number of oft-quoted passages to make his argument. Where critics refer to Annie Proulx's writing as lyrical, Myers stated that her sentences "call to mind a bad photographer hurrying through a slide-show." He accused Guterson of producing "concatenation[s] of uninspired phrases set to an elegiac cadence."

Myers's article attracted heated criticism from aficionados of American literary fiction, especially of the authors Myers mentioned by name. Some critics charged Myers with being selective in his choice of targets, and of cherry picking particularly unreadable passages from the authors' works to make his point. For many critics, Myers was simply continuing the popular attack on postmodernism, of which John Gardner (On Moral Fiction) was the most recent proponent, though Myers offered a more light-hearted, textural analysis.

Critics also challenged Myers's choice of targets, given the implication that he was attacking a new or current trend. Authors like Cormac McCarthy and Don Delillo had been publishing since the late 60s or early 70s. The critics questioned why other older yet still publishing authors like Saul Bellow and Philip Roth were not discussed, Roth and Bellow easily being more towering figures in American literature than Guterson or Auster at least--which criticism is easily answered by the suggestion that Bellow's and Roth's work were not of the type Myers intended to criticize in the piece.

Melville House published an expanded edition of the article in a book titled A Reader's Manifesto: An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness in American Literary Prose. (ISBN 0-9718659-0-6) The book included a section in response to the large amount of criticism directed at the original essay.

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