Our Bar For Great Writing Has Never Been Lower

Canadian writer and poet Anne Carson won the Nobel Prize in Literature last week. I’ll admit, my initial impression of the news was more positive than not. Carson’s Wikipedia page, for one, paints her as a serious literary scholar versed in the likes of Homer, Euripides, Sophocles, Emily Dickinson, Franz Kafka, and Virginia Woolf. In a viral interview with the New Yorker, she even states that she doesn’t read contemporary novels — because she’s a classicist, she reads old books. 

For a moment, I thought we’d finally identified a rare anomaly in the literary world: an educated writer who cares more about preserving the literary tradition rather than destroying it outright. Then I read Anne Carson’s poetry, and, boy, was I disappointed. Carson is not the profound literary voice I expected her to be; in fact, I hesitate to call her voice “literary” at all. 

Don’t believe me? Take a look at some excerpts from her poems. 

The first is from a poem called “Stanzas, Sexes, Seductions” published in the New Yorker in 2001:

It’s good to be neuter. / I want to have meaningless legs. / There are things unbearable. / One can evade them a long time. / Then you die.

My personal poetry is a failure. / I do not want to be a person. / I want to be unbearable. / Lover to lover, the greenness of love. / Cool, cooling.

Here’s another example from a poem called “Clive Song” published in Poetry Magazine in 2024: 

He laughs. / His current client, a Moroccan man, / has been cleared for release / and also informed / he will never leave. / Clive, a lawyer, questions the logic of this.  / “I shouldn’t laugh.” / He tells more stories.

Really? These uninspired musings won the Nobel Prize in Literature? 

Something is rotten in the state of literature, and it’s not because there are no more great writers who walk among us but because the literary establishment increasingly rewards bad, minimalist writing completely devoid of spirit and emotion. Just take a look at the sort of books coming out today — and the sort of books winning our culture’s most prestigious literary prizes. In 2025, for instance, the Booker Prize went to David Szalay’s “Flesh,” a novel that unironically contains the following passage:

He was sitting at her kitchen table eating Somloi galuska while she put the groceries away and then, when she had finished doing that, she asked him if he wanted to see them and he said yes, and she just showed them to him — standing there in the kitchen she took off first her shirt and then her bra. It’s the memory of her doing that that turns him on, as much as what they actually looked like.

What they actually looked like seems almost irrelevant. Or that they were weird and slightly disgusting might even have had the effect of turning him on more.

When he had finished the Somloi galuska, they went to the sofa and kissed for a while and then she undid his trousers and sucked him off again.

Then he left.

If not for the subject matter, you’d assume our narrator was a six-year-old. The excerpt above contains no subtext, no syntactic variation, and no words an elementary schooler would not understand. And it’s not just that excerpt; the entire novel is littered with these soulless, minimalist sentences, and somehow reviewers on Amazon still praise it as “very well-written.”

Or take this excerpt from Irish Book Award winner Sally Rooney — named one of Time’s most influential people in 2022:

It’s cool you’re playing a gay character, Bobbi was saying to Nick.

Is Brick gay? he said. I think maybe he’s just bisexual.

Don’t say “just bisexual,” she said. Frances is bisexual, you know.

I didn’t know that, Melissa said.

I chose to drag on my cigarette for a long time before saying anything. I knew that everyone was waiting for me to speak.

Well, I said. Yeah, I’m kind of an omnivore.

Melissa laughed at that. Nick looked at me and gave an amused smile, which I looked away from quickly and pretended to take an interest in my glass.

Me too, Melissa said.

Reading Rooney’s sentences, I feel as if I’m parsing a legal brief — or, perhaps, reviewing notes from a high school student council meeting. Because Rooney’s writing contains no tonal variation, her language feels strangely anesthetized — as if the narrator has just undergone a lobotomy. The prose describes and summarizes without evoking. 

But it’s not just literary minimalism that contributes to the lack of emotion in this sort of writing; what makes these passages so profoundly soulless is the total absence of aesthetic ambition in these writers’ sensibilities. Neither writer attempts to make their sentences beautiful or musical, and, certainly, neither novel attempts to capture the ineffable experience of being human. Both Rooney and Szalay describe interpersonal relationships with the same emotional detachment one might use to describe a trip to the DMV.

As a society, we’ve largely forgotten that literature is not just a vehicle through which we can observe the goings-on of our society but also an art form in its own right. But because we live in a culture where sincerity gets labeled “cringe” and where beauty is written off as “relative,” we’ve largely lost our ability to create art that aspires to the standards of a Tolstoy or even a Saul Bellow. It’s no wonder Anne Carson won the Nobel Prize in Literature this year — as far as prospective Nobel laureates go, Carson might perhaps be one of the most deserving of the title.

Our bar for contemporary literature has become so abysmally low that, besides Thomas Pynchon, Salman Rushdie, and perhaps Haruki Murakami, there really aren’t any contemporary writers who aspire to the standards of the Western literary canon. We struggle to name any truly great writers of the contemporary world because the literary establishment has largely declared a boycott on deep, introspective writing with a human soul. And as readers, we’ve become so accustomed to this stale, minimalist mode of writing that we’ve become convinced that this way is the best way. 

But great writing has never just summarized and reported in the simplest possible terms. The Nobel Prize historically celebrated writers for “artistic sensitivity” and “human understanding.” Today, it has shifted its focus to writing that “confronts historical traumas” and “penetrat[es] the effects of colonialism.” It’s no wonder that Anne Carson won the Nobel Prize in Literature; we’ve become so terrified of beauty, truth, and meaning in our culture that we actively reward writing that cowers in the face of humanity — or spits in it. 

The Nobel Prize in Literature once rewarded the greatest literary masterminds in our society. Today, it’s largely become a joke. But Anne Carson’s Nobel Prize win reminds us that as a culture, we have not yet run out of great stories to tell; we’ve simply forgotten what makes a story worth telling.

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Liza Libes is a writer and the founder of Pens and Poison. She holds degrees in English from Columbia University and writes about literature and culture at pensandpoison.org. Follow her on X @pensandpoison.

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