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Author: Tod Newman

  • The Time Has Come to Return the Sword

    The Time Has Come to Return the Sword

    Arthur Pendragon hasn’t drawn Excalibur in eleven years. He’s fifty-six, tired, and finished pretending the sword still belongs to him. So he loads it on a donkey and rides alone into the mountains of Snowdonia to return it to the water.

    He doesn’t expect anyone to be waiting for him there.

    It’s a quiet story about a king at the end of his legend โ€” and what he finds out about his life when he gets there. Set in the world of The Halls of the Shadow King, for readers who like their Arthurian fiction grounded and a little unexpected.

    99 cents on Kindle right now.

  • Western Literature with a Magical Realism Twist

    Western Literature with a Magical Realism Twist

    Nora Callahan can feel trouble before it has a name.

    She calls it reading weatherโ€”a sense, inherited from a grandmother she barely knew, that warns her when a man has already decided something terrible and just hasn’t done it yet. It saved her life once, in a trading post in New Mexico, when she walked out the back door for no reason she could explain. It’s saved her more times since.

    But Nora didn’t come west to be anyone’s oracle. She came to build a life after her husband’s death, on a parcel of land between two families who don’t know yet that they’re about to tear each other apartโ€”and a man riding into the valley who gives off no weather at all. No pressure, no warning, nothing she can read. Just a blank where a person should be.

    Now everyone she’s come to love is standing in the path of something she can feel coming and can’t stop, can’t name, and may not be able to warn them about in time.

    THE RIM COUNTRY, Book One. Coming Soon! (More on this book!)

  • The Questions “The Rim Country” Asks

    The Questions “The Rim Country” Asks

    The Rim Country isn’t really about the 1880s. It’s about a question that hasn’t gotten any easier to answer: what do you do with the people you love when you can see them heading toward something irreversible, and you can’t honestly tell them they’re wrong to go?

    The novel sits inside ideas that feel less like history and more like a mirrorโ€”the difference between forgiveness and reconciliation, and why people confuse them; how revenge dresses itself up as justice when accountability is absent; and how two communities stalemated in a grudge war are often the last to notice they’re being played by ambitious outsiders.

    Nora Callahan, the woman caught in the middle of it, doesn’t get to stay above the fray and dispense wisdom. She has to live inside the not-knowing, the same way we all do when the people around us make devastating but somewhat defensible choices we can’t stop.

    THE RIM COUNTRY, Book One. Coming Soon! (More on this book!)

  • War is Coming to the Valley!

    War is Coming to the Valley!

    Nora Callahan’s gifting has kept her alive more than once—it’s how she knows, long before neighbor ranching families will admit it, that war is coming to the valley and she can’t stop it.


    THE RIM COUNTRY, Book One. Coming Soon! (More on this book!)

  • The War They Forgot to Put in the History Books

    The War They Forgot to Put in the History Books

    Most Arizonans know the name Tombstone. The O.K. Corral. Wyatt Earp. The gunfight that lasted thirty seconds and generated movies and a hundred years of mythology.

    Fewer know about Pleasant Valley.

    In the summer of 1887, a feud erupted in the Tonto Basin between two ranching families โ€” the Tewksburys and the Grahams โ€” that would kill somewhere between thirty and fifty men over the next five years, wipe out the male lines of both families, and leave a valley so saturated with violence that the survivors renamed it just to escape the memory. By body count, the Pleasant Valley War was the deadliest range conflict in the history of the American West. It makes the O.K. Corral look like a disagreement over a fence line.

    And almost nobody outside Arizona has heard of it. And few inside Arizona, to be honest.

    I’ve been researching this conflict for the better part of a year, and the more I dig, the more convinced I am that the Pleasant Valley War is one of the great untold stories of American history. Not because of the violence โ€” though the violence is extraordinary โ€” but because of what the violence reveals. This wasn’t a simple feud between bad men. It was a collision of cattle and sheep interests, racial prejudice against the half-Native American Tewksbury family, the corrupting influence of a territorial cattle baron with political aspirations named James Stinson, the arrival of hired killers like Tom Horn, and the fundamental question of who had the right to determine what an ideal ranching valley was for.

    Why I’m writing about it as fiction

    When I first encountered the Pleasant Valley War, my instinct was to research the history for a possible historical fiction novel. But the historical record has a gap at its center that no amount of research can fill: the inner lives of the people involved. We know what happened from a few differing perspectives. We don’t know what it felt like to watch it happen from inside the valley, day by day, before anyone knew how it would end. That feels useful to me. Is this the sort of pressure between opposing sides we’re feeling today — and are we equally unsure of the outcome?

    As someone who loves filling in these human gaps of history, I revel in the knowledge that this is where beautiful fiction lives.

    The Rim Country is my attempt to inhabit that gap. The novel follows Nora Callahan, a widowed Irish immigrant who settles in Pleasant Valley in 1882 โ€” five years before the killing starts โ€” and finds herself positioned between the two families as their friendship slowly becomes something else. Nora has an unusual gift: a barometric sensitivity to the intentions of the people around her, a kind of reading weather that gives her early warning of what’s coming and no way to stop it.

    She is fictional. Everything around her is as historically accurate as I can make it.

    The Mogollon Rim, which forms the northern boundary of Pleasant Valley and rises 2,000 feet above the Tonto Basin floor, is the novel’s central symbol โ€” a wall between worlds, between the valley’s closed world and the open country above, between what the valley was and what it was becoming. I’ve driven that rim. I’ve stood at the edge and looked down into the basin and understood, in a way that no map communicates, why the people who settled there felt both protected and trapped.

    That feeling is what I’m trying to put on the page.

    Why Wattpad?

    I’m publishing The Rim Country serially on Wattpad, which means you can read it chapter by chapter, free, as it develops. There are fourteen chapters posted now, covering the years 1882 through 1884 โ€” the friendship, the partnership, the betrayal, and the first death that makes everything that follows inevitable.

    Serial publication is how Dickens published. It’s how most of the great Victorian novels reached their audiences โ€” chapter by chapter, with readers waiting to find out what happened next. There’s something fitting about telling a story of this era the way stories were told in that era.

    If you’re interested in Arizona history, the Pleasant Valley War, or simply in fiction that takes its geography seriously, I’d invite you to start at the beginning. Chapter One is short. The mule is opinionated. The valley is beautiful.

    It won’t stay that way.

    [Read The Rim Country on Wattpad โ€” free]

    Tod Newman writes historical fiction under the Desdichado Books imprint. He reviews books at todnewman.com and posts about the writing life, Arizona history, and whatever the Mogollon Rim is doing today.

  • Blood Runs in Channels: A Review of “The Curses We Keep”

    Blood Runs in Channels: A Review of “The Curses We Keep”

    “The woods lay silent, a black mouth swallowing sound. Pines stood jagged and skeletal against a sky bruised with dusk, their branches reaching upward as though clawing for the last veins of light. Spanish moss hung in long, gray shrouds that swayed in the still air, heavy with damp. Drops fell slow to the earth, each bead glinting like a tear suspended in its fall before breaking the mud with a soft patter.”
    โ€” Miller, Dakota. The Curses We Keep (p. 6)

    So begins Dakota Miller’s debut novel, The Curses We Keep. Billed as Southern Gothic horror, I wasn’t sure what to expect โ€” the label carries weight it rarely earns anymore. The cover art alone signals something unusual: a seriousness of intent largely absent from contemporary fiction. The artistic edge of Southern Gothic seemed to have died with Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner, only partly revived by Michael McDowell and Cormac McCarthy before a distracted reading public and a risk-averse publishing industry pushed the genre toward the margins โ€” into the hands of independent writers like Dakota Miller.

    The Faulknerian Inheritance

    To invoke Faulkner is not to make a casual comparison, and I don’t make it casually here. Miller’s trans-generational arc โ€” tracing one family’s curse from the Salem trials to the Low Country of South Carolina โ€” carries unmistakable echoes of Absalom, Absalom!, in which Faulkner builds Thomas Sutpen’s dynasty from raw ambition and moral rot into something that must, by its nature, destroy itself. Faulkner wrote: “There is something in the touch of flesh with flesh which abrogates, cuts sharp and straight across the devious intricate channels of decorous ordering, which enemies as well as lovers know.” That sense of inevitability โ€” of blood and sin running in channels that no act of will can redirect โ€” is precisely what Miller achieves in tracing his family’s line forward from Salem. The curse is not supernatural decoration; it is consequence, as natural and relentless as water finding low ground.

    The formal resemblance to The Sound and the Fury is equally real. Faulkner’s great novel fractures time and consciousness deliberately, forcing the reader to assemble meaning from fragments โ€” Benjy’s disordered perception, Quentin’s obsessive circling, Jason’s bitter clarity โ€” because the Compson family’s dissolution cannot be understood from a single, stable vantage point. Miller employs a comparable stream of consciousness to collapse distance between reader and character. We are pulled into the current rather than observing it from shore. Faulkner described his own method as rendering “the agony and the sweat” of human effort โ€” not explaining it, but inhabiting it โ€” and Miller clearly understands that ambition. His prose does not summarize suffering; it enacts it.

    The O’Connor Edge

    Where Faulkner’s Southern Gothic tends toward the epic and the elegiac, Flannery O’Connor’s is surgical and merciless โ€” and Miller shares that quality too. O’Connor famously wrote that “to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.” Her grotesque characters are not freakish for shock’s sake but because, in her theological view, grace requires violence to break through human self-satisfaction. The darkness in Miller’s family saga operates similarly: the horror is not gratuitous, it is diagnostic. Every terrible thing that happens reveals something already spiritually wrong. O’Connor also said that “the meaning of a story should go on expanding for the reader the more he thinks about it” โ€” and The Curses We Keep has exactly that quality of resonance. The novel’s images and devices linger and accumulate meaning long after you’ve closed the book.

    Both O’Connor and Miller share a refusal of sentimentality that is rarer than it ought to be. O’Connor once noted that “tenderness leads to the gas chamber” โ€” by which she meant that cheap compassion, unmoored from truth, enables the worst outcomes. Miller holds to that same discipline: no character in The Curses We Keep is granted an easy exit, no suffering is cleansed into something bearable. The reader must look at what Miller is showing. That is an O’Connor demand as much as a Miller one.

    What Miller Has Done

    Miller uses language the way the best writers do: to reflect meaning already embedded in the world rather than to manufacture his own. His prose is effective precisely because it is purposeful, laying bare the layered pain of his story without sentimentality or escape hatches. The terrible things unfolding feel like truth, and Miller refuses to soften their consequences. Every character must reckon with how their own darkness and folly have led them here โ€” no one is spared, and no one is probably entirely innocent.

    At times the writing evokes Poe in its atmospheric density; at others, the Faulknerian stream of consciousness pulls the reader into the current alongside the characters. The O’Connor edge keeps it honest and unsentimental. The effect is quietly devastating โ€” the kind of novel that leaves you thoughtful and unsettled long after you’ve set it down.

    That an independent author is doing this kind of work, largely outside the machinery of traditional publishing, is itself worth noting. The mainstream press rarely tolerates this much darkness without demanding that it be made palatable. Miller has not made it palatable. He has made it true. That distinction matters enormously, and it puts him in better company than most publishers would have the courage to print.

  • The Chart That Built the NFL Draft โ€” and the One That Should Replace It

    The Chart That Built the NFL Draft โ€” and the One That Should Replace It

    Here’s an article I decided to write after YET ANOTHER YEAR of seeing my beloved NFL draft executed in a sub-optimal way. I’ve enjoyed seeing Dr. Richard Thaler (author of “Nudge” and winner of the Nobel prize in Economics) weighing in on this strange market and felt like this might be the time to put something in the blog explaining the issue…

    Every spring, NFL front offices gather in war rooms and make decisions worth hundreds of millions of dollars based, at least in part, on a laminated chart that Jimmy Johnson reportedly sketched on a cocktail napkin. That chart โ€” formally known as the Draft Value Chart โ€” has governed how teams trade picks for over three decades. It is also, according to Nobel Prize-winning economist Richard Thaler, badly wrong.

    Understanding how it’s wrong, and why teams keep using it anyway, is one of the more fascinating stories at the intersection of behavioral economics and professional sports. And of course, this is an area I have enjoyed writing about for years.

    The Jimmy Johnson Chart: How It Works

    When Jimmy Johnson became head coach of the Dallas Cowboys in 1989, he inherited a franchise in chaos. One of his early challenges was figuring out how to value picks when trading up or down in the draft. This makes great sense, because Johnson realized that there was a missing pricing mechanism.

    The chart he developed assigned a point value to every pick in the seven-round draft, with the first overall pick valued at 3,000 points, the second at 2,600, and so on, declining steeply through the first round before flattening out through the later rounds.

    The chart’s appeal is its simplicity. When a GM wants to trade the 4th pick (1,800 points) for the 12th pick (1,200 points) plus a second-rounder (400 points), the math is clean: 1,800 for 1,600 โ€” close enough to shake hands. It gives both sides a common language and a face-saving mechanism for complex negotiations. (Note the “face-saving” aspect… this is where behavioral econ comes in!)

    The chart spread rapidly through the league, and for decades it was essentially the industry standard. Some teams developed proprietary variants, but the underlying logic โ€” a steep exponential curve weighted heavily toward early picks โ€” remained the dominant framework.

    What Richard Thaler Found

    In 2005, economist Richard Thaler (later awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2017 for his work in behavioral economics) co-authored a paper with one of my favorite sports analytics gurus, Dr. Cade Massey, titled “The Loser’s Curse: Decision Making & Market Efficiency in the NFL Draft.” The findings were seriously actionable (but the NFL did not, actually, take action).

    Thaler and Massey did what the Jimmy Johnson chart never attempted: they measured the actual performance of drafted players relative to their draft position and their compensation. By tracking performance metrics and rookie salary costs over many years, they constructed what amounts to a surplus value chart. In plain English, this means not just asking “how good is this player likely to be?” but “how good is this player likely to be relative to what we’re paying him?” An important distinction!

    The results revealed a profound market inefficiency. Early first-round picks are dramatically overvalued by the Johnson chart relative to the surplus value they actually produce. The reason is twofold:

    First, top picks are simply harder to predict. The gap in projected talent between pick #1 and pick #10 is rarely as large as teams assume, but the difference in compensation is enormous. Rookie contracts are slotted to draft position, so the first pick commands a far larger salary than the tenth โ€” a cost premium that often exceeds the actual performance premium.

    Second, the certainty bias (a cognitive bias where people value a smaller, SURE gain over a higher-risk, greater-reward opportunity) runs deep. Teams systematically overweight the “sure thing” at the top of the board, even when the historical data shows those players bust at surprising rates. Thaler identified this as a classic behavioral economics failure โ€” the same overconfidence and loss aversion that distort decisions in financial markets showing up in draft rooms.

    The Thaler/Massey surplus value model suggested that picks in the late first round and the second round offer the best value in the NFL draft โ€” the sweet spot where players are talented enough to contribute meaningfully but cheap enough that their rookie contracts represent genuine organizational leverage. I feel like this is what I have observed over the years as well. Many more high first round picks are busts than we tend to recall.

    The Arbitrage Opportunity

    The part that interests me is how a team should respond to this erroneous pricing.

    In the “real world” when a pricing mechanism is wrong in a systematic and predictable direction, it creates arbitrage opportunities for anyone willing to exploit the gap between perceived value and actual value. Some notable billionaires have made their fortune off of arbitrage in currency markets (this is why George Soros is known as the ‘Man who Broke the Bank of England’).

    In draft terms, the arbitrage looks like this: if the Johnson chart says Pick #5 is worth Pick #18 plus Pick #52, but Thaler’s surplus value analysis says Pick #18 and Pick #52 together are actually more valuable than Pick #5, then the team trading down from #5 is winning the deal โ€” even though the Johnson chart says it’s a roughly fair exchange.

    Teams that internalize this insight should, in theory, be eager to trade down from premium picks. They receive more total surplus value while the team trading up feels satisfied because the Johnson chart validates the exchange from their perspective.

    Bill Belichick and the New England Patriots were widely cited as the most aggressive exploiters of this arbitrage over two decades, consistently moving down in the first round and accumulating picks rather than chasing the top of the board. The Kansas City Chiefs have shown similar tendencies in recent years. These teams weren’t just being clever about roster depth โ€” they were, consciously or not, taking the other side of a mispriced trade from teams anchored to the Johnson chart.

    There is a limit to this arbitrage, of course. A quarterback who goes #1 overall has a value that no surplus model fully captures โ€” the organizational lift, the marketing revenue, the franchise identity. And as more teams develop sophisticated internal valuation models, the gap between “chart price” and “true price” gradually compresses. The market corrects, slowly.

    Why the Johnson Chart Persists

    Here’s the really interesting question.

    If the Thaler model has been public knowledge since 2005, why does the Johnson chart still circulate in NFL draft rooms?

    Several reasons.

    First, coordination: both sides of a trade need a common reference point, and the Johnson chart provides that even when both parties know it’s imperfect.

    Second, organizational politics: a GM who trades down from the second pick and then watches the player drafted there win a Super Bowl will face questions no surplus value spreadsheet can answer. The Johnson chart provides cover.

    Third, the chart’s inaccuracies are not uniformly distributed โ€” for mid-round trades, it’s reasonably well-calibrated. The distortions concentrate at the extremes, particularly at the top of the first round.

    And of course, there’s also the simple conservatism of an industry where decision-makers are judged against peers rather than against theoretical optima. Using the same chart as everyone else is safe. Departing from it requires explaining yourself.

    The Takeaway for Analytically-Minded Fans

    The next time you watch your team trade up to grab a receiver at pick #9, ask yourself: who won that deal? The Johnson chart will tell you it was roughly fair. The Thaler surplus model will tell you that there’s a high probability that the team trading down got the better end of the bargain.

    The NFL draft is one of a remaining handful of markets where a publicly-known, empirically-validated mispricing persists year after year. Teams that understand the difference between perceived draft value and actual surplus value have a structural advantage over those that don’t โ€” and they’ve had it for twenty years.

    Want to dig deeper? The original Massey-Thaler paper titled “Overconfidence vs. Market Efficiency in the National Football League” is available HERE. For a more recent treatment, The Ringer and For The Numbers have both published updated surplus value analyses incorporating the new CBA rookie wage scale, which has changed some of the specific numbers while leaving the core insight intact. Also, check out the NFL Operations joint project with Carnegie Mellon.

  • I Have a New Novelette โ€” and It’s Almost Free ($.99)!

    I Have a New Novelette โ€” and It’s Almost Free ($.99)!

    I’ve been living in the world of the Old Testament prophets for a long time now. The Eyes of Gehazi took me deep into the strange, volatile orbit of Elisha and his servant, Gehazi. The Prophet and the Queen dropped me into the exhausted, visionary mind of Jeremiah, taken hostage to Egypt. Both of those novels ask a lot of their readers โ€” they’re long, layered, and they don’t apologize for it.

    So I wanted to build a door.

    The Unknown Prophet is a 17,000-word novelette โ€” long enough to sink into, short enough to finish in an evening โ€” and it’s only $.99 (Amazon won’t let me keep it free, but I’d like to).

    It fictionalizes one of the strangest and least-discussed episodes in the entire Old Testament: the unnamed man of God from 1 Kings 13 who walks north alone, confronts a rebellious king at an idolatrous altar, watches God split stone and restore a withered arm, and then gets betrayed on the road home by an older prophet who should have known better. The story ends with a lion and a burial and a grief that has no clean resolution.

    What I love about this story is what it doesn’t explain. The biblical text gives us almost nothing about who this man was, what he was thinking, or why he made the choice that killed him. That blank space is where I live.

    If you’re new to my Prophetic Series, this is the place to start. If you’ve already spent time with Gehazi or Jeremiah, you’ll find the same world โ€” the same dust and wind, the same God who is present and terrifying and not always easy to understand.

    You can grab the ebook for only 99 cents on Amazon. If it finds you well, I hope you’ll wander further in.

    OTHER LINKS you might find interesting:

    The Halls of the Shadow King: Brittania Calls – Learn all about this fourth novel in the Halls of the Shadow King series!

    Tod’s thoughts about the damage that Post-modernism has done to modern literature

    Tod’s Book Reviews

  • Britannia Calls: A Red Dragon, Fionn mac Cumhaill, and Early Christians Who Didn’t Survive by Being Timid

    Britannia Calls: A Red Dragon, Fionn mac Cumhaill, and Early Christians Who Didn’t Survive by Being Timid

    The fourth book in The Halls of the Shadow King series is now available on Amazon Kindle. It’s called Britannia Calls, and is a Christian retelling of Celtic mythology (and possibly an Arthurian origin story!). Set twenty-something years after the adventures of Amal in the first three books in “The Halls of the Shadow King”. My intent is that the reader has the option to treat this as either the fourth book or as a standalone introduction to the series. Here’s the overview:

    Highlights of the Action

    What are the highlights? Third-century Roman Britain. A red dragon sleeping under a Welsh mountain. A Christian awakening spreading through the island that the dragon finds deeply inconvenient. And a team sent from Antiochโ€”led by Amal, the Shadow Kingโ€”to do something about it.

    They’re joined by Finn McCool and they briefly meet Taliesin. Yes, those two. One is an immortal Celtic warrior who has been fighting supernatural evil longer than most civilizations have existed. The other is a blind former druid who serves a different master now and carries scars from the last time he tried to face the dragon alone.

    The early Christians in this story didn’t survive Roman persecution by being cautious people. They survived by being stubborn, brave, and entirely convinced that the darkness was going to lose eventually. A primordial dragon will test conviction in a cavern deep beneath Mount Snowdonia.

    Mythical Celtic Setting

    Britannia Calls is historical fiction rooted in the third century ADโ€”a few years before the reign of Emperor Constantine. The narrative swims in early Celtic Christianity, and the pre-Roman mythological traditions of Ireland and Wales. The supernatural elementsโ€”dragons, Pattern-sight, binding rituals drawn from Hebrew and druidic traditionsโ€”are built on that historical and literary foundation, not cartoons layered on top of it.

    If you’ve read The Apprentice or Into Deeper Waters, you already know Amal. If this is your first encounter with the series, Britannia Calls works as an entry point. The format keeps it focusedโ€”one mission, one mountain, one ancient enemy.

    What’s Next?

    I’m already thinking about the next project. Another Old Testament prophet, most likely. Different era, different landscape, same fundamental conflict: someone who has been given a gift they didn’t ask for and a task they’d prefer to refuse. He won’t know what hit him.

    HOW TO PURCHASE THE BOOK!

    Find Britannia Calls on Amazon (Kindle only): https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0GS3PDF8R

    Paperback is available exclusively on my web store here at todnewman.com!

    Other LINKS about this Novel

    Q&A with the Author

    Reviews of the First Book in this Series

    Early article “hyping” this book!

    Detailed Cover Art process post

  • The Retreat from Excellence: How Postmodern Relativism Undermined Literary Standards

    The Retreat from Excellence: How Postmodern Relativism Undermined Literary Standards

    When a culture abandons the pursuit of objective excellence, it doesn’t simply become more inclusive of wider ranges of thinkingโ€”it becomes incapable of discernment.

    Over the past three decades, we’ve witnessed a striking decline in literary quality (I don’t think this is terribly controversial–there are many indicators). I submit that this decline correlates directly with the ascendancy of postmodern thinking in academia and publishing. The culprit isn’t difficult to identify: when “good is merely a perspective” driven by an esoteric “System of Thought” becomes the operative philosophy, the distinction between mediocrity and mastery dissolves.

    The Death of Standards

    The postmodern project, at its core, represents a philosophical surrender. Rather than wrestle with the philosophical inconsistencies in Naturalism, then Realism, then Modernism, the postmodernists decided that solving these problems was impossible because truth itself was merely projected by dominant Systems of Thought. This was a pretentious error.

    By denying that there can be such a thing as “true good” in art, postmodernism hasn’t liberated us at all from oppressive standardsโ€”rather, it has left us defenseless against the tide of trivial and insupportable newly-born standards. When every text is merely another perspective, when every voice carries equal weight regardless of craft or vision, the result is predictable: the market floods with work that previous generations would have recognized immediately as unserious. Walk into any major bookstore today and survey the literary fiction section. You’ll find novels praised to the heavens by prestigious review outlets that lack basic narrative coherence, that substitute cleverness for wisdom, that mistake the transgressive for the profound. This isn’t an accident of taste. It’s the logical outcome of a system that has lost the vocabularyโ€”and the courageโ€”to say that some work is simply better than other work.

    Academia’s Capitulation

    The academy, which once served as a guardian of literary standards, has become their primary subverter. English departments that once trained students to recognize excellence now teach them to deconstruct it. Now a literary PhD dissertation can be generated by an AI, and it is happening all over.

    Close readingโ€”that patient attention to how language achieves its effectsโ€”has given way to reading for power dynamics, for representations of identity, for the political implications of competing Systems of Thought. These approaches aren’t completely without value, but when they become the dominant approaches, literature ceases to be evaluated as literature. At that point, it becomes far easier to deconstruct the physical words on a page into representations that reflect whatever system the professional academic rewards. I’ve been occasionally surprised on the literary side of X to find academics who have creatively deconstructed religious works into polemics about post-industrial society and other fashionable concerns. The result? Entire generations of writers emerge from MFA programs unable to distinguish between craft and ideology, between a sentence that sings and one that merely signals. They’ve been taught that traditional notions of beauty, structure, and moral seriousness are suspectโ€”tools of cultural hegemony rather than hard-won insights into what makes language live on the page.

    Publishing’s Moral Vacancy

    The publishing industry, always responsive to cultural currents, has enthusiastically embraced the postmodern turn. Editors who might once have rejected a manuscript for technical deficiencies now celebrate those same deficiencies as formally innovative. Marketing departments that once sought to identify lasting work now scramble to ride waves of social media enthusiasm, no matter how shallow. Consider how contemporary publishing determines what’s worthy of publication. Increasingly, the question isn’t “Is this excellent?” but “Does this fill a slot in our diversity portfolio?” or “Will this generate the right kind of attention on Twitter?” These aren’t questions about literary merit. They’re questions about market positioning and cultural opticsโ€”and while both have their place in business decisions, when they crowd out questions of quality entirely, literature suffers. When there is no gate on the process for quality and excellenceโ€”even in the absence of political biasโ€”the bottom line becomes the only motivator.

    The Evidence Is in the Reading

    The proof of this decline doesn’t require theoretical argumentationโ€”it requires only that we read. Pick up a celebrated novel from 2020 and set it beside one from 1950. The difference in linguistic precision, in structural sophistication, in moral and intellectual seriousness is often startling. This isn’t nostalgia speaking. It’s the recognition that when a culture ceases to believe in excellence, it ceases to produce it. The postmodern response to this observation is predictable: “You’re merely privileging one aesthetic over another. Who are you to say Hemingway is better than [insert trendy contemporary author]?” But this response itself reveals the problem. It treats evaluation as an arbitrary exercise in power rather than a learned skill requiring attention, knowledge, and intellectual humility. It assumes that because perfect objectivity is impossible, all judgments are equally subjectiveโ€”a logical leap that would be laughable in any other field.

    Recently, I was discussing books with an adult reading enthusiast who had discovered a new passion for H. Rider Haggard. His books are exciting “lost world” adventures written during the late 1800s, and the writing was considered accessible to young children of that era. My friend was surprised that young boys were drawn to these books in the past, because even the average adult reader would find the writing challenging today. There are scores of examples like this of what we have lost by losing our way regarding excellence in literature.

    What We’ve Lost

    When we abandon the pursuit of objective literary standards, we lose more than just the ability to distinguish good books from bad ones. We lose the cultural infrastructure that allowed great writers to develop. George Eliot, Tolstoy, Dostoevskyโ€”these writers emerged in cultures that, whatever their other failings, took literature seriously as a vehicle for truth. They wrote for audiences that expected not just to be entertained or validated, but to be challenged, elevated, transformed. Today’s literary culture, by contrast, often seems content with books that function as mere mirrorsโ€”reflecting readers’ existing beliefs back to them, confirming what they already think about the world. This isn’t literature’s highest calling. It’s literature’s unflinching surrender.

    The Way Forward

    The path forward requires recovering what postmodernism has taught us to abandon: the courage to discriminate between truth and falsehood, the willingness to say that some work achieves what other work only attempts. This doesn’t mean returning to a narrow canon or dismissing new voices, but rather means insisting that new voices, like old ones, be held to standards of excellence rather than given passes based on novelty or identity. Editors should be willing to reject manuscripts that fail to meet high literary standards, regardless of their political or cultural appeal. Critics need to be willing to write honest reviews rather than promotional copy. It means readers willing to demand more than what’s merely current or trendy. Most importantly, it means recovering the belief that drove the greatest writers of the past: that literature matters precisely because it can access truth, beauty, and moral wisdomโ€”not perfectly, not infallibly, but genuinely.

    When we believe there’s a “true good” worth pursuing in art, we create the conditions for excellence. When we don’t, we get what we have now: a literary landscape cluttered with forgettable cash generators, while genuine talent goes unrecognized because we’ve lost the language to recognize it. The decline of contemporary literature isn’t a mystery. It’s the inevitable result of ideas taken to their logical conclusion. Postmodernism promised liberation from the struggle to define truth and beauty; it delivered mediocrity. The question is whether we have the cultural courage to admit it.

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