The Case for Thinking People's Fiction: From the Brontes to Bridgerton

After a kickoff discussion of sequels last month, we’re pivoting in the next few Unedited episodes to a debate around what happened to good fiction and why so many of the novels we read these days feel, well, stupid. Is it nostalgia talking to say that the novels of fifty or one hundred years ago felt smarter than the stuff getting praised in the (increasingly decimated) newspaper reviews of today? Or that the books kids once read in school presented better lessons, better stories, and just better writing than the BookTok trends of the month? We don’t think so. In this episode, Noah gives a brief introduction to the subject of “stupid” by asking what, ultimately, fiction is, and how the novel’s adaptation to changing times and technologies turned it from a canonical artform to a beehive of buzzwords. To cap it off, we ask how (and why) to recover smart in an age of stupid.