Andrea Monagle

@andreamontoro.bsky.social

I read books for work, and I read books for fun. Sometimes I do other stuff in between.

@gravitysra1nbow.bsky.socialReposted by @andreamontoro.bsky.social

I genuinely mean this. I cannot imagine a more bleak dystopian notion than the idea of all art being turned into slop designed to coddle my exact perceived intentions. The point of literature, film, music, and art is to be exposed to the interior lives of others. Who are these people.

@andreamontoro.bsky.social

My loyalty to Goodreads (unwillingness to learn a new interface; grief over losing fourteen years of logging, despite whatever reassurances of a smooth transfer other sites promise) has finally been rewarded (they've added quarter- and half-star ratings).

@monagle.bsky.socialReposted by @andreamontoro.bsky.social

I'm not going to pretend like Trump isn't the beating black heart of America, but I do sometimes wonder how he would've been perceived over the past decade if more media outlets had published his comments verbatim.

@maris.bsky.socialReposted by @andreamontoro.bsky.social

LOL, the gotcha part in the second paragraph is truly hilarious. Who will think of the straight white rightwing men in the literary world? WHO? WHO?

Last week, the longlists for the National Book Awards were announced. Among the 20 authors in the fiction and nonfiction categories, nearly all are straight white males. Most are also on the political right, some even on the far right. Remarkably, mainstream media outlets haven’t reported this, perhaps because they don’t think it’s noteworthy. It’s as if we were living in 1956 rather than 2026. If you’re scratching your head at this “news,” well, it’s because I made it up. Or rather, I inverted the particulars about the authors’ identities and their political views to make a point: If today, as a reader, you recoil at the thought of a time in which minorities were systematically marginalized when it came to the literary world’s public honors (and so much else), shouldn’t you also recoil now that the tables have been almost completely turned? And if you object to the right’s efforts to politicize the arts, won’t you also object when the efforts come from the left?
Older posts