The idea that working class fiction and/or fiction centered around the rural poor hasn’t been published is horseshit. You just haven’t been reading it. Name a year and I’ll tell you a book that should’ve been bigger than it was.
And you’re STILL not reading the right books. For two fucking years you’ve been talking about Hillbilly Elegy and how that horribly written misportrayal accuractelg represents Appalachia, and I guarantee not a damn one of you has ever read @robert_gipe’s Trampoline or Weedeater.
Not a damn one of you has read @CrystalWilki’s Birds Of Opulence, or Frank X Walker’s About Flight. Not a damn one of you read @howtopreserve’s Render: An Apocalypse, or @ray_mcmanus’s Punch.
The reason Hillbilly Elegy was so successful was because time and time again Appalachia is brought up as a problem rather than a place. It’s because you wanted a goddamn scapegoat and this was an easy place to point your finger. Vance just told you what you wanted to hear.
There’s incredible fiction, nonfiction, and poetry coming out of rural places every year, every week, from brilliantly talented people who get the complexities of these places and you don’t read it because it doesn’t reinforce the narrative you want to hear.
If you want a brief look at the type of writing I’m talking about, go read the past few months of essays the @BitterSouth put out every Tuesday. Go buy this fucking novel that came out last month. 
Mark Powell’s Small Treasons was one of the most brilliant social novels to come out last year and none of you said a fucking word about it, none of you read it.
The books are there, the writers are working their asses off, and none of you are paying any attention. Instead you write a piece like this and mention that ratty ass trash of a fucking book Hillbilly Elegy 20 times, while rural people have screamed for two years, That ain’t us!
I think I posted this series of tweets damn near two years ago, and I stand by them just as much now as I did then. Hillbilly Elegy is nothing but piss-poor propaganda. If you want to know who you should be reading from this place, ask those of us who fucking live here.
More than anything, perhaps, this feels like a failure of the critic. For a month I’ve seen dozens of pieces devoted to how horrible Sean Penn’s novel is, pieces published in some of the biggest markets in the world.
Meanwhile and comparatively, I’ve seen next to nothing praising how goddamn brilliant a novel like @LeesaCrossSmith’s debut Whiskey & Ribbons is from @HubCityPress.
Of all the critics I follow, I can think of one who’s consistently begging publishers to send him books by under-represented voices: by POC, by women, by LGBTQ writers, by rural writers. Thank you for that, @Gabino_Iglesias. Fucking thank you!
And thank you to writers like @rgay who are doing the same, who are pointing readers in the direction of work that matters. This moment is too fucking dire to waste our time on art that isn’t fearless, on work from voices that have been played on a loop for too fucking long.
