A reformed blognik leaves his laptop for a larger world.

SAMUEL HYLAND

This past Fall, the neurotic writer Tao Lin, who writes about doomed men and manic depression, announced on Substack that his debut novella, Shoplifting From American Apparel, had gone out of print. In 2009, when Shoplifting was first published, Lin was a wiry graduate of New York University, where he had abused Adderall and lurked, crusty-eyed, in the stacks of Bobst Library. He founded a website, Muumuu House, that doubled as a “star factory” for young, offbeat writers—friends of his, and disciples of his anxious, compulsory take on internet fiction. Many of these writers appear, with their names changed, as characters in Lin’s own books, which are both diaristic and deeply digressive: exhaustively listing banalities, until, inevitably, some grand, gutting conclusion about humanity is reached. Taipei, his third and best novel, told the story of his (Paul’s) tumultuous relationship with the writer Megan Boyle (Erin), who in 2015 published Liveblog, a 707-page attempt to live-blog her life. (“9:30AM: woke. peed and refilled water glass. it was sunny and reminded me of a day in winter 2009. ate remaining pizza slice. looked at internet.”) In the closing moments of his memoir, Paul, foreseeing a breakup, has a minor existential crisis, then, suddenly, a sweeping realization that he is “grateful to be alive.”

“When I’m talking to someone I think ‘can I use this dialogue in a book.’ If the answer is no I try talking to someone else.”

Another character in Taipei is Calvin, a bohemian teenager widely thought to be Jordan Castro. Castro, from Cleveland, is ten years younger than Lin, and a close literary peer: deeply fixated, like his early mentor, on morbidly depressed men and their neurotic inner monologues. In 2012, three years after Shoplifting From American Apparel was published, he starred as Lin in a $30,000 indie film adaptation, which Vice called the “cinematographic equivalent of the Doritos Loco Taco—a total lack of substance covered up with gimmicks to distract the consumer.” In the original novella, Lin G-chats copiously with an Ohio friend, Luis, who describes everything as “fucked,” and weighs every conversation against a rigid criterion: “When I’m talking to someone I think ‘can I use this dialogue in a book.’ If the answer is no I try talking to someone else.” Castro’s own debut novel, The Novelist (2022), was about an overthinking male author. Its follow-up, Muscle Man (2025), is about an overthinking male college professor. Last Fall, in the weeks preceding its publication, he published two short essays: one, in the Paris Review, about “not reading Ayn Rand,” and another, on Twitter, about how “young men have been told, by basically every mainstream institution, that they suck.” Many people disliked both essays, which might not have come as a surprise. Early on in The Novelist, Castro’s unnamed narrator sympathizes with “Jordan Castro,” a writer whose critics spew “meaningless political terms” based on “egregious misrepresentations” of his work in a collaborative effort to “slander him.”

Castro and Lin, once enfant-terribles, are now grizzled patron saints of “Alt Lit,” a much-slandered literature of plotless, autobiographical shitposting. In the late aughts, when Lin emerged as its torchbearer, his writing freakishly channeled the early internet, which was one-dimensional: names and things those names did and said. Fifteen years later, as Shoplifting leaves shelves and Muscle Man stocks them, that internet is much more amorphous—more so, perhaps, than its initial literary analog was ever built to accommodate. Bloggy autofiction was radical, in its heyday, because it positioned social media as the “drumbeat of modern life,” rather than a “modern day distraction.” This holds up in 2026, but does the writing? Three summers ago, when The Novelist was published, Dall-E mini, a primitive AI image-generator, reigned briefly as the premiere bastion of “random-sauce” nihilism—an outgrowth of the YOLO 2010s, and a fixture of its fuck-all literary output. This sensibility, like social media theory, was very cool a decade ago, because it helped us to reckon with a vast, infinite moment, and its vast, infinite digisphere. (Midway through Taipei, when Paul and Erin impulsively elope, it is because “getting married” is “like getting a tattoo.”) Post-Dall-E, as AI facilitates a closing-in of those walls, neither our moment nor its internet feels very vast, nor very infinite, at all. Increasingly, autofiction that assumes the opposite—that we are young, that the internet is alive, that anything is possible, and that there are zero consequences—does not feel vast nor infinite, either.

“What was the point of literature, I’d wondered, if it could only ever be something else?”

Yes, it is true: these are very easy, perhaps unfair, critiques to lob in hindsight. What gives? When Castro and Lin were panned in their primes, people were still ostensibly good, and their grievances were low-stakes: Lin was “solipsistic,” Castro “scatalogical,” and Alt Lit, a playground for “boring, infantile narcissists.” A decade later, in dystopically urgent times, patience with meandering, self-mythologizing myopia—particularly by men—is much more scarce. In an October survey of the literary “manosphere,” the Cleveland Review of Books placed Castro, a “racist” and “misogynist,” on a spectrum of “dysmorphic and insecure” narrators, for whom the body—see: the gym—is a site of transcendence. The same essay saliently critiques “selective readers” who read books “strategically,” and, to the chagrin of their authors, distill nuanced texts into “trite semi-analysis.” Among readings of Castro, this feels, ever so rarely, like one he might agree with—yes, I lift, and fuck yes, I am misunderstood. But as the “blognik” matures as a novelist, and the “Calvin” of Taipei grows up, his raison-detre, one might think, would be necessarily deeper than scornful vindication. Scornful and vindictive as his prose may be, it also bubbles with political frustration, which has ascended from subtext to center, then from center to caricature. Midway through The Novelist, his unnamed narrator furiously critiques “Eric,” an allegory for—and beneficiary of—an illiterate literati:

Every novel, like Eric’s novel, failed as a novel, but since no one wanted to read novels, no one noticed, and instead of despairing over the failed state of literary culture, they rejoiced, like madmen delirious from bashing their heads into the wall.

At the end of the paragraph, Castro distills his wrathful screed into the big, galaxy-brained question at its center. “What was the point of literature, I’d wondered, if it could only ever be something else?”

🏋️‍♂️🏋️‍♂️🏋️‍♂️

“People are like, What advice do you have for young men? I’m like, What are you talking about?”

There is a chapter of Threshold, a meandering drug novel, where Rob Doyle grows frustrated with an exhibition, and more so, the world that created it. “Everywhere you looked,” he writes, “art was becoming indistinguishable from social work, progressivist politics, liberal guilt. To join the tribe called contemporary art, it was required that you loudly declaim a humanitarian worldview and place your work at its service.” Lexically, these grievances sound baldly conservative, and even more familiar: liberalism is a cult of spineless sheeple. But if this “tribe” is unified by meaning—or, more broadly, the idea that it is a prerequisite to art—then his complaint could also be a meta-commentary. Plotless autofiction is inherently at odds with leftist politics, because its very bedrock is apathy: the decadent belief that your life, which is also an art-object, does not necessarily have to mean anything. (Or: “YOLO!”) Where the 2010s were religiously liberal, their risque “Alt Lit” was spiritually gnostic, unbound by the prevailing institution of shame. This was a hilarious disposition, yet more broadly, a generational one: burying uncertainty in nihilistic sarcasm. I often think of a recurring gag in Shoplifting, where “Sam,” a Tao Lin surrogate, shouts “Obama!” at random passersby. (“That was good,” he says, when a friend does it to a gentleman, who is caught off guard. “You dominated him a lot.”) The word “Obama,” like the progressive art Doyle critiques, was meaningless, then: “progress,” plastered everywhere, while little progress actually occurs. “Spare me,” Doyle writes in Threshold, speaking for an entire canon.

“My response to whatever’s going on in culture is like, okay: I’m going to try and write the best novels that I possibly can.”

Doyle and Castro share a frustration, as do many people, with purpose: not “meaning” writ large, but the idea that all life and literature must serve one. The unfortunate irony: Spare me from politics is an oxymoron, because its logical endpoint—change nothing, conserve everything—is definitionally conservative. Obama-era Alt Lit was radical, because it transgressed against the inverse of our America, an empathetic Neverland of educated, curious caricatures. Now, as fascism rears its ugly head, myopia and apathy are outrageous, which leaves authors like Castro in a precarious position. Oftentimes, in reactionary eras, the regressive undertones of edgy literature are much more readily nitpicked: Has anyone noticed that Tao Lin was on Red Scare? Or that Jordan Castro is kind of racist maybe? Or that Lin believes he cured his own autism? Or that Castro told The Free Press that umbrellas were “not very masculine?” (Other times, “regressive undertones” is not quite the right term: in the mid-2010s, Lin was among several “Alt Lit” titans accused of sexual assault.) It feels fitting, in retrospect, that Lin and Castro were both championed by Bret Easton Ellis, whose own nihilistic opus was “cancelled” twice: first, by Simon & Schuster, then again, by Gulf War America. While Ellis has made peace with being a villain, his 21st-Century proteges, adrift in the internet they helped define, often chafe against a digital-era truth: that not everyone sees them the way they see themselves. “People are like, What advice do you have for young men?” Castro told Ellis in a recent podcast appearance. “I’m like, What are you talking about?”

This exchange haunts the legacy of Muscle Man, but also, to a greater extent, the legacy of Jordan Castro: a novelist at odds with a moment that demands more. Five decades ago, the ascent of New Historicism, a context-driven literary theory, forged an avenue for similar approaches—This book is 100% about its era, it often seemed to assert, whether the author knows it or not. Contextual reading was radical in Reagan-era America, whose old injustices were shunned in search of new imperialism. But in the decades since, as the Democratic Party surged, New Historicism began to look a lot like Neoliberalism: an institution, and perhaps, by 2025, one that restricts more than it renews. On the “Bret Easton Ellis Podcast,” Castro suggested that he had been typecast as a “Man Novelist,” a vessel for the brooding masculinity of our moment. “My response to whatever’s going on in culture,” he later said, “is like, okay: I’m going to try and write the best novels that I possibly can.” His only two published novels, The Novelist and Muscle Man, are both great books, on their own merit. Alternatively, as cultural texts, they have each endured vastly different afterlives: one book, a chronicle of COVID-era insularity; and the other, a “manosphere” ur-text for the masculine and marginalized.

Thus, a much-argued point: by strapping “literature” to the “something else” of its moment, we strip it of its timelessness, and therefore flatten it. “Spare me,” you, a grizzled writer of great novels, might yawn. Another much-argued point: is it really “flattening,” per se, to recognize the potential of literature to be more? When the “something else” of society grows suffocating, the implicit task, for storytellers, is to produce Texts—things we study, now or later, to understand the times. Stupid times, like ours, demand that we scour for sense, sniffing around like pigs, snouts buried in shit. Should Merriam-Webster be correct, then it feels symbolic, in 2025, that The Novelist and Muscle Man were each published at “slop” apotheoses: the former, in its inaugural year; and the latter, in its year of global dominion. Castro has long bemoaned misunderstandings, which makes sense, considering that his prose—deadpan, straightforward, and dryly funny—is not quite “slop” at all. This, like his goal of writing great novels, has not changed. But the times certainly have, and with them, so, too, have the standards. Midway through The Novelist, the titular overthinker aspires, much like Castro, to be a “serious person” who deserves “to be taken seriously.” The unfortunate thing about seriousness: it is shaped entirely by factors beyond your control.

🏋️‍♂️🏋️‍♂️🏋️‍♂️

“Their bodies wanted the pump, were literally dying for the pump, but people could not listen to their bodies, because they did not speak their body’s language.”

Shortly after I finished Taipei, I learned on Twitter that “Calvin,” or Castro, had published a dispatch from “eternity,” or the sauna—a sauna somewhere in Mount Kisco, where he had bonded with porn-brained Zoomers, united in goopy heat. This was last February, a month after the term “manosphere,” which seemed to sprout from somewhere sinister, began to creep into, then cauterize, post-election click-cycles: You, young men, have fucked us. Penis-owning young people had overwhelmingly voted, with said penises, to elect a rapist whose own penis perked up, Pringle-like, at a new idea: patriotism, but make it pornography. Make it garish, oiled-up and sucking my dick. Generate this, please. Make the other countries wear skimpy bikinis with American flags on them and suck my dick passionately, gagging and choking through “God Bless America” while a cherub feeds me hot dogs on the afternoon of the Super Bowl, which the Patriots win over the Redskins, no longer the Commanders, by a score of 47 to 45.

“No reason for him to be wiggling and writhing like some kind of horny child, nearly rubbing up against me, sucking up all the oxygen, then breathing his hot, sour breath back out onto everyone…”

This is all retrospective: I am typing this on the first day of 2026, nearly a full calendar year after Castro wrote about saunas. Castro had not known, then, what I know now—about Grok porn, or kinky Kirkifications, or how a strongman President would very publicly weaken, physically and mentally, as his perversions increasingly became public. He was commissioned by the Paris Review to contribute to “At the Gym,” a January slate of essays on “resolutions made and broken, gym memberships purchased and fitness classes left unattended.” And so, Castro had written, obediently, about eternity: the timelessness of being 27 years old, surrounded by teenagers in a sauna, eavesdropping on talk of “rizz” and hookups. Much like Muscle Man, the gym novel he would publish months later, this dispatch was empathetic and endearing. And much like Muscle Man, it seems, it could not have come at a worse time.

Because, in part, I am conflicted: I would really like to write about how Muscle Man is a Trump-era novel, or how it critiques the curdling masculinity of our moment, all lewd AI generations and lactic acid and latent lust. But none of these things state, simply, that Muscle Man is a great novel, which it is: not about America, but Shepherd College, where Harold, a grizzled English professor, seethes through departmental meetings, desperately waiting to hit the gym. Harold, like most Castro narrators, is insular and opinionated, almost unbearable in his self-glorifying word-vomit. What makes him tolerable, remarkably, is how earnestly he resents his loser colleagues, who publish books about “various abstractions,” withering away in flabby bodies while he, a “strong, virile” man, seeks catharsis in higher things, like weights. Among these flabby colleagues is David, who is flamed, Eric-style, in a scathing internal monologue:

Couldn’t David scoot over a little? There was more than enough room at the table, no reason for him to be wiggling and writhing like some kind of horny child, nearly rubbing up against me, sucking up all the oxygen, then breathing his hot, sour breath back out onto everyone… 

Castro’s strength lies in contempt: singling out weak people, like Eric and David, as symptoms of a weak culture, which he gawks at with bewildered incredulity. Castro, like Harold, is almost entirely consumed by this contempt, which is chiefly interesting because it is sometimes funny. Yet it is from this slapstick contempt, in each of his novels, that catharsis comes spilling out, as if only accessible via the flow-state of really fucking hating someone. In The Novelist, that someone is Eric, whose “weak” physique and “pathetic” Twitter posts cause Castro—or, rather, his unnamed narrator—to type “forcefully,” until his rage-writing leads him to finally focus on his novel. (“Working on a new novel, like Woodcutters,” he writes in an impulsive email to Li, who might be Tao Lin. “Shit-talking Eric.”) And in Muscle Man, the “someone” is not one person, but multiple people, all of whom resemble Eric—not only in their actions, but in Castro’s reactions, which bear striking resemblance to a familiar screed: 

Every novel, like Eric’s novel, failed as a novel, but since no one wanted to read novels, no one noticed, and instead of despairing over the failed state of literary culture, they rejoiced, like madmen delirious from bashing their heads into the wall. — The Novelist

Their bodies wanted the pump, were literally dying for the pump, but people could not listen to their bodies, because they did not speak their body’s language. — Muscle Man

Structurally, these rants are very funny—and very similar—in their engagement with illiteracy: so viscerally upset with idiots, and their bastardization of language, that the sentences run on endlessly, bastardizing language themselves. In Muscle Man, the bastardized “language” in question belongs to the body, which does not speak—nor benefit from—the Pig Latin of modern life: phones, tablets, televisions, and other things that thwart our spines, tilting them downward. Harold, who is on his phone constantly, finds this insane: stupid people, some of whom are his colleagues, have no desire to lift, or, really, to live. Pathetic! Harold is exceptional, because he desires life. He is willing to suffer for it. His pain, unlike the pain couch-potatoes think they feel, is noble—growing pain, pain that serves a purpose. Imagining a fawning podcast host, he mentally talk-thinks, mid-rep: “But the pain after a day of self-centered degeneracy spreads out into the world, negatively affecting countless others, spreading pain and more pain exponentially.” And what exactly was he doing here, seething about pained peers, sitting in pools of his own sweat? Not spreading pain. Not spreading pleasure, either.

Castro is not a college professor. He does not teach Gothic Literature at a fictional school called Shepherd College, in a fictional building called Lawes, teeming with architectural oddities and students with suspicious bookbags. He is very against the term “autofiction,” which has been used, with varying degrees of correctness, to describe his milieu: diaristic “blogniks” who bumbled through the 2010s, writing edgy, inchoate literature baked in YOLO-tinted irony. Muscle Man is not autofiction. Maybe, it is not about our evil, degenerate, self-centered America, either. In its final pages, Harold, headed for his car, runs into David, who—tired of kettlebell swings and Turkish get-ups—asks to be taught to deadlift. “It would be my honor,” Harold says.