Prose off: Fiction from the Land of the Eternal Reach-Around by right-blooded Lucy Ellmann in The Paris Review put forward by Emily Stokes who ought to be ashamed of herself v. Fleming story

Wednesday 10/21/26

This was going to be a two-for-one prose off in which we pitted a couple recent short story excerpts from The Paris Review against the story I'm working on this morning, because I went to The Paris Review's site today and clicked on two stories thinking we'd do one of these given that it's been a bit, and was floored by how bad they both were.

I go in knowing how bad anything I click on in these places will be, but it is nonetheless so bad, so obviously included for reasons that have nothing to do with the work itself, that a part of me still goes, "You have to be fucking shitting me."

Then I started doing this entry and it was getting long, so how about we save one of those Paris Review stories for later?

All the fiction in The Paris Review is like all the other fiction in The Paris Review, which is like all the fiction in all these literary places and circles. Overall you have two kinds of fiction. Genre shit. Nonsense about vampires and wizards and the boy aquarium for people who try to escape their lives by pasting over their brains and feeling less, knowing less, living less, becoming less human as if on some readerly retreat/return to fetal state, and then MFA-machined fiction.

That's it right now.

The genre shit is 98% of it because of the people I just described and there being many more of them than the Lorin Stein types on the literary side who were going to schools that cost $30K a year in second grade, and because you have all these writers and would-be writers who have usually never actually read anything of quality and possess no idea what writing can be or even real writing actually is who want attention, to feel like they belong to a group, or don't know any better the same way a person who has only eaten bologna sandwiches can't conceive of anything else, and they're also unable to understand anything unless each sentence is six words long, starts with a subject followed by a verb, the narration is first person, the paragraphs are super short, and the majority of the text is bad, cliched dialogue, which is familiar to them.

Take away formula and seeing versions of the same old same old over and over again, and they're utterly lost. I mean, look, it's 1 out of 100 people--if that--who can read the sign outside the Bunker Hill Monument saying that there are 294 stairs inside and comprehend that there are 294 stairs. Forty seconds later, one of them says to another, "How many stairs are there?" "Um...200 I think?"

They aren't really reading reading. Same as the guys who go to the bookstore, purchase War and Peace, Absalom, Absalom, and The Brothers Karamazov, post a photo of their purchases on Reddit in a big stack, and then later boast about having finished The Brothers Karamazov in another Reddit post; they may have looked at all the words, but such a person isn't reading a book; they're doing something else. Upvotes, please! It's closer to a competitive Instagram form of reading for points and ego. Dashboard reading. Stat reading. The reading form of baseball analytics-collating rather than baseball playing. (We'll dig much deeper into who reads and why, such as they read, later, and why women make up most of the readers, but men make up most of the people who "read" so-called great books.)

People who aren't readers (and the millions pretending to be writers who have never read but, again, want to be thought of as "special" and here's what could do it for them because it isn't like they can go out and make the Bears as a back-up DE) automatically think that writing has to be about talking owls and the wizards and stock terms they throw around pretending they're intelligent and in the know like "worldbuilding."

It doesn't work like that. Any great work of writing can only have been itself, was made in a unique way, and had no recipe. It ought to be as much a surprise to the author as anyone.

Many of those people read, as such, for online community. "OMG WE READ THESE KNOCKOFFS OF HEATED RIVALRY GIRL POWEREEEEEERRRRRRR!!!!!!!" and then they go to a hockey game, make the expected "I went to the boys aquarium" social media posts with as many photos of themselves as possible in their new Florida Panthers jersey, referencing their "favorite" real life players by their first names like they're besties and hockey players aren't actually usually sexist homophobic monstrosities with the brain power of a spent and corroded Double A battery ("get pucks in deep").

It's people wanting out from their lives. It isn't killing yourself, but it's killing off your brain, and that means deadening the pain. But under the banner of this other thing.

Then you have the silver spooners without a jot of ability, the Yale trust funders who are dilettantes in the truest sense of the word, before it's on to Iowa or whatever "prestigious" place for the MFA, and you meet with an agent and the agent realizes you suck mentally and morally like they suck and they get you into Indiana Review and The Missouri Review with your arid prose inanities that don't even mean a single real thing to you, the author of them, and the agent takes a lunch with this editor who buys the same type of shit from this same agent by the same type of shitty person/bad writer/hollowed-out post-human like you, and maybe you check some boxes as to what's "in" at the moment (like Jason Arday), and a deal is made for your creatively barren/navel-gazing novel or story collection which is simply a fictional version of your hermetic, privileged life or something someone told you that you ripped off (the preferred method of Kristen "Cat Person" Roupenian but one used by many of others) and now is almost certain to be have been written by AI and another book as well that you haven't hardly thought out yet beyond a shaky sentence that kind of describes something but also, nah, not at all, and depends on how much someone wants to pretend because of these other things that have nothing to do with your ability or what you've written.

It goes from there.

The agent and the publicists at the publisher butter up the likes of good old Sadie Stein at The New York Times Book Review, maybe someone offers her some fresh meat for her hubby Lorin to throw atop his desk, and the gushy review is assured, and on and on and on.

It's all some form of this. It's never the writing in the non-genre camp. It isn't the quality of the writing in the genre camp, either, but these two parts that pass for being of the same world have their differences though they each have horrible writing in common. I'm simply showing you the breakdown.

On the literary side, it's all about the person and never about the work the person does/has. When I say that, I don't mean that the person is anything but a horrible person.

How can you make such a blanket statement, Fleming? Damn you! Die!

I can confidently say as much because good people aren't put forward by this system. You have to be like the people in charge and running the show--a part of the show--at whatever level they're running it, whether that's the MFA candidate--what a ridiculous thing to even have to type--editor for that semester at The Iowa Review (where the real editor Lynne Nugent is also going to hook up whomever she wants to hook up, as she did with Emily Nemens when Nemens was the editor at The Paris Review, simply because she was the editor at The Paris Review), or a nutjob like Raluca Albu at BOMB, or Katie Raissian, her pledged sister in instability at Grove/Atlantic, or the raving, Pulitizer Prize-winning perineal encrustation that is Mark Warren, David Remnick at The New Yorker, a toady to the degree of a Joel Whitney who'd cause an actual toad to say, "At least I have a spine and am not to be confused with a pox," or Jackson Howard at FSG, or the intern at The Bumblefuck Review.

It's about a class system. It's about the country club and saying who gets to be a member and who doesn't, and then the hierarchies inside. That's why these people do this--for that. Standing, positioning. Getting to have their ass tongued. That's the appeal. The thing I do where I wake up and start my days at one in the morning and work on the same 1600 word story for the 500th time across four years in making it the best thing there has ever been? They could never, ever understand doing that. They could (and do) if they saw that story or know me or about me. Which is part of the problem. That that's what I do and who I am and it is borne out in the work.

But they would never do that themselves or any version thereof as pertains to their job within this world. They aren't here for the work on the page and what it might mean to the world, to readers, as work on the page that lives in human lives. Even the people who want to be awarded and the "stars" don't give a fuck about their actual work. That's very obvious from all the examples we've included in these pages. They don't even care if they write the work. They'd prefer not to. They are playing a different game than any work-related game.

These people look after their own so that they will be looked after. Hence, there are virtually no good people here, and there certainly aren't any good writers, let alone great writers. There aren't really any in the world at present, but even if there were, they wouldn't be welcomed into this incestuous, diseased sandbox where the only reading material on perfunctory offer is the most boring, pretentious, lifeless, pointless--do you even want to call it mediocre; I'd say it's aspirationally mediocre, like J. Robert Lennon and that New Yorker story of his we saw--work there is. Perfect way to put it: aspirationally mediocre. Gilded nothingness.

This is the start of Lucy Ellmann's "MT" from the summer 2026 issue of The Paris Review. She's won a Guardian Fiction Prize, is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature which sounds sufficiently stupid as to be made up but is a real thing, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for her 1000-page single-sentence novel (which doesn't sound painful at all to try and read, but even these people don't read the wank-garbage by these/their people), Ducks, Newburyport. What? You don't want to read a single-sentence 1000-page novel? Well, you just aren't smart enough then. It's your fault, plebian. It's very important literature, don't you know. Anyway, here we go.

Whether wrangling gators, playing golf, or organizing themselves into a hedgehog of pikes, men just love being together, being men together. Like male bottlenose dolphins, they seek each other out. Men together, whitewater rafting. Men together, playing beach volleyball. Men together, tear-gassing protesters. Men together drilling for oil. Men together shooting people in Bible-study groups. Men together itching to finger any control panel going. Men together, like bees to honey, wherever there’s money. Men together, having to watch other men together play a lot of ball games all the time. Men together being buff and ripped. Men together metal-detecting. Men together felling trees. Environmental cowboys together, fly-tipping or incinerating trash meant for recycling. Men together at DuPont and Tefal, still dumping forever chemicals into rivers. They’ll dump them forever! Men together writing about Minoan craftsmen, as if there were no Minoan craftswomen. Minoan men together. Montanan men together. South Dakotan men together. North Dakotan men together. Yorkshiremen together. Irishmen together. Eastern European men together. Israeli men together. Saudi men together. Sudanese men together. Spanish men together. Frenchmen together. Chinese men together. Tongan men together. Salvadoran men together, holding U.S. deportees captive in a mega-jail. Men together drinking, men together smoking, men together schmoozing, men together name-calling, name-dropping, sucking up, fawning, groveling. Men together networking, men together inviting each other over for dinner and cute girls, men together showing off their elbow candy, elbowing each other out, slapping each other’s butts in the shower.

Painful. Sexist, obviously. But so painful to try and read. Anyone love that? What genius, right? I think we know how brilliant that is. Wow. What a huge gift this writer has. You're born with this talent that other people don't have, and then you work your entire life to hone and develop that talent.

Clearly--I mean, just look at that story--that's what Ellmann did. How could anyone suggest otherwise? BEST WRITING IN THE WORLD. That's why it's in The Paris Review, right? (And I get it, believe me: no one on this world, here in 2026, can write well, let alone brilliantly. But this is still being put forward, touted, as though it were masterful, that very few people could ever do something so great.)

More seriously: How do you write something that stupid? How do you expect anyone to take it seriously? How do you write something that stupid and think, "Why, this definitely belongs in one of the best fiction venues in the world, they'll probably love it at The Paris Review"?

"...a hedgehog of pikes..."

Who do you think is going to know what that means? By the way: it's astounding how intellectually deficient the intellectual poseur, as a rule, is, so you can't count on publishing types to have any more of a clue as to a hedgehog of pikes than Sal the vendor at Haymarket who thinks the plural form of every fruit and vegetable takes an apostrophe. And put it right in the first sentence. Fuck those readers, right? Send them packing as soon as possible.

You see how little thought is given to readers and reading by these writers? Because none of this has to do with readers and reading. It doesn't even welcome the prospect of readers and reading. It doesn't want to be read by readers. These people don't want there to be readers. They want praise. But they don't care about why they're getting it, including if it's lies.

Here's how these people work. Someone could never have read their awful story, and they say to this person, "Your story in The Paris Review was amazing," pro forma, and that person, that "writer," has what they want. Doesn't matter how inauthentic that praise is. These people are sick. They're way past broken. That's why they can have AI write their work, win awards for that work, be praised for that work, and they won't think, "I didn't even write it."

I'll tell you something, too, about a first sentence. I could write a book about first sentences and how they need to work. But right now, I'll just say that if you're going to put something in the first sentence that gives the reader a reason to stop, to walk away, to have to sit and puzzle, or wonder if you made a mistake, you need some amazing reason to do this. A reason you thought through and weighed the pros and the cons.

You cannot create a bump, a hurdle, an impasse, in that first sentence before they're into the story, before they're on the story's side, so to speak, and have any expectation that they won't bail. People would get to "...a hedgehog of pikes," already knowing this misandrist claptrap for what is by dint of an immediate reaction of, "Oh, she's doing this type of thing," and their eye not being able to help seeing it's all one giant paragraph, and they're getting the fuck out of Dodge. They aren't reading this shit. Yeah, some system people and cronies will skim it or lie about reading it or whatever as part of their culture of the eternal reach-around, but no one on God's earth is seriously reading this story as something they want to do, and I will bet my very soul on that.

How does nobody else--I know the answers, but I'm still asking rhetorically--say what I say here? You can't tell how stupid that is? Of course you can. Everyone can. Is there not a single honest person out there? You people of this system: You know how much that blows. You know how much it all blows. Name one of the darlings. George Saunders. Joshua Cohen. It all sucks beyond belief. That isn't taste, it isn't subjectivity.

You know what a bigger problem is than the lack of courage? Look, they're not publishing you in The Paris Review or The New Yorker as things presently stand if you're not one of them. If you aren't a rancid person and you have any writing ability--which a Lucy Ellmann does not--then you need things to change if you want your work to be seen even by a tiny group of people, which is all that publishing is. The work in The Paris Review, Granta, Harper's, etc., isn't making it over the walls of the citadel of the publishing system to get to the world (and nothing being written in the world right now could help make a real reader out of people). It's just for these frauds to hobnob over and self-congratulate themselves in regards to and for them to be lied to about by others like them as they are then tasked to do their duty and lie and shill in return.

It's also because so few people are truly serious about this. About writing. About being a writer. It's lip service. That includes if you're Tommy Orange. I mean, how hard do you have to work to create that crap of his? Writing just doesn't mean much to anyone. Nor does it have to mean fuck all to you to be showered with praise and awards in publishing. You simply need to be the right person. Being great at this, taking it seriously, giving your life to it, will result in contempt for you with these people. And those millions of people at large who put the word "writer" in their Instagram bio? Who doesn't now? With that being the last thing on earth they are? You think they're going to care or speak out about all the wretched fiction in the "best" places, that wins the awards, get the hype? They're just pretending. Same as most of the people in the system. They're not even looking. It means nothing to them.

This is everything to me. My work. My art. What it can do in and for this world. So of course I care. With every cell of me. But hardly anyone else is even going to care enough to bother to look, never mind with the intent of honestly seeing what's actually what.

We've talked about exclamation points in this journal, how these bad writers who are also completely incapable of saying anything actually humorous or, as they'd prefer to put it, "droll," use exclamation points as a signal to people like them that something is supposed to be funny without being able to make it funny, as with Joyce Carol Oates, whom system people have been lying about for like half a century now. Ellmann uses the technique with

Men together at DuPont and Tefal, still dumping forever chemicals into rivers. They’ll dump them forever!

And "bees to honey." Wow. Is that new? I haven't encountered that one before. Did you make that up? Impressive.

Men together being buff and ripped.

I think the kids these days call that cringe, grandma.

She sounds like my mother--no offense, mom--when she's caught wind of some "newfangled" pop culture trend or saying from my twelve-year-old nephew and then tries to bring it up on the phone with me, getting all the terms incorrect, the points of emphasis incorrect, and generally sounding like one might have imagined a cave man did after first chancing upon fire or Niles on Frasier when he tries to talk sports.

Anyone want to tell me what this means:

Men together itching to finger any control panel going.

Do you really think one "fingers" a control panel? Does that sound natural to you? And control panel? "Men suck! They always want to work a control panel!"

How can one read that and not laugh?

if someone said that to you out in the world, you'd think they were crazy. "You know men and their control panels!!!"

Now, I get it, if you're Lucy Ellmann. You're trying to be "writerly," but you have no talent for this. And you can't fake talent. You aren't good at writing (and didn't work honestly at becoming better). You never were. Obviously you're never going to be. You were never not awful at it.

That's not just bad. That's comically bad.

The "going" in the control panel part is forced/awkward, too. Even such a simple sentence doesn't work on so many levels. If this is impressive, the only manner in which it is in its degree of ineptitude.

And what is achieved calling the stupid story "MT" rather than "Men Together"? Is that supposed to make us think? Does it pay off?

These people are working with nothing. So then they just do these moves, these smoke-and-mirror manipulations, try and shift things around, make a noun a verb, do her dumb title thing like it's "deep," because that becomes the stand-in, the way they're trying to scam you over--and scam themselves over--that there's anything "creative" happening here.

If you're the right person, you could defecate on the page and spread it around into words and a person like Emily Stokes at The Paris Review will put it forward.

And if you're Lucy Ellmann, or any of these people, you don't do this because you need to, because it's your calling, who you are, you care about readers and reading so much, or you want to impact and better this world.

It's never any of the above reasons why such a person does what they do. It's always other things.

You know who her daddy was? You may have guessed if you don't already know. Richard Ellmann, James Joyce's (beat the tar out of him in a prose off, too) biographer. Her mother was feminist literary critic (another "of course" moment), Mary Ellmann.

Born into it, and then it's simply a matter of the hookups because of the name, the pedigree of the blood.

Always the same, right? Same shitty writing, same explanation, whatever it is, for why that person is gifted/handed what they're gifted/handed, meaning it's never because of the quality of the work or its potential appeal.

What is the point of this garbage? is it some incisive social commentary? Your stupid, misandrist list? What insight are you providing? Where is the story? Shouldn't there be, I don't know, a story with a story? Is the language memorable? Who couldn't do this? What ability does this take? What understanding of human nature?

The point of this garbage is that having it, as the right kind of person, allows one to move about in this system, including up. That is the real function of this writing. Of all their writing. Come back to this paragraph. Keep coming back to it. This is writing that isn't a threat to anyone's ego here. These are fragile, insecure, weak people. Frauds. Living lies. They cannot look at something and be made to think, "I could never do that," and then voluntarily put that work by such a person forward, or say "yes" to it, or hype it, or tell others to do the same. They want that person to be gone. They won't allow that person to pass on their watch if they can help it. We're talking one person. And one person ultimately wouldn't matter anyway, because it takes the entire rotten village.

So you tell me how you're going to get the entire village to act on behalf of someone whose work causes each of them to think, "I could never do that." It's going to be a miracle if you got one of them.

I'm a nice person, so I've tried to not to subject you to any more than was necessary to be representative here--and that's what it's like, right? Being subjected to something you want nothing to do with. The excerpt available on the Paris Review's website goes on for 1200 words and it's all one paragraph. Given her one-sentence 1000-page novel, I think we can safely conclude the whole work is one paragraph. Yeah! Give me more of that!

Okay, I'll give you a bit more from further down the page:

Fishermen together, racing across the Bering Sea in search of the biggest king crab catch.

Somebody's been watching Deadliest Catch.

It's embarrassing.The Paris Review is embarrassing. Emily Stokes pretending this is genius writing is embarrassing. These people are embarrassing. But, they operate under a rock, because they've helped kill off reading, so they can do whatever they please under that rock where no one sees them and without anyone to care.

Who is affected? Besides me, I mean? The actual great writer. These people need this world of theirs to be this way or else they couldn't have/get the stuff they have/get. If it was about actually needing to write work of any quality, they'd stand no chance. So this is how it works instead, and how they want it to work.

You think Emily Stokes gives a fuck if people read? She cares that rich donors write checks to float The Paris Review and that she can live how she lives. She cares that people praise her. She doesn't care that they're all liars lying. These people don't care about such things. They don't care about authenticity. Deserving is an alien concept to them. These are less people and more like black holes. None of their attempts at self-validation work, of course. The collecting of lies and handouts. They know--somewhere in there--that they got nothing. Which is why they hate a person who is truly what they aren't.

Speaking of which...here's the beginning of that story of mine I've been working on for a year now, and hope to have finished soon. It's by a man, obviously, and is told by a woman.

Before I learned that simply because pain isn’t time doesn’t mean it can’t extend indefinitely, I walked across a sweeping field housing two baseball diamonds on the day I once believed I’d always call the most painful of my life.

A twenty-foot-tall fence runs along the back edge of this park where theoretically separate outfields pool into the jointly occupied space of a world beyond that of city street but short of officially formidable blast.

I’ve looked across this field from the sidewalk on all my walks since that day, seeing myself without seeing myself as I was that morning long ago: a woman never to be herself again because of the part of her she had just lost, head pressed into the fence, full weight against it, like there was nothing else keeping her up, crying such that I can still hear her now.

Usually I take a different route back, but the park has two water fountains, and as I was thirsty and lightheaded the other morning and there’s no drink to be had on my alternative course home, I risked seeing myself again and returned as I’d come, drinking my fill from the fountain behind the backstop of the first diamond and continuing to the second at the far end of the field where I did something I never do: took a seat atop the four cement steps that serve as stands where parents watch their kids play their earliest organized sports, but not on this early autumn morning, because it wasn’t the appointed hour for those kinds of games.

Three children within a bat-flip of home plate were playing soccer with a green ball on the third base side facing me. Two girls, twelve-years-old, maybe eleven, one of whom was without shoes, the boy younger. The barefoot girl could have been his sister and probably was.

Off in the right field distance, near the tall fence where once my weight had gone, a couple boys, older than this boy, and a mom and a dad, had a game of two-on-two going, mom and dad on the same team, also with a green ball, which led me to believe that the two groups were also part of a single group—a family and some friends of the kids having a day out.

The shoeless girl was an excellent player. She dribbled around her friend and the boy with ease, but without any hint that she wished to be seen as worthier, and as though she was doing what the other two did save with more favorable results for the moment and an understanding that someone else could have been you, and you them, so what was the big deal?

Let’s just play.

Bit of a different level, huh? Here we have this woman, out on a walk, which has all these implications built into it for her, and she sits and watches a game--two games, really--which will contain stories themselves, and unfold, and come to pair with her own story.

Do you know any stories like that? Does that sound like any other story? Hell fucking no. It's just a story that this guy is doing, which is unlike any other story he's done or will do. A new thing. Always a new thing.

What would a misandrist say about a man writing a story about a woman that is infinitely better than the story trashing men by the woman? Did I do wrong? Does that make me one of the bad men?

The Booker Prize people should be ashamed, too. Is there anyone here who shouldn't be? I'd be willing to know you if that's you. Stand up. Stand for something. I know you don't honestly believe in this shit.

Shame, because I've read that Joyce bio (and even a book about the bio) a couple times.