Prose off: Story that's the same as every other story by MacArthur winner/official genius Bryan Washington in The New Yorker v. Fleming story

Thursday 11/12/26

Serious box-checking + serious connections + serious mediocrity = success within today's publishing world/subculture.

Which is to say, I've known for a while that Bryan Washington, who was recently awarded a MacArthur genius grant, was going to get said MacArthur genius grant.

Not that Vegas would care, but if you could bet on this shit, it'd be easy to make a fortune about what will happen. Granted, that Washington was going to be gifted the award wasn't quite as obvious that Tommy Orange would. But still you knew.

Actually surprising he doesn't have a Guggenheim yet, but that must mean he hasn't applied or will be getting it in the spring. It'd be harder for him to make an order on Amazon than order up a Guggenheim at this juncture.

It's the same shtick from him every time out from him. Same voice, same sentence structure. Unvarying in its blandness and nothingness. I'd say that's the hallmark: it all adds up to nothing. There's no need for it to exist. It does nothing for anyone. Adds no value to any person/reader's life.

That ain't what any of this is for; it's so that the people of the system can be the people of the system.

Naturally, Sigrid Rausing slapped Washington's fiction into Granta. Want to read the first sentence of a story of his there? Okay, here you go:

Most guys start pairing off around one, but TJ just sits there sipping his water.

I bet you think I messed up. Nope. That is word for word the first sentence. Pairing off around one what?

Eh, fuck it, it doesn't matter, does it?

Making sense, having anything of quality...that's not the point of any of this. The point of having something for these people is just so you technically have something that can be used. The biggest thing--the only thing--is who you are to these other people of the system. What you represent to them. And what you allow them to think about themselves. (Maybe add a big star next to that second point.)

Has nothing to do with the quality of the writing. You can put anything in these places, just so long as there's something with a space for a name at the top, because it's that name that matters, not anything beneath it. The prose is just this placeholder that allows the owner of the name to peacock and those who "made" that person to peacock about what they think this says about them.

How bad is that first sentence of the Granta story, though? Kind of funny how inept it is, isn't it? To you, maybe. These are the people who determine what is afforded a chance, who gets backed. So also not very funny to me, as the person these people hate because it is impossible for anyone to be less like them.

They are fake in what they are, and I am as real as it comes in what I am. That will make you the enemy of their state. There's nothing worse you can do. They'll shelter plagiarist, racists, sexists, rapists. That's fine, so long as not enough people find out and start making noise and then something has to be done lest one's reputation get sullied, as with David Remnick and how he handled Jeffrey Toobin.

Sacks of shit, both, but Remnick only cared about Toobin being a sack of shit when that threatened to make Remnick look like the sack of shit he is. Obviously. There it is. Not very debatable, is it?

You might say, "Oh, no, Colin, I fear for you, taking on a mighty official genius, but I shan't avert my eyes," to which I say, thanks, but I think I'll be okay. I've waded into these official genius waters before, with Junot Diaz, George Saunders, and Yiyun Li.

Here we go. This is from Bryan Washington's "Gatekeeping" in the July 12, 2026 issue of The New Yorker.

That night, the chubby Taiwanese flight attendant—JT—finally comes on my belly, and I do, too. Then I roll onto my side. We’re silent except for the television’s drone, and then he chuckles, exhaling. Some women in the hotel room next door are throwing a bachelorette party.

I said it’s cool to finish inside me, JT says.

I don’t know, I say. Feels weird.

Boyfriend-adjacent?

That’s not it.

Suit yourself, JT says, reaching for his glasses.

Both of us tap at our phones. Michael B. Jordan hits a punching bag in front of us, yelling about somebody’s legacy.

It’s because of your face, JT says. That’s why they talk to you that way.

You think so? I ask.

Soft features. Everyone’s always touching you, right?

Right.

Fat-people problems. Happens to me, too.

It’s JT’s second night in the hotel. Some kind of flight delay. Which makes this our first back-to-back in months. We’ve been doing whatever this is for about two years now. The coffee table’s covered with mostly unfinished takeout noodles, because JT ate only a few bites before deeming them inedible.

Now he reaches for his vape and takes a pull. When he offers it to me, I inhale a slower one.

Once, JT says, this pilot spent our entire shift talking shit. Just punching down. I couldn’t do anything right. When the other attendants tried intervening, that didn’t help at all. But after we landed I caught him waiting for me on the bridge.

To finish you off, I say.

Right? You’d think. He had this look on his face, like he was so fucking embarrassed. Then he puts his hand on my side and asks if I want to get dinner.

JT sets a palm on my belly. Our cum’s still on it. When I make a face, he rolls his eyes, wiping some of the mess on his stomach, too.

So, I say, what happened?

What do you think? JT says. I told him to go fuck himself.

As writing, this is on the level of "Great, thanks, we'll phone you if we're interested," with the phone call never to come, of course, but here in this world, and the publishing la-de-da part of it, where nothing is real, we got us a genius!

Sure you do. Totally believable. If ever there was a genius it's someone who could write the likes of that, because fuck knows a non-genius couldn't.

Did a prose off with something from "Dead Thomas" and the so-called finest prose ever written in the English language with the close of James Joyce's "The Dead," so I think maybe I'll be okay here even with newly minted official genius like Bryan Washington despite him being someone who writes so much better than I do as evidenced by these awards and his fiction appearing in The New Yorker, etc. I mean, that's the official stance, right, comrade?

Thomas looked mostly similar to us—apart from the clothes that were pebbly as if they’d been discovered in a cave after someone had gone missing—and you couldn’t totally see through him, but he wavered. Shimmered. Like when you’re in the car and the road is flat and the sun all but boils the landscape in front of you and the asphalt could be a snake’s back after it’s gotten wet from the garden hose while it tried to stay hidden under a bush by your feet.

We’d often pull our chairs over to Thomas’s desk before class, mostly us girls, sitting in a half-circle. You wanted to be near him and he wasn’t likely coming to you. Thomas wasn’t a do-the-rounds kind of guy.  

“What is this,” Thomas might say, “people crowding around the radio for one of Franklin Roosevelt’s Fireside Chats?”

None of us knew what he meant until we got to the 1940s in history, but that’s when Thomas was from.

We learned that he didn’t have a place he lived outside of school, because why would you when you’re dead?

I asked on behalf of everyone how he had kicked off—trying to keep it casual as my mom advised with pretty much everyone so Thomas wouldn’t get depressed—and he wasn’t positive but thought he’d been working on a car—which impressed all of us, including the cool boys—and was under it when someone got nefarious—Thomas’s word—with the jack.

He had an alcoholic stepmom who wanted to be disencumbered (another Thomas word) of him because she had designs on traveling, and he had a strong suspicion she was the culprit, the vile…well, I won’t say that one.  

You couldn’t help but have a lot of respect for Thomas. Working on cars and moving through the space-time continuum. This was someone able to shake off his skull getting crushed and then being alone in a different world and having the fortitude to make the best of the situation. And he was a top student.

People in town talked about adopting him and there was excited chatter behind the door of the yearbook committee meeting room that he could contend for the title of “boy most likely to succeed,” but he wasn’t able to leave the school, which made his work ethic all the more impressive given that Thomas wouldn’t be making college plans.

“Is this building like, force field-y, so it locks you in?” Rachel asked, and he said, sure, something like that. Then again, Thomas was such a whiz with the books that it may have simply been a comfortable environment for him and that’s how he ended up there, allowing that the universe reads heart waves. You tend to like the places where you do well and can keep your head down, but not so that you walk into walls.

What do you want me to add? Anyone who looks knows. Anyone involved knows that every word of this entry is true. On some level, no matter how great their rage and concentrated attempts at denial. You ask anyone which of these writers is much better than the other--and remember, what you saw above from this guy is all this guy does/can do--and their life depends on getting it right, no one is saying, "It's Bryan Washington for me!"

But that's irrelevant here.