Judith Shulevitz
Writers like Salley Rooney and Arundhati Roy who drum up industry-wide boycotts of other writers betray a fundamental failure to understand what writers do for a living and need in order to survive: "The impulse to form a mob is surely antithetical to the impulse to record your thoughts in text in private and to have your unique voice broadly heard," writes Lionel Shriver. "It is not in the interest of any writer for publishers, agents, and festivals to be the preserve of a narrow ideological position on any issue. If you actually are an independent thinker, which we might imagine would be a criterion for your job, you are bound to fall out with the orthodoxy at such institutions at some point down the line." https://www.thefp.com/p/sally-rooneys-literary-mob-groupthink-israel-hebrew-translations-boycott?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email