Is Ben Marcus right that experimental writing is dying? He’s “justified in criticizing a publishing industry, and a culture, that often recycles the same ideas and stories while ignoring writers whose work is too unpleasant, or destabilizing, or unsympathetic to be absorbed at a glance. His list of writers who ‘interrogate the assumptions of realism and bend the habitual gestures around new shapes’ is one many readers would embrace, and his contention that The New Yorker doesn’t publish enough challenging fiction is absolutely on the mark. But ultimately he’s pantomiming a battle that, if it ever really existed, ended decades ago.”