Overrated: A Guide to Contemporary Literary Fiction You Can Skip

The publishing industry has a quality control problem. These are the most overhyped, overmarketed novels of the past few years — books that critics praised because they were expected to, not because they deserved it. Read at your own risk.

5 books in this list

1. A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara — The worst offender. 720 pages of misery cosplaying as literature. Yanagihara confused volume of suffering with quality of writing.
2. Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus — Peak girlboss fiction. The 1960s setting is window dressing for a thoroughly 2022 sensibility. Historically illiterate and proud of it.
3. Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney — Rooney's third novel and third time writing the same anxious, beautiful people having the same anxious, beautiful problems. The emails are unforgivable.
4. The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt — A Pulitzer winner that would be better as a 400-page novel. Tartt's ambition outpaced her editing. The last third is genuinely tedious.
5. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin — BookTok's favorite literary novel. Which tells you everything you need to know about its actual literary merit.