Max Porter

And I am on a journey because I'm quite

lucky because I have family and a lot of the time I'm busy cooking things and I know that it's harder for writers that aren't distracted because they go and they read this stuff and they fixate on it and I've known very

brilliant, intelligent, successful writers collapse in the sort of sea of pain and paranoia that being reviewed brings.

What I've discovered with this book, because I've learned, you know, what good is going to come of going on Amazon and finding people that hate my work?

Is it interesting?

I mean, I don't want to take no interest, because if you put work out in the world, I think you owe it to the world to be interested in the response.

And I think writers that say, no, it doesn't matter, then I think, well...

your audience of one must be delighted with your work.

You know, congratulations.

But I'm a social person.

I'm interested in it.

I'm also interested in the critical culture.

And particularly in the UK at the moment, I have become worried, more worried about cultural conservatism, both structurally, you know,

an arts culture being slashed of funding by a government that rank the arts very low in their list of priority, you know, way, way under military spending or enrichment of corporate assets, et cetera.

So that worries me because I think art is the lifeblood.

I think that we, you know, for example, the links between social injustice and literacy, you know, it's evident that literature

is a socially mobilizing force for good that it's unarguable the data is there in every aspect of our society to see how good it is to get children to read and to adults to read and for what happens when you share and discuss literature you know right from the literary all the way down to you know instruction manuals it's proven to be good for civilization so um so i'm i'm interested in why then we have this sort of tendency now to be threatened by stuff that's different

to have quite a lazy approach to this question of good or bad or successful or unsuccessful or five stars or no stars i'm worried that our critical faculties are being blunted and that sometimes is to do with practical considerations like how much space a newspaper gives to reviews and and also to us and this this idea that do we are we losing our attention spans and actually are we are none of you know the idea of a good 5 000 long essay 5 000 word long essay about a book that discusses its various

shortcomings but also its strengths and also other books like it and also the intellectual climate or ecosystem into which it engages and compares it to other things and doesn't necessarily come out with a thumbs up or a thumbs down.

Those things are getting rarer and rarer and I think that's a symptom of the fact that it's getting rarer and rarer to have nuanced discussions about things.