McGuane's Stubbornness

By Andy — 2026-10-05 — Literary News

And apparently, everyone's finally paying attention.

The literary internet spent this week arguing over what McGuane actually does that makes him matter now—in the Trump years, when most serious writers have gone either apocalyptic or allegorical or just very loud about class. McGuane did something different. He stayed put.

His recent story collection, A Wooded Shore, catches readers doing what they do best: chasing their obsessions with a kind of logic only they understand. Horses. Fishing. The small plots of Montana and the Keys. McGuane writes them with plainspoken wryness, not sneer. No MAGA caricature, no hot take. Just people being stubborn in their own country.

The phrase that stuck this week came from somewhere in the coverage: "Chalk it up to stubbornness. McGuane is as committed to his vision as his characters are to theirs." That's what the essays keep circling back to. Not brilliance—he's got that in spades and always did. But commitment to something that looks, frankly, old. To process. To craft. To the boring, difficult work of watching people carefully and writing them down.

He's underread, the coverage admits. Despite the accolades.

The week also threw everything else at you. Witches in seventeenth-century England. Secret World War II missions. The decline of literacy and democracy (linked, someone insisted). Don Quixote in 2026 read like a permission slip to waste time. Brainrot as philosophy. RFK's publishing deals. The Spine Collector—a scammer who somehow made a dent in publishing through sheer audacity.

There's a running thread underneath all this. A concerned group of writers, including Claire Messud and Katie Kitamura, signed an open letter protesting the firing of Leah Stewart, director of the Sewanee Writers' Conference. Then came news of a 1.5 billion dollar Anthropic settlement. Publishers got rich. Writers did not.

And somewhere in the noise—Becca Rothfeld reporting from something called the Pro-Human Assembly, which turned out to be surprisingly philosophical—someone asked the question that matters: "What is this activity for?"

Not money. Not influence. McGuane seems to have known this for fifty years.

Source: "The short fiction of octogenarian Thomas McGuane, as seen in his most recent collection A Wooded Shore, is quite possibly the most vital literature of the Trump era." — Lit Hub