Don’t Forget About “Ray” Carver

Time is, indeed, a flat circle, and so a week may never pass without someone becoming Literary Twitter’s main character. Last week, it was writer Alex Perez, whose earlier tweets on the Literary Man became a Substack post, a reading list, and the topic of many, many conversations online about Raymond Carver. Let’s dive in.

Young men should be reading Ray Carver, Richard Ford, and Denis Johnson. They should become regulars at a bar that attracts working class dudes and disaffected lawyers. They should listen to Love and Theft by Dylan. They'll be a little cliché at first, but they'll make it.

— Alex Perez (@Perez_Writes) May 9, 2025

When I think of the true American Literary Man, I think not of Carver, but of Ernest Hemingway. Perhaps I saw the author’s depiction in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris at an impressionable age. But both of these greats call to mind a lot of the same qualities: connections to the working class, like serving in the military or working in a trade, and waxing poetic on those experiences. There’s also a certain amount of anger, alcohol, and aggression in there as well.

To Perez, the modern Literary Man is lacking such qualities, or rather, feels conflicted about those qualities in our world of toxic masculinity discourse. “This has resulted in a literary man who is extremely aware of his masculinity, even if he is opposed to the word and doesn’t consider himself traditionally masculine,” he writes on Substack. “The literary man is constantly haunted by the specter of masculinity.”

The image he conjures is one of a neurotic navel-gazer who is angry at the world and himself.  He is on both sides of our political spectrum and shows up to each in distinctive ways. I’ll let you read the finer points on Perez’s substack. But to cure this American Literary Man, Perez assigned some reading: Carver, of course, along with Hemingway, Roth, Mailer, Salinger, Chekov and Bolaño — truly a roster of dudes I’d love to never meet in a dark alley.

Online, the response to Perez’s message has been pretty par for the course. Many people have quoted tweeted his original words and added on their increasingly unhinged suggestions for what the young Literary Man need do. A personal favorite: “Young men should be reading Italo Calvino, Ernst Jünger, and Yukio Mishima. They should become regulars at a martial arts school that attracts strong silent types and drunken masters. They should listen to Untrue by Burial. They’ll be a little weird at first, but they’ll make it.”

Haters disagreed with the premise of Perez’s argument, as well as the advice. There are many tweets responding with a better reading list for the young Literary Man. In particular, a lot of Perez’s critics take umbrage with the writer’s calling Carver by the familiar “Ray.” One tweet called him an “embarrassing hack,” for it.

The message clearly also resonated with many online, and there were many tweets and replies in support of the argument and reading list. Perez, for his part, believes these conversations are leading to a Carver renaissance. He tweeted that the author’s book sales are up 47 percent last week, which notably coincided with Carver’s birthday.