## Metadata - Author: [[Ryan Chapman]] - Full Title: Thomas McGuane is Writing the Most Vital Literature of the Trump Era - Category: #articles - URL: https://lithub.com/thomas-mcguane-is-writing-the-most-vital-literature-of-the-trump-era/ - Saved: 2026-10-04 ## Highlights > After a decade of Donald Trump’s chaos and cruelty, we might ask how literary fiction is responding. Readers, for their part, flocked to journalistic and historical explainers in Trump 1.0, then classics during the pandemic, followed by escapist genre fare and comfort reads in Trump’s second term. Writers attempting to capture the new now have met the Diet Coked-out American berserk in kind, as with the Rabelaisian excess of Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection and Mark Doten’s Trump Sky Alpha. Other novelists have turned to acidic, class-conscious portraits of the underemployed—see Andrew Martin and Halle Butler. A third group embraced allegory, turning to history (Zadie Smith’s The Fraud) and the supernatural (George Saunders’s Vigil). ^h27564658 > McGuane turned to short fiction relatively late in his career, and, like Donald Antrim, seemed preternaturally suited to it. Or perhaps he just loves a challenge. He’s said writing a story is “like trying to start a fire in the rain.” Upon the publication of his career-spanning Cloudbursts, the New York Times called him “a master of the short story.” ^h27564659