Alternative Literature (often stylized as Alt Lit or Alt-Lit) is a term used to describe a particular literature community that publishes and/or draws its motifs from the internet, internet culture, and "a population of people that are connected with one another through their interest in the online publishing world." It includes various forms of prose, poetry, and new media.
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Origins
The term was first used to refer to this community of writers in the summer of 2011, when Tumblr and Twitter accounts named "Alt Lit Gossip" emerged, created by Cory Stephens (@outmouth). The accounts covered writers from presses and publications such as Muumuu House, Pop Serial, and HTMLgiant in a style akin to celebrity gossip sources like TMZ. After a few months the original accounts were deleted; they were revived by Frank Hinton in the fall of 2011, and began to gain popularity.
Shared traits across Alt Lit
Alt Lit is characterized by self-publication, self-promotion, and the maintenance of a presence on social media networks. Josh Soilker has said that Alt Lit is "in blog posts, videos, gchats and Facebook status updates. In PDFs and folded papers..." and that the movement's principal figures were Tao Lin, Noah Cicero and Brandon Scott Gorrell.
Alt Lit writers share Gmail chat logs, image macros, screenshots, and tweets, which are then self-published as poetry books and/or novels.
Writing for the New Yorker, Kenneth Goldsmith characterized Alt Lit writing as "marked by direct speech, expressions of aching desire, and wide-eyed sincerity." He also noted that Alt Lit is "usually written in the Internet vernacular of lowercase letters, inverted punctuation, abundant typos, and bad grammar."
Literary magazines and blogs
Online and print Alt Lit magazines include Illuminati Girl Gang, New Wave Vomit, Pop Serial, Shabby Doll House, Have U Seen My Whale, The Bushwick Review, The Mall, Keep This Bag Away From Children, Everyday Genius, Metazen, Housefire, UP Literature, Parlor, Sadcore Dadwave, Red Lightbulbs, and Unsure if i will allow my beard to grow for much longer.
Alt Lit news and creative blogs include Alt Lit Gossip, I Am Alt Lit, Internet Poetry, HTMLGiant, Beach Sloth, Allthemacchs, Heartcloud, FRXTL, Cutty Spot, and Alt Lit Press.
Presses and books
Presses publishing Alt Lit writing include Muumuu House, Civil Coping Mechanisms, Sorry House, Habitat, Boost House, Lazy Fascist, Nap, Scrambler Books, Publishing Genius, and Plain Wrap Press.
Two anthologies of Alt Lit writing are The Yolo Pages (2014, Boost House) and 40 Likely To Die Before 40: An Introduction to Alt Lit (2014, Civil Coping Mechanisms).
More than 150 books, e-books, and zines of Alt Lit writing, mostly self-published, have been catalogued on the Tumblr blog Alt Lit Library. Mellow Pages Library in Bushwick, Brooklyn, offers a wide selection of Alt Lit titles and hosts Alt Lit readings and book releases.
Authors
Alt Lit authors include Sarah Jean Alexander, Jacob M. Appel, Gabby Bess, Megan Boyle, Melissa Broder, Ben Brooks, Marie Calloway, Ana Carrete, Jordan Castro, Heiko Julien, Richard Chiem, Noah Cicero, Elizabeth Ellen, Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, Roxane Gay, Mira Gonzalez, Tao Lin, Scott McClanahan, Spencer Madsen, Guillaume Morissette, Sam Pink, Steve Roggenbuck, Timothy Willis Sanders, LK Shaw and Janey Smith.
Related concepts and movements
Many writers and critics in and around the Alt Lit community have proposed different labels to be used in conjunction with or in place of "Alt Lit."
New Sincerity
Some critics have linked Alt Lit writers with New Sincerity, to the point of using the terms interchangeably. Notable Alt Lit writers such as Steve Roggenbuck, Spencer Madsen and Tao Lin have also been grouped under the label "New Sincerity", but many Alt Lit writers reject the influence of David Foster Wallace and prominent mainstream exponents of a "New Sincerity" such as Jonathan Franzen.
The New Sincerity connection entails the use of an array of literary techniques intended to create the impression of "sincere" communication, ranging from autobiography, self-revision and a conversational tone to minimal punctuation and sans-serif fonts.
New Modernism
Due to its temporal proximity, Alt Lit is often grouped with post-modernism and many other literary movements, including New Modernism, which most literary critics say began around 1999, alongside the Modernist Studies Association (MSA) and its annual conference. But unlike New Modernism, Alt Lit survives only online, in forums that perpetuate its gossip-like atmosphere. There are no annual conferences, no academic classes on the style, and no published anthologies outside of some self-published groupings. The movement seems to persist only through the addition and publication of new writers who are discovered on the Internet by self-proclaimed Alt Lit writers and publishers.