How identity-obsessed Twitter mobs make writers pull their own books from publication

The novel was set to be his first, and it follows the romance of two young men during the Kosovo War in southeastern Europe in the 1990s. It would have been released March 26.

Then readers and furious onlookers took their rage from Goodreads to Twitter. Retweeting a review on Goodreads, one Twitter user said the book was bad because it highlighted Americans during a tragedy that didn’t take place in America.

The two-star review it references on Goodreads has a similar complaint.

Another charge against the book, from the same review, said its villain should have had a different identity because of the story’s context.

Other tweeters said similar things, and a quick search of the book on Twitter yields more censure than support for the book. It seems like everyone who was involved in the project apologized for their role.

One woman, who copy-edited the book, said she was “plagued with guilt” for “not catching sensitivity issues.”

Jackson’s agent for the book felt bad too, saying she was sorry to everyone hurt by it.

The novel’s publisher, Sourcebooks, on Thursday confirmed that it would withdraw the book from publication.

For his part, Jackson addressed the controversy by apologizing to the whole book community for his “problematic representation” and “historical insensitivities.”

As Jesse Singal at Reason points out, there may be other problems with the book. But we’ll never know because it’s been immolated by this fake problem.

There’s a reason the adage “write what you know” exists. But if we tell people only to write about their own experience, we’ll all stay in the ideological bubbles we’ve created for ourselves. Maybe Jackson didn’t do a great job. But the copious apologies and rapid cancellation (less than a month after the first Goodreads review was published) were not necessary.

Recently the same thing happened to another author, Amelie Zhao. Her first novel, “Blood Heir,” was set to be published in June. Then in January, she released an apology and a retraction. Zhao’s book is set in a fantasy world where “oppression is blind to skin color,” but some readers assumed her imagined world became a racist commentary on ours.

If we’re only allowed to write about tragedy or marginalization when we’ve experienced the same form ourselves, we’ll understand less and less what it may be like to have another’s perspective. The ideas that took down Jackson’s and Zhao’s books only perpetuate insensitivity and feeds communities of Internet outrage.