I am a forty-year-old woman who’s based in San Francisco. I write Woman of Letters, which is a blog that’s about literature. It publishes twice a week. On Tuesdays I try and publish a critical piece that’s about something I’ve read recently, while on Thursdays I publish lighter pieces—tales, reminiscences, or interviews.

The newsletter is marked mostly by what I don’t do. I don’t write about pop culture, films, music or TV—the focus is solely on the written word. I also don’t advocate political stances or venture into polemic. The name speaks of itself: I’m not a freelance intellectual, with a mandate to comment on the world at large—I’m a woman of letters, whose remit is literature and the written word.

In my critical writing, I can only write about whatever I’m reading at the moment. As a result, the nonfiction side of the newsletter tends to have sudden shifts in direction. For three months in 2023, I wrote mostly about the Icelandic sagas. Then in 2024, I wrote about the Mahabharata.1 In 2025, I wrote first about 19th-century American literature, and then about 20th-century American magazine culture. The latter culminated in an epic, fifteen thousand word post where I broke down the origin of the ‘New Yorker story’ and its apotheosis in the work of John Cheever.2

Now, in 2026, I seem to be writing about these contemporary intellectual journals. So far I’ve done pieces about four of these journals, and I’ll see how long my interest in the subject continues. I’ve also been reading a lot of Thomas Bernhard and W.G. Sebald and their various English-language imitators, and I’m pondering how I want to write about these authors.

The most distinctive part of this newsletter is my ‘tales’. This is a style of fiction, inspired by the Icelandic sagas, marked by plain language, an omniscient perspective, and a minimum of visual detail: these tales harken back to the earliest forms of prose language, which drew their inspiration from histories, biographies, fables, fairy tales, and jokes. One of my longest tales, “Money Matters”, was reviewed last year by The New Yorker and as a result of that attention I was able to sell a collection of tales dealing with money in contemporary San Francisco (I wrote here about the path to selling that book). That collection will likely come out in fall of 2027.

The broader Litstack community

I started my career as a fiction writer, with fairly traditional aspirations. I wanted to publish novels that you could purchase in bookstores. While pursuing that goal, I maintained an author blog, under various names, that was basically a journal, a chronicle of whatever I was reading.

Between 2016 and 2024, I published four novels with well-respected publishers. But then I had a crisis of confidence and decided that something about my approach wasn’t working. I wasn’t connecting with readers the way I hoped to. So I decided that from henceforward, I’d put my major creative energy into writing my blog.

This was immensely freeing, and it opened many new directions. Both fiction and nonfiction sides of my blog began to flourish. On the fiction side, I developed the tale form. And on the nonfiction side, I learned how to structure my pieces in a way that was engaging and built to a satisfying climax.

As I put more effort into this newsletter, I encountered a lot of other writers who were also doing exciting things with their blogs. In many cases, they were writers who had fewer publication credits than me—sometimes they had none at all. But we were all exploring this form—literary blogging—together, and I learned a lot from them. Collectively, I think of these writers as ‘LitStack’—the group of writers who seem to take online writing really seriously and who are working to develop their newsletter-game to the highest level.

Because I have a larger platform than most of these writers, I think it’s nice to periodically call out whoever’s caught my attention recently, and I like to think that Woman of Letters serves a valuable function as an entrypoint, for many readers, into this broader online community.

On the fiction side, the most interesting new voice on Litstack is , a pseudonymous narrator who claims to be a 26-year-old Stanford grad, and who writes portraits of the striver class. The stories are definitely fictional, but they look and feel like personal essays about people the narrator used to care for. The main selling point is overlocked’s voice, which superbly mixes kindness and condescension. She mercilessly dissects her subjects’ foibles, but she also has a certain respect for their ambition and determination.

Her most successful story is “I saw the best mind of my generation destroyed by a private school boy”.

Seeing James was my first brush with an emotion I was going to feel repeatedly throughout my life — a light indignation upon discovering an inefficiency, or a bureaucratic annoyance when one feels that a friend has been wasted on someone. I feel like a neoliberal writing this, or Jia Baoyu. But my law school friends and I agree that the best exam questions have a glimmer and wink in them; if that’s the case, James could not see that glimmer and wink in Alice. These days, I am suspicious of any notion of “intelligence” and find it a worthless thing to discuss, given how it has been used to naturalise inequalities in status or distribution. But you do have to see a person to understand what you have, and I do not think James saw what he had in Alice.

Lillian Selonick is another fiction writer who’s been doing exciting things on the platform. She has a personal blog, but her best work usually goes on , a journal run by Cairo Smith. The recent piece of hers that I’ve enjoyed most was a personal essay, about an online friend who Lillian knew intensely and then lost: “To a Ghost of Web 1.0”

When you sent me the novel excerpt in 2017 you said you had finally gotten sober. Thirty days. I should’ve known better than to attempt to provide literary criticism to you in that state.

Lately, many of the nonfiction writers on Litstack have been exploring various techniques for selling other folks on their personal obsessions (a process I call ‘effort-posting’.)

Some of the best critics on Substack take their inspiration from me, which is really gratifying, and I also take a lot of inspiration from them. Three excellent critical pieces I’ve read in the last week, all by writers with fairly low follower-counts (Sam has only 86 subscribers!)

• Michael Morgan wrote about Bill Watterson for Republic of Letters.

• T. Benjamin White wrote about the Animorphs series for his personal substack, The Composted review.

• Sam T. Oakes described a previously-uncharacterized genre, Programmer Science Fiction

Other superb critical writing on Substack:

• Henry Begler on J.D. Salinger.

• Alexander Sorondo on the letters of John Updike.

• Ross Barkan on Pet Sounds.

Discourse-posting

This corner of the literary internet, LitStack, has its own little trends and obsessions. People like to write reactions (often negative) to popular books (this year it was Lost Lambs and Yesteryear, last year it was Ocean Vuong’s Emperor of Gladness). There’s also a lot of talk about AI, about kids not knowing how to read, about cultural stagnation, and about a perceived lack of white male writers.

When you write about these community touchstones, it’s called discourse-posting. I have mixed feelings on this type of posting. When you’re new to LitStack, it’s almost essential to do a little discourse-posting, just as a way of announcing yourself. It’s also a good way of learning how to disagree with other people. I find that many writers, particularly those who lived through the cancel culture period (2016-2024) are so terrified of being canceled that they’re afraid to really speak their mind—discourse posting teaches you to have courage and throw something on the internet even if you know you’ll potentially take heat.

On the other hand, discourse-posting can result in cheap growth. It’s the easiest way to get attention online, and at some point it surely occurs to most writers that if I just did discourse-posting, then my audience would grow and grow and grow.

However, no point in having an audience unless they’re an audience for things that you care about, so what you need is a form of discourse posting that still conveys your unique sensibility and that only draws readers who are fundamentally onboard with your worldview. Personally, I think the best discourse-poster on the literary internet is . She has such a talent for writing posts that are reasonable and heart-felt, but ever-so-mildly irate. I really admire her.

I have my own ways of discourse-posting—often I use my tales to comment on various discourses, as I did with a recent post on whether there will ever be AI-assisted literary fiction. And, of course, I try not to ever write a discourse post that I don’t stand behind—the point isn’t just to say something provocative, it’s to say something that’s provocative and true.

The stereotype about discourse is that it’s angry and vapid, but I don’t think it has to be. I think it can actually be playful and fun. Lately I’ve enjoyed seeing a rash of discourse posts that respond to me.

• Here is Masha Z on the future of fanfiction (doing a pitch-perfect imitation of my own tale style!)

• Grace Byron defending the little magazine

• Clare Frances giving her take on Yesteryear

Subscriber chats, meetups, comments, and paid posts

Woman of Letters is also a community. Every Friday there’s a subscriber chat, where people discuss what they’re reading and answer some question that’s currently on my mind. There’s also an active community of commenters: I read all the comments, and I try to respond whenever I have something to say.

I had two great events recently in SF and NYC, and I am thinking of having a regular SF Bay Area meetup (I might rotate the location between SF and Berkeley). More details on that soon.

And there are special posts for paid subscribers. Most of my readers are not writers and don’t necessarily connect to contact that’s about the writing life, so I tend to reserve those for paid posts.

More about me

I’ve had many lives as a writer, so many that I’ve given up on summarizing them all. I began as a sci-fi writer, selling my first stories to sci-fi journals in 2010. Then, between 2016 and 2024, I published three contemporary YA novels. I also released my debut literary novel in 2024. And somewhere along the way I started writing essays on literary topics. After 2024, I shifted focus and began writing mainly for this blog.

The tremendous growth in my subscriber count (from 600 in May 2024 to 13,300 in June 2026) has, oddly enough, rejuvenated my career, leading directly to the sale of my story collection and the highest advances I’ve ever gotten, but I still think of Woman of Letters as my main work. This blog is the engine, and my books are the train-cars. Without the blog, my books would go nowhere.

The process of working on this newsletter has been so magical and paradigm-altering for me. For my entire writing life, since I was a teenager, I aspired to be recognized as a great talent. But when I began putting serious effort into this newsletter, I realized that my own attention is actually the most valuable thing I possess. I didn’t necessarily need to have insights of my own or do something flashy that would attract attention to itself, I just needed to pay attention and then write about whatever I noticed.

Of course I also have this book that’s recently come out: What’s So Great About The Great Books? has been in the world for under a month! Just last week, Cathy Young at the Bulwark gave it a very positive review, saying:

Dynamic and thought-provoking. . . . I’d like to believe that this quirky, smart, passionate, occasionally frustrating but far more often charming volume does offer hope: that, even in the age of smartphone screens, Instagram, and TikTok, there is still room for the Great Books and for the ways in which they can help us think more deeply about what it means to be a human being and a citizen.

Many of my recent subscribers are probably here, in one way or another, because of the release of this book, which contains everything I wanted to say about reading classic literature. If you haven’t taken a look yet, you can order a copy on Amazon or on Bookshop or from your local bookstore.

As a result, he spent a lot of time on trans message-boards, where people tried to game out how they’d look if they actually transitioned. If he did transition, he wanted to be pretty. He wanted to pass. He did not want to be stuck in some liminal state, where he was always ‘clocky’. He wanted to be a girl who was so feminine that nobody even suspected she was trans.

And John really suspected that wouldn’t happen for him, because he was already tall and just seemed very masculine. Some people had distinctively masculine facial features that, he knew, definitely prevented people from passing—those could be altered with surgery, maybe (but how to afford it?). Then there were also features that were ‘clocky’, like broad shoulders and narrow hips. And if you had these ‘clocky’ features then you always just seemed vaguely mannish, you couldn’t really be feminine. You might pass some of the time, but if people found out, they’d say, “Oh, that makes sense, because of her hands or her shoulders” or whatever they’d clocked.

He hated himself and his body so deeply. His room had a mirror on the closet door, and he spent hours looking at it, taking pictures. Then he would run them through various image programs and try to transform them, so he could picture himself as a girl.

And John’s family would not be supportive. They were Catholic, religious. And he just knew they wouldn’t be into this idea. Like, a guy at school was trans, which was a problem because it was a Catholic school, and the diocese said you couldn’t use pronouns. And John’s parents had wondered why this guy, at school, couldn’t wait until eighteen and do it all in college. And John had argued with his parents, saying where is safe to do transition if not in high school? And John’s mom had gotten kinda prissy, with pursed lips, saying, “It’s all new to me, sorry.”

And they wouldn’t be supportive. It wouldn’t be like some kids, where the parents sign up the kid at the clinic. It wouldn’t be like that with John. The whole idea just exhausted him, and it made him want to kill himself.

If he knew that in the end, he would pass and could have a happy, normal existence, then he would fight things out and do it. But if he was just going to be trapped in some in-between state, where he couldn’t get a job or safely use the bathroom, and…and he just didn’t have a good life, then fuck that.

When he asked these questions on some message-boards, he really got attacked. The girls would be like, “You have to want it. People give up their homes, their families—you have to want it. If you’re worried about your safe, middle-class life, then yeah, that is something that you risk when you transition.”

It would be such a big thing to transition. Like, if he told his friends he was trans—they wouldn’t see him in the same way anymore. Although…he doesn’t exactly know how they see him now. He’s nerdy. He likes to play video games. He doesn’t actually have that many close friends—not the way he’d like. He eats lunch with some people at school, but he never sees them on the weekends. He’s shy about messaging people. Like, you just send someone a message? Out of the blue? About what? He felt so invisible and unloved and just not exceptional at all really.

And then he imagined himself as a beautiful girl who actually had value, because of her looks. He knew lots of guys had fetishes for trans women—he’d sleep with someone who had a fetish, whatever. He’d do whatever someone wanted, so long as they wanted him. The idea of someone valuing his existence just seemed so bizarre, so out of his realm of experience, that it was reason enough to transition.

Maybe he wasn’t trans after all? Like maybe he was just a piece of shit who wanted to be special. It was definitely an idea he had considered. He spent so much time in school looking at these girls who were ethereal and beautiful, they glowed with an inner light, and they often had friends and always had somewhere to be. Even the worst girl’s life seemed better than his own.

But of course he didn’t imagine being the worst girl. He didn’t imagine being ugly, whatever that meant to him. And he hated that. Even in his own mind, he had internalized this voice that called him out for his own thoughts, for…for wanting to be pretty. For feeling like maybe it would be bad to be ugly and to be clocky.

He just felt this toxic feeling of hatred, mostly towards himself, but also in part for the other trans girls on these forums. Fuck these bitches. Like, seriously, whenever he wrote asking for help and wondering whether he might ever pass, he’d just be written off as some doomer. There was a subculture of trans people on 4chan who were really depressive about the idea of transition—they claimed it almost never worked out—and every girl on every other trans forum was so contemptuous of this ‘4tranner’ or ‘doomer’ subculture that it was impossible honestly express any doubts without getting dogpiled.

Fuck all of these bitches. God, he hated them. He was a human being. He just wanted to be loved and…and to be reassured that it would be okay. And whenever he managed to get up the courage to write something, then somehow it didn’t meet some obscure code for how you were supposed to write about being trans, and…and he just got punished, dismissed as a bad person, a problem, who needed to be beaten until he was afraid to express the bad thoughts anymore.

But he knew one thing. If he ever did transition, he would tell it like it was. He wouldn’t just pretend like everything was easy and you never had doubts and…and…he just wouldn’t be such a horrible bitch to young trans people. That’s what he knew! If he transitioned, he’d be different.

Years later, in college, he went to an informed-consent clinic: a gender clinic that’ll give you estrogen even if you’re not female-presenting and don’t have a psychologist’s referral. The moment he started taking estrogen, he realized yes I am definitely trans (a common occurrence for trans people, where the moment they take hormones, there is a sense of rightness that obviates all doubts).

He changed his name and his pronouns.

And what she realized (I’ll start using different pronouns for her now) was that transitioning didn’t alter your essential self. She never had the option of being some idealized man who was tough and confident, just like she never had the option of being perky and beautiful or whatever she’d really wanted to be, when she imagined being a girl. You took estrogen and you took new pronouns, but you were still yourself, which was quite deflating.

Oddly enough, even as she was having this realization, she did actually change quite a bit. She got a lot more confident and outgoing. She learned how to text people if she wanted to be friends with them, learned how to work hard in school and get good grades and pursue professional opportunities.

She did not think she passed, but it was hard to tell. There was an intermediate stage of transitioning, when people definitely saw you as a woman-like person and gendered you appropriately, and then you just didn’t know if they perceived you as being trans or not. A lot of people claimed it didn’t matter, because anyway men and women were supposed to be equal—it didn’t even matter if you were a woman, so why should it matter if you were a trans woman? That’s why, in practice, her transness didn’t come up that often.

But that didn’t mean she passed. She thought most people could probably tell she was trans.

It was really hard to date. It was so hard. God, romantic rejection was a horrible experience. To be rejected from a job or from school, it was nothing compared to your whole person being rejected. And romantic rejection was so ritualized, like you just had to subject yourself to it again and again. And she’d never really dated in high school or in college, so she had no foundation to compare, no baseline experience of anyone liking her.

She would never treat anyone the way she got treated. Some of it was definitely because she was trans—she had the very common experience of men matching with her based on her pictures, and then immediately unmatching when they took a closer look at her profile and saw that she was trans.

But when she complained to cisgendered friends about this, they said it was hard for everyone. Nobody found dating to be easy. Whatever. The point was, she told herself that she was better than the men (and some women) who toyed with her feelings. That she would never treat another person the way she was treated.

When she was around thirty, she finally found someone off a dating app. And with this person, Navin, it was immediately different, because this person was a good, genuine person.

That’s all it took. If you just seemed like a human being, you were already so different from everyone else. And that human-ness was the quality that Simone (her new name) had always possessed. And a lot of people had hated her precisely because of her humanity. They wouldn’t say it, but they were repulsed by her aliveness, her authenticity. They had wanted something different instead, something plastic and manicured.

Simone had gone through life wondering, “Are people really so horrible?” Like when she saw who people dated, and…then how they treated the people they dated, it was really very revealing. Most of her single friends would never date a trans person, for instance—some of them even said it. So fuck them. If they were lonely, they deserved it (but of course she couldn’t say that, because they were just expressing a valid preference).

Anyway, with Navin she felt proper love feelings. Just like in the books! What a relief to experience it after all these years. To know it was possible for her. Like, it’s so simple, you just meet the best person in the world. And, because they are the best, they recognize that you too are the best! They recognize the excellence in you that you recognize in them.

And other people, who didn’t recognize that excellence, well yes it was a matter of personal preference on their part, but fundamentally those people were no good. They were not as good as the person you actually met--the best person you’ve ever met in your whole life, like meeting a celebrity, like if you met Ryan Gosling, imagine you met someone like that who is just really exceptional. And now imagine that exceptional person recognizes something in you, and they say, “You’re the same as me.” In fact, they’re even surprised that you want them, because to them you’re the Ryan Gosling!

And that’s what love was like.

She was relieved she’d gotten bottom surgery. She’d certainly considered not doing it, because she was worried about the risks. But it was nice to take her penis off the table. Because, you know…Navin was kind of a normal guy. Yes, he was extremely accomplished at his job (in the tech field, where Simone worked too), but really he wasn’t that different from her. He probably had some fantasies, just like she did. After all, when she, Simone, was masturbating, she certainly thought about really weird scenarios. She didn’t want to do those scenarios with Navin, because she was tired of scenarios, tired of any relationship that wasn’t normal.

Still…she loved him, and she would’ve been happy to fulfill his fantasies if he wanted (within reason)! But if she’d had a penis then certain potential fantasies that he might’ve had (like being penetrated by her) would’ve been difficult for her not just physiologically, but psychologically. So it was best to take that off the table.

Simone didn’t mind if he fetishized trans women (though there was no evidence he did), but she was glad that they couldn’t do anything in bed that would interrupt her (perhaps illusory) belief that to Navin she was just a woman.

Because, honestly, it made no sense that he was with her. She had interrogated him a few times about whether her gender was something he thought about, and he claimed it was a total non-issue! He was bisexual, and when they’d matched, he thought her transness was interesting, but not a factor in whether they dated.

This was insane to her, because she thought that Navin was so attractive and could certainly be with a cute cisgendered woman if he’d wanted to.

“No,” he said. “I am definitely very rejectable.”

“I just feel like…many cisgendered women would want to be with you. You know…objectively. Like someone you work with must have a crush on you…”

“You don’t think someone you work with has a crush on you?” he said.

“No,” she said.

“Well then we’re the same,” he said. “Like, it’s the same situation. I was single too. I had bad luck too.”

“But you’re so much better than me.”

Anyway, I, as the author, could try and spin out this scenario endlessly, describing each of these people in more detail, to see whether or not it was true that Navin really didn’t have any other options. I’m tempted to do this, because I (as the author) feel like it is extremely unusual for a cisgendered man in his thirties to be in a monogamous relationship with a trans woman. Personally, I feel like there must be something else going on! Not to mention, as a sidenote, if you’re a cis man who is willing to be monogamously partnered to a trans woman, then you could be with a woman who is so hot! Like, easily a ten out of ten! If you’re a cis guy who’s willing to bring a trans girl home to your parents, you could be with the hottest woman anyone has ever seen. And Simone really wasn’t hot like that, so why was Navin with her, when he could probably do better.

Simone was paranoid that Navin wouldn’t want to be exclusive. She was very against open relationships. She was trans, she had obviously gone on dates with a few men who were doing some open thing. But she hated it. Not for her. She was clear about that with Navin, and he felt the same! He was like, “Dating is horrible. Why would I want to keep being on some dating app, sending messages, getting rejected, when I already have a girlfriend? No. Monogamy is the best.”

Anyway, having a boyfriend honestly made Simone very exceptional. It was so chic, having a boyfriend, Other trans people suddenly loved her. She worked in tech, so there were a fair number of trans people at her office. They mostly hadn’t wanted to know her before. Now they felt so insecure, because she had a boyfriend, and they probably told each other than Navin was trans himself and would transition eventually and that’s why he was with her, just to imagine what it would be like.

Simone honestly would have no problem if he transitioned himself—she’d love him no matter what he looked like—but she would hate if he wanted to open their relationship later.

“I would hate that,” Simone said. “Like…I don’t know. I would hate it. That would feel so horrible, oh my god. And I’d probably let you talk me into it, just to avoid losing you.”

“N—no,” he said.

“Like, let’s imagine we are married,” Simone said. “And…you suddenly realize a lot of other women would sleep with you. Honestly, lots of men would sleep with me too. But I don’t want that.”

“Lots of men would sleep with you?” Navin said.

“So many!”

“And…you would do that?” he said. “When you were single?”

“Like, if they were good,” Simone said. “If they were nice. Which some of them were. It was nice to feel wanted. But I don’t know…it was usually a bad experience, in the end. You didn’t have anyone like that in your life? A hookup?”

“No…” Navin said. “Like…I don’t know actually. I don’t think so.”

“It’s just not a good experience when you’re sleeping with someone, and you have a lot of fun, and they’re single, and they’re looking for someone to be with, but for some reason it’s not you. Eventually, you’re like, ‘Why not me? What is the actual reason?’”

“That sounds horrible,” Navin said.

“And these people tell you some stupid, self-serving story about just not feeling a spark. Or whatever. And I used to believe in that story, because I had never felt what you and I have. But now I realize that I could’ve easily felt it for some of those guys. I could’ve felt it.”

“You think?”

“If they had loved me. If they had chosen me, then sure. Because then they would’ve been exceptional, and I would have recognized that. Like there was something missing in those guys, to make them want to use someone else like that. They had really been cheapened and coarsened somehow. It’s such common behavior. It’s so common. It’s just wrong. I can’t explain how it’s wrong, but it is so wrong. I don’t know…it’s such a comforting illusion, to let them tell you that the chemistry isn’t quite right. But with you and me, we always had it, right?”

“Yes, I knew you were different immediately.”

“Because I’m great. And you’re looking for someone great. That’s the problem, these guys didn’t want a great person—they wanted someone pretty.

“You’re pretty.”

“No…it was about looks. And me being trans didn’t help. But that’s all it was. When they eventually found someone, it was just someone prettier than me. They thought they could do better than me.”

“But we’ve all…huh I don’t know. We’ve all felt like…like the match wasn’t right somehow with someone we were dating?”

“Sure,” Simone said. “Maybe. In my mind, I really give everyone a chance. But with you I really wanted it to work. There was something extra.”

“A spark?” He said.

“Maybe.”

This whole conversation was post-coital, they’d just had sex for the second time that night, and now it was like 1 AM on a Sunday morning.

Being with Navin just felt really intoxicating, like you were drunk or on mushrooms. It was whatever profound experience you think you’re attempting when you take substances, that’s what being with Navin was like. He was really smart and engaged, but it really went beyond that. He was just good.

When she was a kid, she’d read The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged—two books she’d really liked. Those books were about really exceptional people, and, in the worldview of these books, exceptional people were drawn to each other, romantically. But in practice, being ‘drawn to each other’ didn’t seem to involve fidelity and marriage. Like, in The Fountainhead, Gail Wynand rescued Dominique Francon from this terrible marriage to a loathsome mediocrity named Peter Keating.

And, when they were married, Wynand treated her so much better than her first love interest, the architect Howard Roark, ever had! Wynand seemed to need her in a way that Roark really didn’t.

But somehow that was no good, in the worldview of these books. Like his need was bad, and he felt it was wrong to make a claim on her, just because he needed her affection, and eventually she left him for Roark, precisely because Roark didn’t need her.

Simone didn’t feel that way at all. You fell in love, you recognized that the other person was great. Then you got married. And you stayed together forever. That was the dream. Even if you were unhappy, you just stayed. She would never, ever leave him, no matter what. Like it was so hard to find Navin—this was definitely not ever going to happen again. So if she left, it would just be loneliness and isolation.

Anyway, right now at this moment she loved him. It did seem crazy! How could this possibly happen? It just seemed so unlikely. When she was a teenager, thinking about transitioning, she had always wanted, you know…some kind of bourgeois domestic life. Like…marriage. A mortgage. Kids. And with Navin, she could have all those things!

She would definitely have accepted something different. She would’ve dated a painter, somebody who didn’t have a job, but those kinds of guys didn’t want her! She’d been rejected by so many men with no job. They didn’t even give her a chance to like them. They discovered she was trans, and then they unmatched.

Women…weren’t that much better. They just did it differently. But okay, no that wasn’t fair. Women definitely did it differently and treated her better, but still…they didn’t want her. That’s why she was still single.

I know that I, as the author, am supposed to invest her with some superficial qualities to signal her immensely charming and attractive personality. Like…what? I could say she likes The Strokes. Or Kurasawa movies. Or volunteers at a soup kitchen. There’s a bunch of signals that movies use to indicate that someone has hidden depths. But…in truth, what made her lovable was that she was still alert to the world.

This alertness was something that all children possess, but which most adults have lost. That alertness by itself would be exceptional, but what made her unique was that she also saw the darkness in the world, and still didn’t turn away, lose herself in comfortable illusions. She was almost alone amongst human beings in that she was both clear-eyed and open-hearted.

Navin wasn’t quite like her. He hadn’t gone through the crucible, but he was a simple person who was very intellectually oriented, very driven by his work. Most of his soul existed inside these very complex technical problems (involving AI) that he dealt with every day, and this intellectual outlook made him a bit inhuman, but, because the essence of humanity is so monstrous, his inhuman quality actually made him softer and more reasonable than most men.

The problem was that Simone had been a man, so she understood what men were like.

“Navin,” she said. “There will come a time when you are fifty years old. And there’ll be someone who’s…thirty-five. And she is really very hot. Maybe she’s Indian” (Navin was Indian). “And…I don’t know. You’ll wonder. Like…if you leave me, it can happen again for you. But for me, it can’t happen again.”

“What’re are you talking about?” he said. “What is this talk? You’re bisexual--some hot they/them on your team. They just idolize you--You’re fifty, they’re thirty-two. You’re an icon to them. Why couldn’t that happen?”

“No…” she said. “No.”

“But why not?”

“It just doesn’t happen though…does it?” she said. “You know when I was a girl, thinking about transitioning, people would be like “There’s a good chance you’ll be sad, bitter, lonely and reviled. And that has to be okay.’”

“Why would that be okay?” he said. “That would be horrible. I don’t understand this online culture.”

“No, no it’s totally a thing,” she said. “Like…it’s a thing. I don’t know, where did you hang out online as a teenager?”

“Uhh…”

“You must’ve encountered some incel stuff about sexual market value, right? Like you’re not thirty years old, working in tech, hearing these ideas for the first time from me!”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I definitely had fantasies that if I made a lot of money, that all these girls would be sorry they’d ever ignored me! But then I did actually start making a fair amount of money, which probably most people in Silicon Valley can tell, but lots of women just didn’t seem to care. I dunno. I’d match with someone who made a lot less than me—like someone doing very entry-level Q&A—and they’d be so dismissive and ignore my messages. Somehow it didn’t matter. Like, I could give someone a pretty good life. You know…you and me could have children. It’s doable. I have looked into it.”

“Paying a surrogate?”

“It’s doable is all I am saying. The world needs children. The point is…I just feel like…I wanted, you know, something different from what most people wanted.”

“But there must’ve been some image in your mind of who you wanted, and it probably didn’t look like me.”

”I have no idea what I thought I wanted,” he said. “But when you and I talked, I just felt like…this is good. I don’t want anything besides this. What else would I want? It would be absurd to want something else.”

“That’s how I felt too,” she said. “And…and I just wonder what I’d tell myself at sixteen. And I guess I’d say, you’ll still be yourself. Which is something people definitely told me, but in a harsh, negative way. They’d say there’s no escaping from your life! But I personally would put it differently. I would say, ‘You’ll still be yourself, and you are good.’”

“That’s wonderful! What a simple message to—“

“But I understand why nobody said that to me as a kid, since it’s not something you can really say to a stranger online.”

“No?”

“Because most people are not good. Many trans people especially are not very good. They are hardened and cruel, and the truth is that their lives will be difficult, whether or not they transition, and they don’t actually deserve good things. But you can’t tell that to people either, because…because it’s not their fault. You know, these forums are full of a lot of people who are in a lot of pain. And in many cases they won’t survive that pain. What’s there to say? That’s the nature of existence. It’s horrible. Life is bad.”

“That is so dark!”

“Yes, I can say that now, because I’m happy,” she said. “Because I have you, and it lets me face the truth without getting upset.”

Although she had overcome her past, it had still left traces upon her. All these misfortunes lingered in her mind, gnawing at her psyche, shaping her worldview. For instance, she was very aware that if at sixteen she had started dressing as a girl, her parents probably would’ve sent her to some all-boys boarding school. Luckily for their relationship, she spared her parents that choice. But even now they still thought…well…they thought that she was disordered. They wished she was different. They weren’t proud of her.

Despite everything, she still believed in God and his love. She believed in Heaven. Surely it had to be real! She didn’t know if other people really believed in it or not. They claimed to believe, but then they didn’t act like they did. Anyway, her strongest belief was that if you killed yourself, then you went to Hell. If you rejected life on Earth, then you didn’t get a good life afterwards, because you had failed.

Simone believed that life on Earth was bad and that it was transient and…and kind of illusory, but it was still important somehow, and there was no real escape. You just endured. But of course that wasn’t something you could tell a sixteen-year-old.

The journal is quite barebones: it has the size and heft of a typical trade paperback; it doesn’t even have a cover-image, each issue’s cover is just a different monochrome color, on matte cardstock, with a table of contents printed directly onto the cover. Inside, there are no images, and the magazine is laid out as if you’re meant to just read straight through, from front to back, which is exactly what I did.

Liberties is a resolutely analog affair. Pieces are available online, but there’s a very strong paywall (you don’t get any free articles per month) so articles are rarely shared by link-aggregation sites and almost never go viral online. As a result, the only way to know what’s in Liberties is to buy a copy. I have no idea how this is supposed to work. Who is this for? Who even hears about Liberties in the first place?

Personally, I loved the journal. I really enjoyed reading it. Turns out the answer to the question “Who is this journal for?” was “Naomi Kanakia”.

In part this was because my politics are essentially the same as the journal’s politics. You know, I often read journals just to stay abreast of what ‘the other side’ thinks, but reading Liberties has taught me that it’s so much more fun to keep up with my own side: it is a pleasure to be pandered to.

Liberties felt like going home

I grew up in Washington, D.C., and I also worked there for a while after college. People who haven’t lived in D.C. cannot understand the strength of the Beltway consensus. In my hometown, “politics” is synonymous with “electoral politics”, and all discussion is bounded by the limits of the mainstream platforms of the Democratic and Republican parties. When I was growing up, there was also a strong technocratic element to the culture in DC—for every issue, there was an expert, and the solution to all problems was to listen to the experts and institute some carefully-crafted policy that would solve the issue with a minimum of trouble.

In D.C., for most issues there is a right answer. Oftentimes, the right answer changes, but at any moment, there is usually a consensus about which policy is the smartest (even if people agree that it’s not politically workable). For instance, during my time in D.C. the consensus was that climate change could only be solved by carbon taxes.

Indeed, when I lived in D.C. there was a huge amount of enthusiasm for market-based solutions (what people nowadays call ‘neoliberalism’): you solved problems by using government policy to align peoples’ incentives, so that negative and positive externalities were priced into the cost of whatever you were talking about (healthcare, gas, education, etc), which then resulted in people investing the socially-optimum amount of money into that good.

I have no idea whether D.C. is still like this, but Liberties definitely feels like a product of the D.C. that I knew and understood. In contrast to The Hedgehog Review, which had an issue about how neoliberalism was bad, there is an entire article in Liberties, by David Greenberg, about how actually neoliberalism was good. It is an excellent piece: a thorough-going defense of neoliberalism as practiced by the Clinton, Obama, and Biden administration—much better and more carefully-written than any of the articles on the topic in The Hedgehog Review, because the Liberties article (“The Nonsense of ‘Neoliberalism’”) pays attention to the specifics of what the two parties actually advocated:

Witting or unwitting, the wrongheaded conflation of neoliberalism with free-market conservatism has continued to flourish. The practice yokes together two groups who are clear ideological enemies. A category that embraces such stark opposites as Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, or Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, can only obfuscate. And, besides, good names already exist for market-friendly economics: free-market conservatism, economic libertarianism, classical liberalism, laissez-faire. But leftists prefer “neoliberal” because it enfolds liberal Democrats in their blunderbuss critique. If to a hammer everything looks like a nail, then to a Marxist every non-Marxist looks like a neoliberal.

I am sure it’s possible to argue with this article, but it was a very strong, well-written, and carefully-argued article, precisely because the author didn’t go wild with polemic—if you want to know to understand how neoliberalism is conceptualized by its practitioners, this is the piece to read.

Flailing in the Trump Era

In my piece last week on The Drift I wrote that liberal journals seem unable to handle the reality of the Trump administration. The people who write for liberal journals are like me, they see the Trump administration as a sharp break with pre-existing norms. And yet those norms, as represented by the Democratic Party, were decisively defeated at the ballot box. This means there is a toothless, flailing quality to the current events coverage in Liberties.

For instance, there was a piece by James P. Rubin about how America could reconstitute its foreign policy under a Democrat. It felt like Rubin was writing from another planet: there is no point in a Democrat creating foreign policy alliances if a Republic administration will just overturn or undo them. The piece was about how Trump had overturned a preexisting foreign policy consensus, but it couldn’t really grapple with the reality of that situation.

In contrast, a journal like The Drift is able to more decisively call out the Trump administration’s lawless and irrational behavior precisely because The Drift doesn’t see that behavior as being much of a break with the Biden Administration. The Drift is used to channeling a certain amount of outrage at the US government, in a way that Liberties really finds itself unable to do.

The best current events coverage in Liberties was a piece on judicial review, by William Baude, which examined the complicated history of this concept and the ways in which the Supreme Court has, in the past, backtracked and seemingly-cooperated with lawless Presidents in order to preserve the idea of judicial review. The piece suggested that the Roberts Court has been strategically deciding in Trump’s favor in order to preserve the concept of judicial review (the idea that the Court is the final arbiter of the law in America).

It is uncertain how the administration would take a significant loss in Court. No amount of “give and take” can necessarily avert a war between the Court and the White House. But it can help to ensure that the war takes place on the Court’s strongest ground, with many members of the administration already well invested in the Court’s power and legitimacy.

This seems like a very charitable reading of the Roberts court, but it’s the kind of reading that Liberties, with its institutional mindset, needs to make, because the alternative is that our system of government has changed in a fundamental way (or that it always functioned in a way very different from how liberals imagined it did).

I do wish this journal would think a bit harder about what it would mean if future Presidents have the same powers that Trump has now. What would that look like, functionally? To what extent could a Democrat use those powers? And what kinds of policies can a federal administration enact if they know those policies will be overturned immediately by the next hostile administration?

Not all serious

But the political coverage was only a small part of the journal.

There was also a strong vein of good-natured humor running through Liberties. There were a number of pieces that the authors had obviously written just for fun, because they wanted to spool out an argument. I really liked Jackson Arn’s ‘Grids, Glass, and More Glass’ about how museums are endlessly rebuilding and expanding themselves. What made this piece particularly good was the tone of amusement; obviously, museum expansion isn’t a horrible social problem, and he doesn’t treat it like one. But it is still amusing the way museums just grow and grow and grow, endlessly adding to themselves, in order to feed the ego of their donors:

The question with which I began was not all rhetorical: what does museum expansion have to do with art? Very little, but also everything. Unless you happen to be wealthy enough to buy masterpieces yourself, to experience art means to experience it with a pack of strangers in a shiny new room named after people you couldn’t stand much more than they could stand you.

James Wolcott’s “Gloire Days” was another tour-de-force. The author begins with a study of Versailles, before moving slowly into the present, ending up at Mar-A-Lago. I never would’ve read a piece that explicitly set out to compare Mar-A-Lago and Versailles, because I would’ve felt the comparison was lazy, but Wolcott doesn’t make it in a lazy way. First, he sells you on the idea of reading about Versailles, and only then does he move into current events.

The cultural coverage

The wonderful thing about Liberties is that it’s so eclectic. It’s a very old-style magazine experience: your only decision is whether or not to subscribe. The magazine doesn’t care if you actually read it, and it especially doesn’t care if you’re interested in the topic of the individual articles.

For instance, there is a shockingly large amount of poetry coverage in the journal. I read a long, pretty-fascinating piece, by John Banville, about the poets of Northern Ireland in the 20th century:

Were writers in the South shocked by the quantity and the quality of the work that suddenly started pouring out of the North? Certainly the poets were — shocked, and envious. One of them, whom I shall not name, from an earlier generation, born at the end of the 1920s, carried a bitter lifelong resentment, frequently and vociferously expressed, of Seamus Heaney’s lavish successes.

I would never ordinarily read something like this, but with Liberties it’s easier to just keep going, to march resolutely through the journal, page by page, instead of skipping ahead to the next article.

One of the very best articles, in any these issues, was another poetry article, by Jaroslaw Anders, about the generation of Eastern European poets who came of age after WWII. These poets ended up as a species of secular saint (who the following generation, the poets of the ‘80s, tried unsuccessfully to take down):

One of the reasons for the pique of the younger generation might have also been the extremely elevated, almost prophetic status that the great few enjoyed in the post-war decades. Especially, but not exclusively, in Poland, great poets were treated, often against their will, as moral arbiters, spiritual guides, guardians of their nation’s soul.

The article was a great analysis of these ‘great poets’ (I recognized the names Miłosz, Szymborska, and Zagajewski, but the article also discussed a dozen others) and what, if any, shared characteristics gave their poetry such power.

The cultural coverage in this journal was superb. It hardly covered anything recent, mostly it was all about 20th-century literature, though there were also articles on Neapolitan opera and about a 19th-century composer of minstrel songs. The literature coverage wasn’t exclusively Western. I really liked an article by Abhrajyoti Chakraborty on Urdu short story writer Saadat Hasan Manto. Robert Rubsam (one of the few younger writers for the magazine) wrote an excellent piece about Yasunari Kawabata and Ryan Ruby (a critic I usually don’t like at all) wrote a good piece about an 18th-century Chinese novel, The Scholars.

The caveats

I fear this review will be short. As I was reading Liberties, I kept thinking, “How would I make this better?” And I really have no idea. The whole journal is perfectly calibrated for me. It’s like they knew exactly what Naomi Kanakia would enjoy, and they published a journal containing that content.

The journal works best in print, and it works best if you just read it straight through. At one point I lost an issue, and I tried to finish reading it on my phone, but my attention kept wandering. There is something very patriarchal and old-school about this journal. It’s like the 1950s New Yorker: you’re meant to just take whatever the magazine lays down. If you don’t care about a topic, you can theoretically skip the article, but most of them are engaging enough that it’s simpler to just read through to the end, because the whole point you’re reading this journal is because it’s full of things you wouldn’t ordinarily care about.

Just as a warning, there is a lot of liberal Zionist hand-wringing. Every issue ends with a piece by assistant editor Celeste Marcus and another by founder/EIC, Leon Wieseltier. These articles almost always have an anguished tone and are about the West Bank or Gaza or have some other Israel focus. The liberal Zionist position is that you really want a Jewish state in the Middle East, and you don’t believe that a one-state solution is tenable, but you are horrified by the current government in Israel.

Susie Linfield summarized this position in a long article in the Winter 2026 issue, in which she writes about several recently-published anti-Zionist books. In discussing Peter Beinart’s book, Linfield writes:

Beinart’s book also points to the ways that left-wing thinking after October 7 has calcified. He views any version of political Zionism as a form of Jewish “supremacy,” and he has long advocated a single “democratic binational state” in what had been Mandatory Palestine. Presumably, the lions and the lambs — or rather, the lions of Israel’s messianic right and those of Hamas and Islamic Jihad — will lie down together and nuzzle each other toward democracy and mutual acceptance. Always a fantasy, this vision has become ever more imaginary since October 7. “I’m not going to be fellow citizens with any of Gaza’s Nukhba Forces terrorists or their hundreds of thousands of supporters,” the historian Fania Oz-Salzberger, a longtime member of the peace camp, recently told Haaretz. “There will be no one state, Israel-Palestine, in our lifetimes, and probably not our children’s lifetimes, because the next generation are victims of October 7 too — on both sides.”

Most of my Jewish friends have liberal Zionist opinions just like these, so I have no objection to the magazine on this score. I have found that many intellectual journals hold very strong opinions about the Middle East (The Drift also had many pieces about Israel-Palestine, all of them holding to the kind of anti-Zionist position that Linfield is decrying here), so it’s hard to find a journal that won’t piss off somebody with its Israel-Palestine stances.

To some readers, this kind of Zionism is probably a deal-breaker. But I am struggling to think about anything else I could criticize in the content of the journal.

I guess there were a few anti-woke pieces that were cringe-inducing just because they felt dated, like Clifford Thompson’s “On Skin Color, and the Individual”—however a lot of mainstream magazines run way more of this content and do it in a much more annoying way.

This is probably also the place to note that Leon Wieseltier got MeToo’ed in 2017, resulting in him being fired by The Atlantic and in the collapse of a previous magazine venture that was going to be funded by Laurene Powell Jobs. I find these accusations to be credible, and I have also heard through the whisper network that he was a notorious sexual harasser. Wieseltier is an older man now and Liberties is a much smaller organization than The New Republic, so hopefully he has less desire and opportunity to harass young female staffers, but you never know.1

Will it last?

I suppose my primary feeling about Liberties is just a sense of worry. How many subscribers does it really have? It is supported, financially, by a friend of Wieseltier’s, Alfred Moses, a 94-year-old lawyer, and surely that money will dry up when Moses dies. Hopefully they’re doing something to ensure the sustainability of the journal. I can’t help wishing they had a little more grit, a little more careerism, that they recruited some younger writers, and covered current culture more (in these four issues, I don’t think they wrote about any work of literature published in the 21st-century), just as a way of getting some younger readers into the door.

Right now, this is a magazine that is for a certain kind of older person (probably 60+) who is nostalgic for an idealized vision of what magazines used to be: the magazine decides what is important, and you just sit down and read it, even if you’re not interested in the topic.

And what’s great is that Liberties delivers that vision on a shoestring, which probably means it’s more sustainable than the old New Yorker was. But I would love if the magazine did a bit more to sell that vision to younger people. I think a lot of folks would really love Liberties if they only knew about it! Like, many people who read Woman of Letters would probably prefer Liberties to my own newsletter, but they don’t even know about Liberties.

I have no idea how many readers each article in Liberties gets—probably fewer than read the average Woman of Letters post—but the articles are written with the quiet confidence that the right person will come across them. I really hope that this confidence is well-merited.

In any case, I am happy to have discovered the journal while it still exists. Out of the journals I’ve read (so far) as part of this project, this is the one that I can recommend most enthusiastically to my subscribers. If you enjoy Woman of Letters, you’ll probably enjoy Liberties too.

Elsewhere on the Internet…

• My story “Domestic Disputes” will be republished in this year’s edition of Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy.

• What’s So Great About The Great Books? (my recently-released nonfiction book) got a positive review from Todd Shy in The American Scholar:

  What’s So Great About the Great Books? is a spirited, welcome argument about the value of reading—reading on your own time, with your own appetites and needs, with your desire to make something meaningful of your life after your formal education is behind you. It is an appeal for reading whole books, challenging books, old books, books that have survived scrutiny and even contempt, books that affirm without simplifying, books Kanakia is willing to call 'great.’

• also had good things to say in The Metropolitan Review:

  It’s in Kanakia’s own pursuit of moral truth through nuance that her strength as a writer lies. She doesn’t use the showy language or inflammatory élan of other popular internet writers, but then, do we really need more of that anyway? There’s a strong aesthetic sense behind her clean, clear prose.

• In the Substack world, What’s So Great About The Great Books was also discussed by Mary Jane Eyre (twice!) and by Jeffrey Lawrence, who uses the book as a jumping-off point for talking about the future of the humanities:

  Perhaps even more so than Kanakia herself acknowledges, the program that she offers in What’s So Great About the Great Books is valuable precisely because the bonds linking the liberal arts to our current educational system have frayed so badly. For the first time in a long time, we must seriously contemplate how intellectual culture in the United States will survive in the face of widespread institutional decline.

It was such a shock! For years, it’d looked like this wouldn’t happen—Johanna had believed human beings would always have some demand for high-brow fiction written without computer assistance. She had actually read zillions of thinkpieces to this effect: “AIs can never make art!” the articles had claimed.

Unfortunately, in the year 2060, they were proven wrong, and Johanna lost her career.

You might be confused. Why did it take so many decades for this to happen? After all, there’d been this scandal in 2026, where a well-known journal named Granta had printed a piece of AI fiction that’d been awarded a prize. And then after that another thirty whole years passed before literary fiction finally gave up the ghost? That seems absurd.

Well, to understand how the literary world responded to AI, I’ll give you a round-up of the state of play in 2059 (the year before Johanna lost her career).

At this point in time, there was something called the ‘e-novel’ that was essentially AI-generated. These were available mostly for free online, and some huge number of people were reading these books.

Then there was the mainstream novel. Increasingly, these were written by people with an e-novel background, but these e-novelists were forced by the publishing industry to go through a horrible rigamarole, where they ‘re-learned’ how to write their works (that had already been downloaded a zillion times online) in a more human style.

The idea was that these novelists had learned something about narrative from this e-novelist community, but to reach a broader audience, they also really needed to put the skin back onto the bones and write in a more human style.

But even after this re-education process had supposedly resulted in the composition of 100 percent human novels, these former e-novelists were still not particularly respected by the literary community, which viewed them as a suspect and tainted by their early use of AI.

Some of these mainstream e-novelists were so hungry for literary credibility, and they beat on the doors for years, asking you to accept that their mashup of Stephen King and Colleen Hoover was somehow special and unique. That their early AI use had just been a ‘learning tool’ and now they knew better and had somehow transcended their AI origins.

Johanna was doubtful. Yes, she had been entertained by a few mainstream e-novels, but she personally was not going to launder the reputation of some millionaire who published mass-market drek that, even if it was technically human, was still no better than it needed to be.

Because if these mainstream novels started getting prestige, then they’d be in competition with Johanna’s own category. She wrote literary novels—certified one hundred percent human.

How, you might ask, was this certification accomplished? AI detection software was pretty good, but not infallible. False positives existed, and if your work was detected you could always say the software had (in your case) erroneously flagged your work as AI-generated.

But the quality of the software didn’t matter. Because people in the literary world didn’t trust to AI-detection. Instead you just had to know, you had to perceive. That was exactly what was at stake after all, right? Whether you had the ability to appreciate whatever was distinctly human in this writing.

However, in practice, it was a lot easier to ‘appreciate the human’ if you knew beforehand that the writer was definitely a human. And this was really the product that the literary world provided to the reading public. Literary publishers gave you writing that, you were assured, was one hundred percent human, never tainted by an LLM.

The way it worked was that literary judgement was outsourced to small journals.

The literary world was still organized around dozens of these small journals, and all of these journals claimed to be anti-AI.

What these journals provided was the assurance that this writing was human. That was their product. The assurance. They provided that assurance by mostly being highly-networked, tied to a certain time and place (New York City, usually) and by sourcing contributors who had elite educational credentialing (i.e. a degree from Harvard) that, even in 2060, connoted at least the pretense that you knew how to read and that you valued literature for its own sake.

Because what was true of the journals was now true of education as a whole, right? A university could only succeed if it graduated students who could meet organizations’ incoherent AI-use guidelines. Many organizations (most of them, in 2060) believed that there were certain parts of your job you should always do with AI (and you’d be fired if you didn’t do them with AI) and that there were other parts of your job that you should never do with AI, because it was somehow morally wrong to let AI touch this particular part of your job.

This made no rational sense, but basically if you went to a better college, then you were equipped to somehow manage these contradictory demands, because…that’s what colleges taught. And, moreover, that’s what being a smart striver was in 2060. It was figuring out ways to use AI without losing the pretense that it was really a human being in charge.

In practice, writers who’d gone to Harvard were extremely good at exuding the impression that their work was fully human and partook of the same kind of inspired creative frenzy that’d produced all the best literary production before 2022.

Anyway, these journals in 2060, were filled with writing from people who genuinely believed that they were producing the best that was doable. In private, maybe they sometimes felt inadequate about how their writing didn’t hold a candle to the best writing of the past, but they told themselves that lots of people throughout history had felt inadequate.

At this point, in 2060, the literary world was knee deep in the Neo-Lernerian movement, a return to the idea of unmediated experience. This movement was centered around one particular journal, called The Harvest, whose fiction section was full of writers trying to convey the rhythms of real life, using their carefully off-the-cuff anecdotes and shaggy storytelling.

Johanna found it very charming, honestly, because it was a return to the period when she herself (she was seventy-five) had come of age. And, not incidentally, this meant some of her work was coming back into vogue and was due to be reissued by a reprint press [in my mind it’s NYRB, but maybe that’s too self-serving. Hmm, whatever, let’s make it NYRB in this fantasy]. Yes, Johanna’s debut literary novel, a neo-Lernerian opus set in 2010s San Francisco, was being reissued as a distinctive period-piece by the New York Review of Books’s Classics imprint.

It was such a sweet moment for Johanna, even though a part of her protested that her novel wasn’t particularly influenced by Ben Lerner. She’d been much more influenced by Sally Rooney, but now for some reason that influence was very out of fashion (probably due to the author’s stance on various developments in the Middle East) so suddenly you had to pretend like Rooney wasn’t the defining influence on a certain kind of early-21st century novel. A huge portion of literary novels in that era were marketed on the idea that they would appeal to a Sally Rooney-loving reader, who wanted Rooneyesque doings, but with slightly non-Rooney characters.

Some writers had successfully channeled that Rooney magic, and others, like Johanna herself, hadn’t really managed it, because they’d never understood it. Personally Johanna had never gotten why so many women felt drawn to the passive doll-like protagonists that filled the novels of Sally Rooney and her most successful imitators.

In any case, Johanna’s book was mostly defined by its failure to be Sally Rooney. But nobody would read it (or pay any attention to Johanna) if that truth were to be known, so she was happy to pass it off as an early Neo-Lernerian work.

Then, unfortunately, all the accumulated resentment in this system caused it to collapse.

Basically, there was some group of young people who’d really aspired (even after all this time!) to make it as young literary novelists. But they’d told themselves that it didn’t pay the bills, which meant you needed a day job, so they’d gotten really boring jobs in tech (everything was tech now, but some jobs were more tech-like than others, and the more technical jobs often paid more, especially because people were so paranoid that it was precisely these more-technical jobs that would eventually get replaced by AI—like, try convincing some kid in 2026 that they really ought to invest in getting good at computers, and then you’ll see what the tech-talent pipeline problems are like in 2060).

Anyway, these young people lived in New York City, and they considered themselves cultured. However, they did have a very earnest quality that was distinctly off-putting to the New York arts people. These techie wannabe writers just hadn’t been acculturated into what remained of the artistic establishment. They didn’t speak the right words. All their references came from books and from forum posts, not from discussion with other cultured people. They didn’t quite know what was ‘in’. Like, they didn’t truly understand, not really, that the literary world was just about social power and not quality. They were still naively reading the top Neo-Lernerian journal, The Harvest, and sending in their short story submissions, not knowing that they basically had no chance of breaking in, because they didn’t have an MFA from NYU.

One of these tech-culture people had spent a lot of time in e-novel communities when she was a teenager. Then, as an adult, she had learned that e-novels were inferior to literary fiction, but she wasn’t sure that she totally believed it.

Anyway, at some point this woman, Indira Sen, was reading The Harvest, and it inspired her to post online:

“Is it just me, or do many of the Neo-Lernerian pastiches that I read in The Harvest not seem to be particularly good? That journal just feels like an e-novel community that isn’t working particularly well. Like, obviously there is some demand on the part of the readers, but the authors aren’t really producing a very good imitation. Everything they produce would get downvoted immediately on fourth-way” (this was the name of an e-novel platform).

She developed her thesis at length (“The Harvest as malfunctioning e-novel community”).

This provoked a lot of backlash from the circle around The Harvest. The editors and primary contributors were too high-minded to notice the Indira Sens of the world, but there were some hangers-on who wanted to curry favor with The Harvest, and one of them, Alice Mah, wrote an essay entitled “The e-novelist as malfunctioning human being”).

In its most-quoted passage, Mah wrote:

“Sen’s own essay offers an illustrative take on the dangers of letting AI do your thinking for you. The metaphors of AI have now become baked into human beings, so they launder AI through their very thought processes, and through their conceptions of art itself. Sen sees The Harvest as something like an e-novel community—as a temple to human consumption. She believes that there is some pre-existing need that The Harvest is attempting to fulfill. She doesn’t understand that the aim of the journal is to create new needs and to open up spaces that even Lerner himself had not yet explored.”

Sen felt this was very unfair, and she thought for a long time about her response. Many of her tech-culture friends took a crack at trying to defend Sen, and she felt like their responses were a bit clumsy. She particularly hated one viral post that was in the style of a faux-socialist takedown of The Harvest.

She hadn’t wanted to take down the magazine. She had just wanted to understand why it wasn’t fulfilling its own aim. The purpose of the magazine was what it did. Right now what it did (at least when it came to the magazine’s fiction offerings) was produce poor imitations of Ben Lerner.

Her question was, “Couldn’t these imitations be better?”

So in her epic, fifteen thousand word response, she first had to explain to Alice Mah how an e-novel community worked. That it was grouped around certain influences, and that it often operated off of shared community parameters that were often explicitly set forth in its charter. And then she had to explain what the participants in an e-novel community got from this activity.

The e-novel had developed, after all, as a reaction against traditional fanfiction. Many creators had wondered why it wasn’t possible, in our fanfictions, to imitate the style of the original as well.

One obvious way to closely imitate the style would be too use AI to mimic the patterns of the original, but with new romantic pairings and new story elements.

However, it was hard to get attention on traditional fanfic sites for work that was too obviously written with AI, so fourth-way had been started as a site for people to share their experiments in producing fanfictions that used LLMs to hew more closely to the style of the original. And within this community, there’d arisen many thoughts about what was good and what was bad. In this community, human attention was at an absolute premium. One good commenter could sway entire fandoms. Creators wrote to attract the attention of that one good reader.

The people who were willing to sift through all this content prided themselves on their sagacity. And they created a set of standards, meta-standards, for people attempting to write good imitations. These meta-standards were the baseline—if adopted, they prevented a work from evincing that uncanny corporate AI voice (i.e. “it’s not X, it’s Y—and that’s so valid”).

The whole point of the e-novel was that it provided an organized way of talking about style. It was a community for people who cared about style and thought that the style added something to the original, and that it was meaningless to do a fanfiction if you didn’t also copy the style. They really prided themselves on having a lot more taste than traditional fanfiction fans and writers.

Most e-novelist communities were organized around popular commercial fiction properties, but, when she was a teenager, Indira Sen had wandered into a very unique community that was devoted to the work of a literary novelist who used to be extremely popular, Miranda July.

There was apparently a group of women so inspired by Miranda July’s All Fours that they had created e-novels of themselves going on similar zany adventures. And in this community there had been a lot of debate about whether what they liked about All Fours was the zaniness or the very unfiltered quality. Like…if you were equally unfiltered, but about a less-zany life, would it still be compelling?

This community was very dedicated, and they had produced some great stuff that Sen had found comforting when she was a girl. Like, as a teenager, Sen had developed this fear (somehow) that she’d fall in love and get divorced and then be dried-up and unloved forever. She hadn’t even fallen in love once yet, and she was terrified of divorce. But something about this e-novel community had really resonated with her. And that had been her earliest community on the internet, where she’d first launched her own effort (an All Fours pastiches about a nerdy Indian girl in a suburban American high school, of course) that’d been praised perhaps disproportionately to its merits.

The All Fours community was very unique in that it had the e-novelist vocabulary, but it was narrowly-focused on a work that was so different from almost every other e-novelist community. This meant there wasn’t much cross-leakage from other communities.

In the All Fours community, people were very quick to call out pastiches that were too normie, too influenced by other sources. And as a result, it’d demonstrated what it would look like to have e-novels that drew from a self-consciously literary source (i.e. that drew upon the markers of 20th and 21st-century prestige fiction).

That community was the place where she had started to think, seriously, about whether it was possible to break the perpetual logjam between ‘human’ and ‘AI-assisted’ writing and create work that was recognizably excellent, but which came from this community where open AI use was the norm.

She recounted this history, and then she closed her effort-post by writing:

I am asking you if the false dichotomies between human and AI—norms that have been abandoned in so many of the other industries—might not be hampering this industry as well. That if there is an authentic human need for a certain kind of self-consciously high-brow writing, then perhaps that need can be satisfied using the same technologies that satisfy other human needs,

By the time Indira Sen hit ‘post’, she already understood the next steps. She had to use the ethos of the e-novelist world to produce a magazine that was better than The Harvest.

The problem, she realized, was that e-novelists were much too cautious. They were so used to being guided by ratings and by shares and kudos and comments, that that they couldn’t take the leap and produce something that was startlingly different from anything an e-novelist had done before. Because what would be the point? Who would read that?

It was actually a very difficult task to recruit other people for her magazine. She originally had a few co-editors, but none of them totally understood what she meant by the ‘e-novelist’ ethos. The difficulty surrounded that term, ‘community parameters’. She was the only person who understood that The Harvest had something unwritten that was very akin to an e-community’s parameters. She had read The Harvest so deeply that she had fully imbibed their conception of what it meant to be good, and she agreed that this style of journal, with its sneering takedowns, its earnest, searching essays, its strong political principles, and its avowed commitment to a highbrow (yet oddly accessible and entertaining) art was indeed good! She just felt it was possible to do it better than The Harvest did.

Her journal was called Hang The Bastards! The first section, Hangings, was composed of a series of first-person plural responses to contemporary news events. In each entry, some corporate business dealing was made transparent, and the blurb ended by saying, Hang The Bastards!

Then there were longer essays, which were all about how artificial intelligence was depraved and horrible and its users should be shot and also late-capitalism was somehow to blame. And, finally, a series of six pastiches of Lerner, which she was exquisitely proud of, since they each transported Lerneresque writing to different demographics and different parts of the country. She really expected these to be praised.

When the first issue of Hang The Bastards came out, it attracted zero notice from the mainstream media world or even from the other small journals.

But it did get a response from one guy, Neil Stein, who immediately understood what she was getting at. He wrote a long, exorbitant post praising the genius of this magazine, and then he said:

“Okay, but the essays are no good. Like, I think the problem is that because most e-novelist communities don’t do nonfiction, you don’t really understand the norms for this kind of essay. And, moreover, you can’t just do sneering socialist takedowns—they also need to be honest somehow. Like, this journal is pro-AI, so it shouldn’t pretend it’s not, just because it’s imitating a type of journal that is almost always very anti-AI.”

This really got her thinking, and with her next issue, she was prepared with some red meat. She took aim in this issue at a forthcoming NYRB re-issue of a book by Johanna Kapoor. In Sen’s essay, “The classic as mediocre e-novel”, she eviscerated Johanna’s book, demonstrating exactly how Johanna had tried and failed to emulate Sally Rooney, and, moreover, demonstrated the reasons she had failed. And she went on to identify a much superior novelist, now forgotten, named Raven Leilani, who had succeeded in her time because she met the unspoken community parameters for this kind of novel.

In subsequent issues, Sen really tried to develop these theories. She posited that every classic, throughout history, has created a penumbra. It’s created an audience of people who were hungry for more works like that classic. And that this then creates a secondary community of impassioned creators. If this secondary community is good at meeting the needs of the fans, then the classic itself endures. It becomes a classic, because it is at the center of a community. And then some people who are influenced by this community go on to create for other communities or write in other milieus. That classics have an influence when they’re internalized as influences by young people.

The ideas were somewhat inchoate, but they provoked a lot of thoughtful discussion online. Lots of people took seriously the challenge to produce an ‘e-novelist’ literature. This resulted in a burgeoning slush pile. After all, her magazine (although tiny) was probably the only journal where a truly unknown fiction-writer could get attention from sophisticated readers. Her journal didn’t bar AI-authored work, which meant there were a lot of submissions, but she had the skills, honed from years of participating in e-novelist communities, to sift through these submissions (with AI help). The biggest thing here was just the community parameters. If people didn’t care to make sure their submissions fit the parameters, then they were out. She was only interested in fiction that was within the Lernerian tradition. And very, very few e-novelists really understood the Lernerian tradition well enough to produce a passable imitation: most attempts immediately seemed rote, like they’d been produced with minimal and thoughtless prompting, so they were an easy pass.

It’s true that sometimes people pushed her on the narrowness of her boundaries. Many people said these criteria were sexist, and that it was wild that she didn’t allow Miranda July pastiches. She allowed this, because she felt she had a good sense of when one of these pastiches was good and when it was bad, but she continued to disallow things that were just too far outside her tastes—no Teju Cole or Garth Greenwell, because she just didn’t understand those guys as well.

And she got stuff that she thought was really excellent. She realized now that the Miranda July influence was good. It was such a trick to detail some insane sexual fantasy, but do it in a very off-beat way so it was believable that it might’ve actually happened. The deal with these stories was that they couldn’t seem too nakedly titillating or they’d seem unrealistic, but they also couldn’t be too embarrassing or deflating, because then that was no fun—too many neo-Lernerian writers acted like they had discovered some big truth when they announced that actually sex is boring (in fact, this is something everyone knows—one reason for declining birth rates).

The major trick was that you needed to make the encounter simultaneously hot and so embarrassing that you wouldn’t tell anybody about it unless it was true.

One great story was Hannah Wen’s “The Duel”, about a college student named Hannah who developed a crush on the sixteen-year-old girl that she was tutoring in math, and how they had this very long, drawn-out, mildly-erotic relationship centered around this teenager’s obsession with the French mathematician Evariste Galois, and how this girl, this younger girl, was so obsessed with Galois, so drawn to him erotically (even as she failed to be a very good math student) that Hannah kept trying to get into Galois herself, just to be there with this teenage girl in her obsession. It was cringe-inducing, but also delicious.

She couldn’t reliably factor a quadratic, but her room was full of math books, from which she painstakingly copied out equations in fountain pen into her notebook, explaining them back to me using words learned by rote from a chat window. She burbled at me for hours with shining eyes, and I couldn’t help it, over time, I kept saying, “Wow! That’s great! That’s so fascinating!” Because, although I knew it was an act, the act seemed somehow so sincere, so wholesome, so disconnected from material gain, that it actually, in some weird way, seemed better than really learning math.

This story went viral as an example of ridiculous AI writing. It was roundly mocked and picked-apart and discussed, and then Hannah really leaned into the bit, by, essentially, pretending it was true. She had such a schtick, this Hannah Wen, where she claimed everything she wrote was just a story, but it all just seemed so true, because it was of a piece with her own moody, awkward personality—over the course of a year she built up a huge following and became a literary celebrity!

She got so big that a reporter for The Atlantic asked her, point-blank, “Are you writing with AI?”

“I don’t know,” said Wen.

“What do you mean?”

“I type at the computer. Words come out. I feel like the words are true, even though they’re not. People like them. I don’t know…”

The reporter followed her to her house and watched her write for twelve hours. He was transported by how free and uninhibited this little Asian girl seemed at the keyboard. It bore so little resemblance to what writing looked like for any of the colleagues of this man, The Atlantic reporter, and yet he couldn’t help thinking that her freedom and her easiness, her swagger, maybe bore some relationship to the great writers of the past.

Then of course there was a huge backlash, where a prominent former e-novelist (turned mainstream novelist) wrote:

“You’re just describing an e-novelist! This is just what it looks like! Oh my god, I am losing my mind. I cannot believe The Atlantic is just columbusing what I and so many other novelists were explicitly told we must never admit to doing if we wanted to keep our careers.”

That was all great publicity for Indira Sen. Her magazine got pretty popular, and she began getting invited to trendy publishing industry events.

Over time, this journal grew somewhat stale. Indira moved on to become an editor at Knopf, and her successors at Hang The Bastards! held too tightly to the neo-Lernerian parameters and didn’t expand outwards to find new influences. They didn’t really grasp that she’d only made the magazine neo-Lernerian because that was a way of getting the attention of the mainstream world, creating something that they would recognize as potentially being good, and that eventually the fashions change, and it’s good for magazines to change too.

But in any case Hang The Bastards! was succeeded by other journals, many of which took HTB as their explicit inspiration. Some of these journals succeeded, and some didn’t. The old journals that were explicitly anti-AI lingered for some years, but it took so much work to create a fully-human journal that it wasn’t really worth the effort, if it wasn’t backstopped by prestige.

As for Johanna, that canny old fraud managed to reinvent herself yet again.

Johanna started a livestream, where she’d take suggestions from the audience and write a story in real time, over the course of several hours. She became a genuine phenomenon, and although her book of these stories (entitled Real Time) sold only a few thousand copies, she accumulated tens of thousands of devoted fans and never failed to sell out her public events.

The situation after Hang The Bastards! was roughly the same as before. It was very hard to convince other people that your writing was good. It was very hard to convince anyone to read anything, particularly if it looked very different from anything that’d come before. If there arose a journal that any group of people, no matter how small, seemed to genuinely be interested in, then that was worthy of comment.

The only difference was…nowadays, some of these journals contained writing that, its authors claimed, might be written with the help of AI.

Great, that wasn’t disqualifying anymore, but…it was still hard to get people interested. You needed to make it similar enough to something people already liked, but you had to put your own spin on it. Then once you had your initial audience, you kept innovating, feeding off the energy from the audience, seeing where you could push them, and where they would push you. Hopefully that energy grew at a level that was commensurate with your efforts and career aims. But, inevitably, that energy would start to dwindle, and then you’d have to decide whether this pursuit was really worthwhile anymore.

Because…audiences always flagged. Everything flagged. Everything died out. And when things died, they left behind only traces that, hopefully, inspired other people in the decades to come.

Before it sputtered out, Hang The Bastards! shocked its readers by breaking its only taboo. A young critic, Georgia Hsu, wrote about getting really inspired by Johanna’s livestream, and about experimenting with a practice that Georgia called autopublication. Essentially, you started with a prompt—some piece of writing you wanted to produce—and then, without any AI assistance, you wrote a response that attempted to fulfill the prompt (as if you’re the LLM-responding to yourself). Then you erased the prompt, and you simply published your own attempt, without ever consulting an LLM.

Many HtB readers felt like this was going too far, because it implied that what they were reading, Georgia’s essay, was essentially unaided, was her original human composition.

But many other people found nothing remarkable in this idea.

In her response, written later that year for a much larger magazine, Indira Sen wrote:

“Speaking purely as a matter of process, I think that that autopublication has much to recommend to it. Especially when it comes to nonfiction, I find that once I’ve gone through the process of figuring out what I want to say, then I worry the risk of an AI distorting my meaning is much higher than the benefits I’d get from its input. Furthermore, autopublication ensures that you truly know your ideas and stand behind them. You will have to answer, after all, for anything that you write. We have seen, too often, authors that are inarticulate onstage and don’t seem able to carry forward their ideas into the real world.

At the same time, I would hesitate to acquire any author who tries to turn ‘autopublication’ into their brand. In my view, human minds have to compete on a level playing field with each other. I have no desire to return to the world I was born into, where some writing is privileged because the author claims that it is was written without aid, using their own mind alone. That layer of privilege had, by the time I founded my magazine, become nothing more than the exercise of social power. Because of their pedigree, some people’s writing was presumptively held to be pure, while other peoples’ was presumptively held to be forever-stained by large language models. And the effort to maintain the illusion of pure human authorship had resulted in the inability to talk seriously about what authorship genuinely entails, and to what degree we can honestly claim that a given author is an auteur, driven by their own vision, rather than a craftsman, who is trying to give a rarefied experience to a small group of people with highly-specialized tastes.

Many of her fans were horrified by this statement on Sen’s behalf. They felt like she had sold out. Like she was claiming that actually it’d all been about the principle, and now she was saying, “Really my own work was all human, all the way through.”

Sen thought differently. She felt it was good for people to understand that raw human output had some value, particularly as part of an author’s broader project and overall development. But in truth this statement was also a trial balloon. It seemed, after everything, that there was still a lot of interest in the idea of ‘human authorship’. She had killed it once, for fun. But now maybe it would be fun to resurrect the idea as well, just to see what happened. After all, that’s why we wrote, wasn’t it? For fun.

Acknowledgements

I religiously read ’s Weekly Readings, where he gives his take on the week’s discourse. It’s written in a very strange style, which I initially found hard to decipher, but after three years I’ve become adept at understanding Pistellinese.

Anyway, after I wrote this story, I realized it was clearly inspired by this paragraph from a post by Pistelli (about the future of written word in the age of the LLM).

I renew my longstanding prediction of how this will all actually work out, accusations aside: lowbrow work will be almost totally cranked out by machine, middlebrow work will promote the artisanal as a value while being largely machine-tooled behind the scenes, and the highbrow and counterculture will divide themselves between a wholly artisanal and a wholly machinic avant-garde.

My story is basically just a five-thousand-word workup of this one paragraph.

Whenever I tell my friends that I’m reading The Drift, they rush to tell me that the magazine is no longer cool, or that they don’t read it, or that it’s far inferior to any number of other magazines that occupy a similar intellectual space.

It is shocking how unanimous this verdict is. Not once has someone said, “Oh yes, I read The Drift too.”

Even stranger is that everyone has such a fully-formed opinion about a magazine that they apparently do not even read. All they know about this magazine is that it sucks. Not one time has someone said, “Hmm, that’s interesting, I’ve heard about that journal but I’ve never read it—why don’t you tell me what’s inside it.”

No, people already know the contents of this magazine they haven’t read. They know those contents are bad!

The Drift’s signature product

In reality, The Drift is famous for a certain kind of takedown piece, very particular to this magazine, that often gets shared widely on Twitter. And most of my respondents are basing their opinion of The Drift upon these pieces.

These mass-culture takedown pieces don’t just take aim at a specific artist or work, instead they try to take down an entire cultural phenomenon! And they have a very unique way of taking down their targets. They usually claim that this terrible thing that they hate is somehow a manifestation of capitalism. That if it wasn’t for capitalism, this thing would not exist at all. So the thing’s badness is an inescapable outgrowth of the bad economic system under which we live.

The most famous recent example is their romantasy piece, where Daniel Yadin claims that, because of the horrors of capitalism, people have turned away from reality and now want to fantasize about having sex with dragons.

The air of tragedy and paralysis that overhangs so much of American life is, perhaps more than declining rates of marriage or property ownership, the real source of strength for the particular type of fairy-tale narrative that has come to dominate our literature. Because what are you supposed to do with your time between now and the end of the world? What should you do with your one adult life?

Romantasy suggests that you may as well suck off a dragon or two.

But there are other examples. There’s a piece by Lily Scherlis that claims a certain therapeutic technique, Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, is just a way of acculturating people to endure the terrible conditions they’re subjected to by capitalism.

DBT and workplace management are symbiotic. Though she doesn’t seem to know it…by reskilling burnt-out clients, DBT readies them for the strain of flexibilized, gigified labor.

The Drift enjoyed this take so much that they ran it again, in a slightly different form, in a piece where Erik Baker claimed a new rash of Stoic self-help books were merely teaching people to endure the terrible conditions of capitalism.

…I realized that I was spending more of my time thinking about my own despair than about the problems outside myself that were supposedly fueling it. And it seemed to me that a lot of people I knew were doing the same thing. So many conversations centered on how we were doing our best under difficult circumstances. Attendance at organizing meetings dwindled. My own attendance dwindled. Life is hard, we’d tell ourselves. Rest is resistance.

The best of these takedown pieces was this one about Simone Weil, where Jack Hanson talked about the way that this Christian thinker has been enrolled in so many modern peoples’ projects, and that when modern people write about Weil, they don’t really grapple with the strangeness of this woman, who literally starved herself to death for unclear reasons (perhaps out of solidarity with those suffering in World War II). This piece argues that it’s hard to really look at the totality of Weil’s life and conclude that she would support any of the modern people who are obsessed with her.

That’s fair enough, although it raises the question of…so what? I love Gandhi, I take a lot of inspiration from him, and from his idea that to resist evil you need to preserve your spiritual power by engaging in honest behavior. But, to Gandhi, preserving his spiritual power also meant vegetarianism, sexual continence, and a whole raft of other things that I don’t do (although I do think they’re good).

Still, this Weil article successfully excavated the strangeness of its subject, and I’m happy that it exists.

The Mass-Culture Takedown

I did not like the other articles of this nature. I felt like they weren’t particularly rigorous. Take the DBT article. At its core, it’s about the dialectic of left-wing self-improvement. You’re depressed and you tell yourself that your depression is merely a true experience of “the harshness of life under capitalism”. However, you really want to feel better, so you seek treatment, but then you feel bad about seeking treatment, so you need to extrude a lot of self-justifying rhetoric about how you know seeking treatment is ultimately a bad thing to do for some very complicated set of reasons.

This problem here isn’t with DBT, which is apparently quite effective at treating depression—the problem is with self-lacerating neurotics who think capitalism necessarily entails misery, so they’re required to be miserable until capitalism collapses.

To see the absurdity of this article, let’s begin by granting the premise that capitalism tends to produce certain difficult circumstances that result in depression. However once socialism arrives, I think it’s intuitively obvious that, at best, these miserable circumstances would be reduced, but not entirely eradicated. Even under socialism, people would still have tyrannical bosses, racist friends, shitty boyfriends, and all manner of other bad relationships that might make them very sad. I guess under socialism a magazine like The Drift would be full of articles about how people feel uncomfortable seeking therapy because “We have socialism now, so I ought to be happy!”

The worst of these articles, at least from the ones I read, was the romantasy takedown.

I found this takedown particularly aggravating, because in a previous issue The Drift had posted a long editor’s note about how Trump’s victory was basically because the Democrats were smug and superior and refused to connect with ordinary Americans (“[Liberals] do not believe they share a nation with Trump supporters in any meaningful sense, any more than Trump supporters believe they share a nation with liberals”).

But then, two issues later, they publish this romantasy piece which is so sneering, so contemptuous of the women who read this genre of fiction. And I guess that I was surprised that this well-funded magazine, founded by Harvard grads—a magazine with such strong socialist principles—wouldn’t feel a kind of noblesse oblige towards its social inferiors. In other words, I’d really expect a magazine of this sort to avoid taking cheap shots at the mass taste.

Like, if you’re building a coalition for socialism, then why, in your same magazine, are you going to talk trash on the most popular genre of fiction in America? It’s not just that the writer thinks this genre is bad. He also thinks its readers are deluded people who are resolutely committed to ignoring reality. And this vitriol seems so disproportionate to the offense, which is just…people reading books they enjoy.

The socialist elitist

I think what’s happening here is that you have socialist intellectuals who are supposedly striving for universal emancipation, but they don’t really connect with the artistic taste of the people they’re trying to emancipate. And this alienation from mass-culture makes these socialists feel really anxious and bad about themselves. So instead of just accepting that they don’t get it, they create these insane contorted essays where they argue that the peoples’ artistic tastes are somehow inherently diseased, and that under socialism, these people will finally be freed from their own poor taste.

This rhetorical performance just feels so unnecessary! Maybe art will be better under socialism, but if it’s not, who cares? The whole point of socialism is that everyone will have the freedom to make and support the art they want. Maybe, in that world, high art will no longer be privileged, but…the people who love it will still be free to enjoy it, and that seems great.

Okay, but now I am taking down this species of viral takedown. And I honestly detest these pieces, I agree with my friends—they’re dishonest and bad.

But the only reason The Drift has a reputation at all is because of these mass-culture takedowns! Their odiousness is exactly what renders them so successful in the attention economy. There’s something very dark and compelling about them, because they obviously arise from an authentic impulse—the contempt of the downwardly-mobile intellectual for those he considers to be his intellectual inferiors—but they (very successfully) disguise that contempt as some kind of public service, some defense of what is good and beautiful and true.

In some ways, it’s a magnificent product, and I respect the fact that it’s clearly serving the magazine’s larger aims. Obviously, the takedowns provide a lot of catharsis to the people who write, read, and share these articles.

However I do think these pieces are ultimately harmful to the reputation of the magazine, because the magazine is like a drug-pusher. It’s giving its readers something they crave, but which they know to be bad, and in return they resent the journal that proffers it to them.

The rest of the magazine is much less bad!

The magazine itself is beautiful. It’s about the length and width of a sheet of printer paper, perfect bound, with matte card-stock covers. The magazine interior is black-and-white, and they wisely eschew photographs—instead it’s full of line drawings and simple illustrations.

Many issues begin with an interview with some left-wing figure. For instance, issue sixteen had an interview with Stuart Shrader, a “leading scholar of the history of the American carceral state.”

Afterwards, many issues have a forum, where a dozen writers do short pieces on a certain topic. The forums were a good exercise, because they forced The Drift to affirm something and not be so relentlessly negative. There was a particularly good one about literature in translation. The temptation here is to say the idea of literature in translation is somehow fake or bad or ersatz or manufactured—a few of the writers took this tack (“Drawing borders in literature runs counter to what literature does at its best”). But you can’t just have a dozen essays saying the same thing, so a few of them were forced to defend it (“I needn’t speak Russian, or know anything about Soviet collectivization, to admire Platonov…”).

Each issue of The Drift also has a set of ‘mentions’ at the back—capsule reviews. And these were excellent! A lot of them are not takedowns—many of them are positive reviews—but they all contain a certain twist or sideways joke. I was really impressed by the quality of these mentions, and by their unique voice, which remained coherent even across dozens of separate writers. Whoever edits this section has done a great job of teaching writers to use this particular style (it reminded me a bit of New Yorker’s Talk of the Town, which also has a very idiosyncratic voice). Now that I’ve said this, I feel like their mentions editor will get hired away by The New Yorker. Watch out!

(On a sidenote, both the mentions and the forum are printed with a light-grey background that makes them a lot harder to read than the rest of the magazine.)

The Drift’s fiction section is superb

Many of the nonfiction pieces, even when they weren’t explicit takedowns, had a very sneering tone, which made the front half of the magazine quite difficult to read. That’s why it was always a relief when I reached the journal’s mid-point and could begin its best section: the fiction.

(By the way, this is how I could tell that none of my friends had read the magazine. Because they’d all say it was bad, and then I’d ask what about the fiction, and they would have no idea what I was talking about.)

I first became interested in The Drift when one of their editors noted on their Substack that three of their pieces had been selected for Best American Short Stories. It seemed remarkable for such a new journal to be getting so much attention.

When I read the journal, I saw why: it publishes a lot of fiction, maybe three to five pieces per issue. In one issue, fully half the page count was given over to short stories.

And the fiction is very unpretentious. It has a plain, unadorned style. The bulk of the fiction offerings are realist stories about the domestic life and professional worries of people under forty. I would say that I enjoyed almost all of the fiction, and I looked forward to reading it. I liked the stories about young women grappling with complicated parental relationships, as they did in Mimi Diamond’s “Good Health” or Mariah Kreutter’s “My Mother’s Husbands”. I enjoyed the stories about women in inappropriate relationships with older men, like Elisa Gonzalez’s “The Wife”, about a young woman who’s dating a mediocre film director. I really enjoyed the stories about female best friends torn up with envy towards each other, like Will Hall’s “Love Language” or Stephanie Wambugu’s “Working”.

A huge number of the stories were about young women living in the city, attempting to make it as artists, actors, or writers. This seemed fine! After all, most of the readers are in the same situation.

Sally Rooney was a strong influence on the fiction section. Most of the characters in these stories weren’t overtly political, but they often discussed ideas, had observations about the world, and grappled with self-doubt and their own artistic aspirations. It’s funny that these stories had a much more hesitant, thoughtful tone than the nonfiction pieces in this magazine (fiction and nonfiction were often written by the exact same people—some writers have written for both sections). The nonfiction and fiction felt like two sides of the same person. The strident, self-righteous nonfiction was an outward projection—it was how the writers wanted to be seen—and the shy, anxious fiction was a reflection of their fears about their true self.

Many contemporary literary stories feel like they see no value in entertaining the reader. Instead, they’re purposefully flat, obtuse or confusing and are full of elaborate metaphors and overtly-lyrical writing—all of it intended to showcase the author’s intelligence. These authors think being ‘literary’ means situating yourself as above the reader.

The Drift isn’t like this. Instead, the authors of The Drift recognize that there is nothing more literary than to respect your own audience by telling them a story that is honest and heartfelt and understated—something you trust them to understand. The stories had a simple, good taste that I really appreciated.

I read an interview with Mariah Kreutter where she said that after publishing in the Drift, she was contacted by five or six agents.1 I am not surprised. If you publish in this journal, it not only means you’re (perhaps) somewhat socially-connected in the New York literary scene, it also means you have something to offer that goes beyond credentialism and empty literary tics.

Any individual story in The Drift might not strike the casual reader as being special, but once you’ve read four or five of these stories in a row, you’ll see that the fiction section as a whole has a lot of integrity—the editors are great at finding stories that don’t feel like homework. At a minimum, the stories are usually entertaining and don’t feel like a waste of time, which is more than most magazines can say.

Because so many of these stories are about relatively similar situations, the few that deviate from that norm are the most likely to stand out. I really enjoyed Samuel Jensen’s “Mormon Lake Hotshots”, a near-future science-fiction story about a married couple who move to the desert and try to hold their life together as the environment becomes increasingly unlivable due to climate change. It starts in the present day, with this married couple bickering over where they ought to live:

Henry had expected all sorts of things from the process of moving from the city to the desert, but the one thing he hadn’t foreseen was his wife’s hesitation. He’d conquered his own in private, before mentioning the idea. Then he’d accidentally made Naomi perform hers in the open.

And this couple’s dynamic is so compelling that I just kept reading, only to pleasantly surprised as the story turned science-fictional at the halfway mark, as we moved into the future. I really loved the author’s confidence that they could hold my attention with the relationship drama, without having to tip their hand as to the real premise.

Another great story was Nick Forstek’s “Porn”, about an trauma surgeon who writes incompetent erotic stories that she submits to a sex-writing writing workshop (where they are torn apart, because there’s no sex in them). And you, as the reader, understand that she’s somehow trying to work out some frustrations with her husband.

My first story featured two characters named George and Becca. It culminates with George and Becca going to a nice dinner and sustaining conversation for over three hours…[then] an errant knife flies from the kitchen and lands between George’s ribs, puncturing his fascia. Becca drags him to the hospital, pausing to do compressions every fifteen feet. After identifying zero vital signs and some pretty significant jugular venous distention, she conducts an emergency room thoracotomy — a surgical incision into the chest wall — to temporize him. The story leaves his survival unclear.

It’s a really silly, moving story, that came out in the same issue as that horrible romantasy takedown! These same women—middle-class married women who write erotica—were treated with contempt by the mass-culture takedown, but were handled with good humor by this fiction writer, Nick Forstek.

Those two were my favorite stories, but I enjoyed almost all of them. There were only two stories that I didn’t enjoy, at least in these four issues. The first was an excerpt from Solvej Balle’s On The Calculation of Volume. The second was Matteo Ciambella’s “Fluff”. These were probably the two artiest stories published in issues 13 through 16, so I think these stories just define the limit of my own taste.

The journal’s depth of commitment to fiction seems quite unusual. I was so surprised by the number and quality of the stories that I reached out to The Drift’s editors to ask why their fiction section was so big. They said that their first issue had only one short story, but that the section expanded over time in response to the number and quality of submissions they received! Whatever they’re doing, it’s definitely working.

I gently probed them to figure out who I could credit most for this section, but they divided the responsibility between their first readers (Kanyin Ajayi and Andres Vaamonde), fiction editor (Livia Wood) and founding editors (Rebecca Panovka and Kiara Barrow)—they all collaborate in picking which stories to publish. If there’s a major magazine that wants to reinvigorate their fiction section, they could stand to learn a lot from The Drift.

The politics haven’t changed

The Drift is a socialist journal that came of age during the Biden administration, when its main aim was to lacerate the liberals. And when Trump was elected, their first reaction was, of course, that this was all the fault of the liberals. You all remember November 2024—it basically confirmed everyone’s priors. Whoever you thought was already bad, well…surprise surprise, it turns out those people are the reason Kamala lost. That’s why center-left commentators rushed to blame leftists for being out of touch.

But I will say, in the year since Trump’s victory, center-left commentators have generally remained flat-footed. Even now, in 2026, they continue to critique a toothless left, because that is all that these centrists know how to do.

The Drift does not have this problem. That’s because, to The Drift, the ultimate evil is capitalism. So, to them, Trump is not really a break with what’s come before. He’s merely an acceleration of all the evils that we experience under Democratic administrations. Yes, Trump has an armed and militarized police force that’s unaccountable to the courts, but…we also had that under Democrats. Yes, Trump is deporting people in an arbitrary and cruel way, but…that’s also something that Democrats did. Yes, Trump is personally corrupt and in bed with industry, but…well…you get it.

I don’t share this worldview, but there’s a cleanness and moral clarity to it that is refreshing. I have now read a lot of these intellectual journals, and most of them seem to really shy away from confronting the reality of the Trump administration. The Drift is different. Their first issue after he was elected, they had interviews with five leftist figures, to try and work out, in real time, whether Trump’s reelection meant they ought to change their message. And, in that same issue, the Forum was entitled “Dispatches on the New Regime”—a dozen writers did their best to explain, from a leftist point of view, how and why the Trump administration was bad.

I appreciated the effort. And I also appreciated that the journal hasn’t abandoned its commitment to open borders, police abolition, trans rights and all the other stuff it believed. If you think something is right, then you ought to continue to believe in that stuff even when it’s unpopular.

The weakest section of the journal

I’ve talked a lot about the mass-culture takedowns, but most of the nonfiction pieces aren’t takedowns. Each issue had a few longer essays about political or intellectual topics, and these non-takedown pieces were usually quite weak.

Partially the problem was the tone, which often felt very smug. For instance, in the opening of this piece by Gabriel Antonio Solis on Chicano organizing in South Texas, the author claimed that the reason Dems had lost Chicano votes in South Texas was that the party had betrayed or undermined an earlier generation of radical organizers. But…the story told by the body of the piece is quite different. In the author’s own telling, the radical organizers didn’t necessarily have a strong desire to participate effectively in electoral politics, which was one reason for their downfall:

The RUP’s unexpected success raised its profile, but also exposed some of its internal divisions. While many saw the RUP as a means for improving Mexican American representation within the existing political system, others had a more separatist vision that included the possibility of seceding from the U.S. altogether.

The Democratic party took advantage of some of the radicals’ intellectual incoherence and ate away at the RUP’s power base. The author describes his own father’s role in the move towards the Democratic party:

[My father] became active in the Mexican American Democrats (MAD), an organization formed by the Democratic Party in 1975. Unlike the RUP, MAD did not call for “Brown Power,” Chicano national self-determination, or a global anti-imperialist program.

This story, which the author himself was telling, seemed like an opportunity for the author to reflect on the failures of radical organizing in the past. These radical organizers experienced initial success, but they failed because their goals were confused and impractical. Maybe there is a lesson there! The editors of the journal really should’ve pushed the author to think about that lesson.

As it is, a lot of the nonfiction pieces felt perfunctory in this way. They told a story, but they didn’t bother to tell the story in a way that would be truly convincing or energizing, even for a true believer.

On the nonfiction side, the journal is leaving a lot on the table. Unlike with the fiction, the mentions, and the mass-culture takedowns, they’re not pushing this section to be as good as possible.

That’s a shame, because it’s really this section that determines the long-term reputation of the journal. The Drift is often compared to N+1, which is a left-wing periodical founded in 2004. In its heyday, many people felt that N+1 was cliquey, was smug, was superior—they had all kinds of negative feelings about the journal. But they also had to admit that it had launched a number of real talents: Elif Batuman, Wesley Yang, Andrea Long Chu, and Anna Wiener all had breakout essays in the journal. Usually, these breakout pieces were a little askew—they didn’t feel like the typical thing you’d expect to read in an intellectual magazine.

Right now, it feels like The Drift isn’t giving its authors the scope to do something that would truly stand apart. I don’t exactly know how to fix that—I assume part of it involves trusting its authors a little more and allowing them to say something that would break, slightly, with the established leftist party-line.

And that, in turn, means really believing in the brilliance of your authors and believing in the possibility that they can perhaps push the world in a better direction.

The Verdict

It’s hard for me to criticize something that is confident in its own vision. The mass-culture takedowns, although I hate them, are a very well-conceived and effective product. They’re honestly perfect for the attention economy, because they get shared widely, but they don’t actually piss off any powerful people.

Other journals rely, for this same effect, on author takedowns, where they find a sacrificial critic who is willing to say that Ben Lerner (for instance) really sucks. But the problem is that if you, as a writer, get a reputation for writing author takedowns, it’s really harmful for your long-term career—you make a lot of enemies and eventually get taken down yourself. The Drift doesn’t do this. These mass-culture essays are so unique to The Drift that I don’t know their authors necessarily benefit from writing them (the pieces honestly seem more like they’re written by the magazine itself than by any individual), but I don’t think authors suffer from writing them either. This essential harmlessness makes the mass-culture takedown difficult to truly despise.

A lot of craft goes into the takedowns—something I realized when The Point tried to do its own version of a mass-culture takedown. As I was reading Selen Ozturk’s recent piece on BookTok, I couldn’t help thinking that The Drift would’ve done this piece much better. Because they would’ve pushed her to at least create the illusion of engaging deeply with the subject (the Romantasy takedown author claimed he had read 3,600 pages of romantasy), and The Drift also would’ve had the perfect closing for the piece (they would’ve blamed capitalism).

I do think being a socialist elitist (a la The Drift) is better than being a liberal elitist (a la The Point). That’s because liberal elitism just comes off as contempt for the masses. The liberal elitist says that ordinary people love bad things, because ordinary people are dumb and have bad taste. But a socialist elitist has a different message. They get to say, “Ordinary people don’t really love bad things…it’s just capitalism that foists bad things onto them.” This is a much cleaner and more compelling message than regular elitism. I don’t think the message is true, but I at least want to believe in it.

If I have any critique, it’s that right now there’s something about The Drift that seems very cautious. It’s well-produced and often very entertaining, but it operates within a world of highly-online socialists who tend to tear everything to shreds, and each article in The Drift seems like it’s written, first and foremost, to avoid the possibility of critique. Their critical pieces are relentlessly critical, so you can never accuse their authors of liking or affirming anything, and their political pieces have the bland feeling of conventional wisdom (at least within the social circles where they operate).

As a result the magazine comes off like a jobs program—an opportunity for a group of young people to prove that they can create a magazine-shaped product.

The Drift feels like it’s very anxious about being laughed at, so they’re careful to never write anything that seems too sincere. But this anxiety is exactly why people are so dismissive of the magazine. If The Drift went out there and said, “Here is a ten thousand word essay by the next great socialist thinker—this person is gonna teach us how to win” then people would laugh, but they would also pay attention.

Despite its radical politics, The Drift gives off an aura of careerism, because the editors don’t seem to see a point in publishing essays that are actually good. It’s like the magazine doesn’t believe that a thoughtful, well-reasoned, impassioned piece would actually have an impact and get attention. So instead they limit their expertise to producing these takedown pieces that are designed to circulate widely online without ever actually having a cultural impact.

But I don’t really think the editors are cynical or careerist. If they were, the founding editors could just hand off (or close down) the magazine and bank their reputational gains. I think they want to make an impact, but it’s just hard to know how to begin, and it’s a bit scary to really try. They have gained a lot from this magazine, and if they start trying to launch new talents and make big statements, then they might falter, become a laughingstock, and lose much of what they’ve gained.

However, if you really believe that something is important, then surely you’re willing to lose your career over it. I would love for The Drift to commit to a piece and stake its reputation on saying something interesting.

And yes, if they committed to a piece, it would probably get trashed by the same crowd of envious para-intellectuals who form the primary audience for The Drift’s mass-culture takedowns. But that would be good! Right now the magazine is overtly respected, but privately mocked. The opposite is much preferable—you know you’re having an impact when someone bothers trying to take you down.

In any case, a lot of people came, and I had a great time. Thank you so much to for moderating. There was a video-camera operator there from CSPAN, and he said eventually the event would be on TV and then uploaded to YouTube.

This morning, my editor told me that many people have purchased this book—after two days, it is already headed to a second printing (and, in related news, after two days the book is already PUP’s best-selling title for the month of May).

I actually don’t exactly know what it means to say your book is getting a second printing (especially so soon after release), because this has never happened to me. I don’t think it means the book is literally sold out or unavailable—I am pretty sure you can still buy it on Amazon and at many bookstores. I think what it means is that orders from bookstores have exceeded the available copies in the warehouse, so now they need to print more. Right now, there are likely still many copies available on shelves. So get yours while you still can.

In other news, the book was reviewed by Valerie Stivers at Unherd (here’s a link that gets you past the paywall). I haven’t read the review, but all my friends say it’s a bit weird, because there’s some stuff in the review about me being trans. But she likes the book!

Other Press

• When I was in New York, I was also on the radio, answering questions for All of It on WNYC. The recording is here.

• wrote about the book: “I love her way of writing about books and writing and the literary scene. So I knew I would want to read her new book and that I’d enjoy spending time in her company. And I did!”

• also wrote about the book: “Have you ever had FOMO about not reading the classics? In her forthcoming book, Naomi Kanakia positions herself as an encouraging guide for contemporary adults who want to be well-read and yet are not sure whether reading Great Books will reward their time.”

• interviewed me for his newsletter.

• also did one of her Reading Life specials with me.

• An excerpt from my book (it’s basically the first chapter) was posted on LitHub.

  There’s a set of books that you’ve probably already heard of. These are the ones that’ve been extolled by professors and critics. They’ve been referenced in countless speeches and essays. And in school, your teachers most likely claimed that these books were among the world’s greatest works of literature.

  I’m talking about texts like Melville’s Moby-Dick, Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Dante’s Inferno, Cervantes’s Don Quixote, and about a hundred others—most people have heard of these books, and most people have some preexisting ideas about them. (Collectively, these texts are often referred to as ‘The Great Books.’)

This inner-directed concept seemed to accurately represent how I was raised. As a young person, I was told that it was really important to read the classics, so when I became an adult, that’s exactly what I did.

I have often been told (including by Riesman in this self-same book that was written thirty-five years before my birth) that we don’t live in an inner-directed society anymore and nowadays peoples’ desires are very malleable and determined entirely by the consensus of the herd.

Personally, I have my doubts. I feel like every writer, thinker, and professor still basically advocates immersing yourself in the greatest work of the past.

However, if these values that I live by are indeed under threat, then it’s my duty to somehow defend them, which I have done by writing a book entitled What’s So Great About The Great Books?

I have been working on this book for four years, and now today it is finally out. Yes, today, May 26th, is my book’s release date. Hopefully it’s in at least a few bookstores.

The vast majority of you will not read or purchase this book, and that’s fine. It is not important for you to give me money or your attention. What’s much more important is that you understand how deeply I believe in the value of reading the Great Books.

Sometimes I worry that I don’t insist strongly enough on the value of reading the classics (and especially classics from the very distant past)—I know that everyone has their own TBR list, and they don’t necessarily want me to moralize about what they should be reading.

But I do think on this one day, the release of my book, I would like to be more categorical than I usually am. And I would like to say that I believe there are millions of people in America who would both enjoy and really benefit from a self-directed program of reading the Great Books.

The importance of reading old books

Looking back, I don’t recall ever being explicitly told that people were supposed to read Plato and Tolstoy and Euripides and John Donne. It just seemed obvious to me that this was a really good thing to do, and that many of my favorite authors had pursued some form of this education. Now that I am thinking about it, probably the early example that made the strongest impact on me was Samuel Delany, who was one of my instructors at the Clarion Writer’s Workshop in 2006, when I was twenty years old. At the time, it felt like he’d read every book in existence, and I absolutely idolized Samuel Delany (although he personally was not very encouraging about my own writing—an experience that inspired one of my most popular tales).

Before taking this class with him, I read Delany’s About Writing, where he very explicitly said that writers ought to read the greatest authors and then aim to follow their example, and that if you’re not capable of doing this, then you’re not really a writer:

In terms of writing, we’ve seen the last twenty-five years’ explosion of writers’ workshops and MFA programs. But there’s a possible built-in failure in this program: while many—or even most—people can internalize a range of literary models strongly enough to recognize and enjoy them when they see them in (some) new works that they read, very few people internalize them to the extent that they can apply them to new material and use them to create.

Lots of people want to.

But not many people can.

Most of you who read these notes—the vast majority—will discover, sometime fairly soon (that is, in the next three, four, or six years), that you are not really writers.

Later in the book, he gives a long list of authors you ought to read—needed to read—if you’re going to become any good.

You need to read Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert, and Zola; you need to read Austen, Thackeray, the Brontës, Dickens, George Eliot, and Hardy; you need to read Hawthorne, Melville, James, Woolf, Joyce, and Faulkner; you need to read Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Goncharov, Gogol, Bely, and Khlebnikov; you need to read… [about fifty or a hundred more names that I cut —NK]

I found this so inspiring, and although my own reading is much broader than Delany’s (he never seemed particularly concerned with the ancients or even with the Renaissance), when I attempted to educate myself, I think that I followed the spirit of his advice.

The Great Books ideal is more important than my book

Maybe if I hadn’t encountered Samuel Delany’s dismissive and contemptuous attitude towards the typical aspiring fiction writer, I never would’ve set forth to read all the Great Books. Who knows.

Anyway, now it is Tuesday, May 26th, and my version of About Writing is coming out! This is my book, What’s So Great About The Great Books? And, like About Writing, it is a very idiosyncratic book. It’s my defense of a specific reading program, the Great Books, which involves reading all the greatest classics of world literature—including some that are famously indigestible—in translation, with relatively little in the way of classroom instruction or outside training.

This book is my attempt to transmit my own values to the next generation.

As I said, I really strongly believe that there are a large number of people in America who would benefit from reading the Great Books. The main thing I know about these people—the folks who ought to read the Great Books—is that deep down inside, they really want to do it. But for some reason, they haven’t given themselves permission. Because they don’t think they’re the kind of person who reads classic literature.

In other words, they’re just like me at age twenty-three. Back then, I read the Great Books not because I thought that I’d enjoy them, but because I was afraid that if I didn’t read them then I could never be a great writer.

The Great Books have given me plenty of enjoyment, but the truth is that if reading the Great Books was as pleasant and absorbing as reading Gone Girl, then there would be no issues—everyone would be reading them. Obviously, there is a barrier to entry. People bridge that barrier in various ways, but I think mostly it involves some amount of trying. Nowadays I find that if I want to appreciate something, then I usually can. But I didn’t know that when I was twenty-three. Back then I just rushed headlong into the classics, because I thought that if I didn’t like them, then that meant I was a bad person.

Today, I have a whole suite of techniques for trying to appreciate something. Mostly it’s a process of testing: I have dozens of books that I periodically go back to, testing whether it’s time for me to read them. Then, when the moment is right, I dive in. Sometimes I bounce out—I read several hundred pages of Gravity’s Rainbow last year, for instance, before deciding the moment wasn’t propitious (i.e. I was very bored). But oftentimes, when the moment is right, I get really enthused by an author and will read more and more of their work. Then I’ll look into their influences, and I’ll start reading about their culture and their language and their national literature.

These are relatively simple patterns of behavior that I’ve developed simply because I am anxious to enjoy the things I’m supposed to enjoy. If there is widespread consensus than something is a work of genius—and particularly if that work is an older book—then I really make a strong effort to enjoy it. Sometimes that effort doesn’t work, but I think it’s a worthwhile practice to withhold judgement on an older work (say…older than fifty years) that’s widely-regarded as being good and important. And that’s really the essence of the Great Books movement—it’s just an organized way of respecting the judgement of our forebears. Many people, throughout history, have felt these books were valuable, so we attempt to see their value as well.

Maybe I should be more emphatic

Samuel Delany was so harsh! He was so dismissive of most people and their efforts. This guy read War and Peace when he was thirteen, and he basically believed that unless you had that kind of all-consuming drive to be a great writer, then it could never happen for you.

That’s not really my style. I really feel no desire to make other people feel inadequate.

However, I do believe, just as Samuel Delany believed, that if you want to be a great writer or thinker, you should attempt to read the world’s greatest works of literature. Obviously, it doesn’t work for everyone. Lots of people have either consciously or unconsciously rejected this Great Books ideal, and they have gone on to produce good work. I just heard the other day about a writer who I respect who doesn’t read fiction at all! Regards it as a waste of time, because it doesn’t access truth.

That’s fine for them. Many people have brilliant and forceful and idiosyncratic personalities that’ve given them a strong sense of what they personally need to succeed.

But many more people are like myself at age 23—anxious to achieve something worthwhile, but with no sense of how that might happen. Reading the Great Books offered a path. At the time, I thought it was the only path. I know now that’s not necessarily true, but I still think it’s one of the most accessible paths to becoming a better writer and thinker—it’ll certainly do much more for you than doing an MFA program (this latter point is not controversial, virtually all MFA professors would agree that workshop is no substitute for reading the classics).

If I’ve failed to argue this point as forcefully as Samuel Delany did, that’s just because I have a different personality than he does. Sometimes I worry that I’ve undersold the Great Books, and that I don’t convey how transformative and useful they are. But hopefully the depth of my conviction comes through even though my tone isn’t particularly polemical.

For more info, see my book

The other day I was explaining about the Great Books to a friend, and she had many questions, “Which classics do you mean? Just the English classics? What about the Chinese classics?”

I told her all these questions are answered in my book.

Yes, everything I have to say about the Great Books is indeed contained within a book that is coming out today. As I’ve mentioned a time or two before, this book has ZERO overlap with my blog. Nothing from this book has ever been published on my blog, and nothing from my blog is in this book. That’s because I wrote the first draft of the book three years ago, before I had ever started this blog. I turned in the book, and then I started the Woman of Letters Substack as a way of promoting it.2

Now, three years later, the body has outgrown the head, and the blog is read by many more people than are likely to read the book. But still, I think the book contains much that’ll be new and interesting to readers of Woman of Letters.

This book is essentially about why you should read the Great Books. There’s nothing else quite like it—most other books on this topic take a much more polemical approach (somehow Western Civilization always seems to be hanging in the balance when people discuss this topic), and they also tend to get very mixed up with the question of what kids should be taught in college. I avoid all that stuff.

Instead my book is about whether you, a person who enjoys reading books, ought to make a concerted effort to read Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Milton, Chaucer, Euripides, Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche, and a bunch of other authors. I get down into the weeds and talk about exactly what I mean by the Great Books, and I even provide a list of books to read (the same list I’ve used for the past seventeen years).

The time for gratitude

With my past books, I’ve often been too caught up in my anxiety to properly thank all the people who helped me publish the books. In order to make a book, you come together intensely with a certain group of people. And after the book comes out, those relationships eventually fade or go sour. Your editor gets laid off or turns down your next book. Or the imprint decides not to give your book a paperback. Or your agent fires you, or you leave them. Or you leave the imprint to chase more money somewhere else. The point is, in the years after the book comes out, something usually happens to tarnish your memory of the book’s release.

So the time to praise everyone is when the book comes out, before all that stuff happens! A book’s release is really a time for the team to come forward.

In the case of Princeton University Press, I feel extremely positive feelings. I can recommend this press in the highest terms. They are truly exemplary.

This book began when Matt Rohal, an editor at PUP, read several of my pieces in The Los Angeles Review of Books and asked me to develop a proposal where I said something about the Great Books. We went back and forth a few times on the proposal for What’s So Great About The Great Books? (I think the title, which is excellent, is his). I’ve never had an editor who was better at managing me than Matt is. He is so good at delivering edits—there is so much praise, even when he wants major changes. I’ve always been confident that Matt trusted me and that I was fully in control, but then somehow I end up doing what he wants me to do! It is really magical.

I am truly amazed this book exists at all. Four years ago, I was a not-particularly successful YA novelist with few nonfiction publications and very little online platform. Matt and Princeton University Press not only took a chance on me, but they did so very enthusiastically.

Princeton University Press is a very big academic press. They have both a scholarly list (I think Matt acquires in philosophy) and a trade nonfiction list—the latter are the general nonfiction books like mine. Because it’s an academic press, everything has to go through peer review. My proposal got peer reviewed and then my complete draft got peer reviewed as well. In both cases I made substantial changes as a result of peer review. One of the peer review comments caused me to restructure the book to deemphasize a lot of the political stuff that used to be right at the beginning, and this change really substantially improved the manuscript.

Peer review was a difficult experience. I did have a classic Reviewer #2 experience, where I got some pretty negative peer review comments, but…that’s fair enough, and the comments ultimately made the book stronger. The peer review also corrected a few inaccuracies. It is nice to have scholars double-checking your work.

I am thankful to my former agent, Christopher Schelling, who negotiated my contract with Princeton University Press. Academic presses have this very exploitative baseline contract where they take all your copyrights. It’s possible to push back on this and get something that more resembles a regular book deal, but it’s a lot of effort, and I’m thankful that Christopher did the heavy lifting on this.

Princeton University Press also has an excellent production staff. Production was handled by Ali Parrington, who is extremely organized. Princeton University Press is so efficient. It’s like a machine. Copy edits were handled very well, by Plaegian Alexander—I normally hate copy-edits, but hers were at just the right level of detail, correcting genuine errors without being too intrusive. First- and second-pass pages also happened in a really orderly manner. It was just nice to not feel rushed and to have a strong sense of what the book would look like.

And then my publicist, Jodi Price, has been incredible! She is so on top of things. She’s really been emailing people and getting results. I have been so impressed. There is no job in publishing that’s harder than being a publicist, because…there are so many books, and outlets aren’t in business to do favors to publishing companies. They want to cover stuff that their readers will actually interested in. Authors are also very difficult, and we have a lot of expectations that we load onto publicists. They’re not miracle-workers, their job is to understand what kinds of pitches might be attractive to the people who cover books. I feel confident that Jodi is doing this job about as well as it can be done. Princeton University Press is lucky to have her!

My new agent, Alia Hanna Habib, has also very generously involved herself in some of the conversations about marketing the book.

Oh yes, and I really should thank Dog-Eared Books in SF, who agreed to sell the books for my SF event, even though it’s offsite. They have been great supporters of me over the years, which I really appreciate. And I should thank both P&T Knitwear and McNally Jackson Seaport, who both wanted to do events with me in New York. It is very hard to schedule a New York event, because bookstores tend to be selective about which author they’ll work with. I have very good feelings about P&T because they did a nice event for me for The Default World. In this case, McNally Jackson reached out first and I had already committed to them by the time I heard from P&T, but I still appreciate both bookstores a lot. Thank you so much.

And then, of course, there are all the people who requested copies of my book through my galley copy form! I sent out many copies of this book to various people in the Substack community, and there’s been a lot of advance press from my newsletter friends. There’ve been writeups or interviews by Robert Boyd Skipper, Isaac Kolding, Henry Begler, John Pistelli, Abra McAndrew, Alexander Sorondo, Petya Grady, Jared Henderson, and Henry Oliver. Thank you so much for engaging with my book.

(If you got a book and haven’t gotten to it, don’t feel bad—I also get many galley copies that I don’t end up reading).

This book was very difficult to write, probably one of my hardest writing experiences. It’s an immense undertaking to produce an entire nonfiction book—much more work (at least for me) than writing a novel. But it’s been a good experience. I owe everything good in my career to this book. In order to promote this book, I started this newsletter, which has grown and become such a life-sustaining endeavor. Because of this book, I also developed a lot as a writer—I am a nonfiction writer now! (In fact, some would say that I am much better as a nonfiction writer than as a fiction writer.)

I am really proud of this book. I do think that it’s the right book for someone. And that in twenty years someone will look back on this book and credit it with altering the trajectory of their life, just as Samuel Delany’s About Writing (may have) altered mine.

Whether the book will do more than that, and blow up, become widely-praised, and get assigned in schools…I dunno. Probably not. But it’s still a good book that someone needed to write, and I’m happy that I did.

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Over the next ten years I read maybe fifty other domestic thrillers. I liked almost all of them, including the mega-hits like Woman in the Window and The Girl on the Train. So it wasn’t just Gone Girl that worked for me, but this entire genre of novels it inspired—books about a woman with mental issues (usually alcoholism or a personality disorder) who was trapped by her husband and needed to outwit him.

The reason I read Gone Girl was that in my twenties I prided myself on my ability to enjoy bestsellers. I not only liked Gone Girl, I also read all the Twilight books, all the Hunger Games books, and The Fault In Our Stars and Eleanor & Park and a number of other YA bestsellers. What’s great about reading bestsellers is that you’re not only reading a good book, you’re also communing with the popular will—it’s nice to enjoy something at the same time as millions of other people.

However, if you read a bestseller and you don’t like it, then that’s a sad, alienating experience, where you’re left wondering why ordinary people have such terrible taste.

In my thirties, I frequently experienced that alienation. I did not enjoy On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous, I did not enjoy Fifty Shades of Grey, I got only marginal enjoyment from Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Normal People—I liked them, but they didn’t enthuse me the way Gone Girl (or even The Hunger Games) had. I don’t know—maybe my own ambitions as a writer got in the way and prevented me from enjoying these books, but (aside from the domestic thrillers that I mentioned earlier) I basically fell out of the habit of reading of reading bestsellers—I never even attempted Where The Crawdads Sing or Lessons In Chemistry or The Correspondent.

For this reason, I was initially going to give Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear a pass, but then it started accumulating a lot of upset reactions on Substack from Rafael Frumkin, Leigh Stein, Jerusalem Demsas, and others. The gist of their criticism was that the book didn’t take seriously the inner lives of Christian women, and, somehow, from the way they talked about this book...I became convinced that I would probably enjoy it a lot.

Yesteryear

This novel just came out from Knopf, where it was acquired by Jennifer Jackson, the same editor who acquired Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Station Eleven and Peter Heller’s The River—she has a genius for publishing propulsive books that’re somewhere between literary and commercial. And the book is already a bestseller, already going to be adapted into a movie with Anne Hathaway.

It’s about a woman named Natalie who lives in a farm in Idaho with her husband and five children. The husband is the scion of a US Senator and is kind of a failson and dimwit. The wife is an influencer who’s very popular online. Apparently she is based on a real-life influencer, Hannah Neeleman, who operates a farm called Ballerina Farm and has nine children and ten million Instagram followers.

One day this woman Natalie wakes up, and she’s on a farm with a man who looks like her husband, but isn’t her husband. There are some children on the farm. Everything looks vaguely old. The date etched into the wall says it’s 1855, and she’s trapped now on this farm doing boring farm chores, without any nanny or personal assistant. She has to do the same old stuff she used to do for the camera, but now it’s her actual life, and it’s really dull.

This premise, where she is transported back to 1855, is the weakest part of the book. It is thin, I agree with the criticism. It is very clear right from the beginning that she’s not actually in 1855. She believes she’s been taken somewhere else and is being captured, but she honestly doesn’t think that hard about what’s happening on this farm where she’s being held captive.

Instead, for most of the book, she just flashes back to her life, and how she ended up with her influencer career. This is really where the meat of the book lies.

Not at all about real life

There’s essentially three main characters in the book, besides Natalie herself. There’s Caleb, her husband, who is one of the most dimwitted guys I have ever seen in a domestic thriller.

The thing to understand about the book is that there’s an uncanniness to all the characters. This is a book that is basically a response to images that the author, Caro Burke, consumed through her phone—images of some woman’s perfect life on a remote farm. And in this book, the author wanted to play, not with reality, but with those same images. So her aim is to give us a distorted, fun-house mirror version of that influencer life.

And I think Caleb is basically the author’s fantasy about these big, tall, bland perfect husbands that influencer women have (husbands who inevitably get caught up in sex scandals or abuse them or do something weird). These guys always seem really dumb, and if you decided to exaggerate that dumbness, then you’d get this guy.

Then there’s his dad, the patriarch, the Senator, who basically just wants his idiot son settled somehow. He views Natalie—a poor girl his son met at college—with some distaste initially, though eventually there’s a kind of budding respect.

But the strongest relationship is Natalie’s mental relationship with “the Angry Women”, who are the embittered upper-middle-class professional women that she imagines hate-watching her. Sometimes Natalie thinks directly about these women. Other times she interacts with them online. And often she imagines one specific woman, her college roommate, Reena, and how Reena must be eating out her heart with envy, thinking about Natalie, leading to the novel’s most bravura passage (reminiscent of Amy’s “Cool Girl” speech in Gone Girl)—a long paragraph where she imagines Reena’s future life after college:

Overall, Natalie’s voice is an incredible rhetorical performance, because the audience for this book is basically the angry women. This is our fantasy. We are the ones who hate Natalie and want her to suffer. But she constantly gets back at us, thinking about us, and how she’s better than us. And yet even that is our fantasy—what if the woman we were parasocially fixated upon was reciprocally obsessed with us?

Natalie comes from a religious family somewhere in the West, but she went to Harvard, which is where she met her husband. Natalie opted out of the traditional career and instead put all her ambitions into this image she wanted to project, using her husband’s father’s money. And by being the perfect mother on Instagram, she also gets money, power, respect, far in excess of what her college classmates get.

Like, it’s impossible to say that Natalie is not a success. The worst you can say is that she’s not authentic, that she’s not really home-oriented, doesn’t care about motherhood—she’s only doing it to get ahead. But then, if that’s true, and being an Instagram mom is just her version of having a career, then that makes her even more of a success by the standards of the professional-class women who’d ordinarily look down on her for being so domestically oriented! There’s no way to win, either she’s a better mother than us or she’s a better career woman.

However, because she’s so unambiguously perfect, we get the privilege of torturing her with this ludicrous made-up scenario where she’s trapped in 1855. Because that’s our fantasy, right? This woman can only achieve career and domestic success because of women’s liberation. Women’s liberation is the only reason she has the power and freedom to prance around on the phone screen, performing motherhood. But if somehow that gate was to snap shut, then everything would go away. She’d have nothing. She’d be sunk, and she’d be destroyed by the inherent contradiction involved in making a professional career out of motherhood.

The book hates Natalie

I think the many people who have called out this book for its malice are correct. It revels in hatred towards its protagonist. But that is what makes the book good. There is an unabashed obsession with Natalie and with her performance of perfection. The book admires her, but it is ashamed of that admiration, so it punishes her. As the Cato Burke put it herself in an interview:

I think at this point I feel more critical of my own behavior online than I do of random tradwife influencer accounts, because it almost feels like I’m in a maze holding the map that will lead me out and for whatever reason I just…don’t…leave? I know on a fundamental level that social media is a mass form of performative rot, and yet I stick around anyways.

This is why, I think, the book doesn’t make a strong effort to build out Natalie’s religious background (she is Christian, but we never learn what denomination, or even whether she goes to church or has a spiritual advisor). It’s because this kind of influencer is generally careful to keep the specifics of their religion off of their feed, so it’s not really a part of the parasocial relationship that is the true subject of this novel.

When I was a YA author, I knew many Mormon authors, and one year I was even a judge for the YA category for the Whitneys (an award for LDS authors). During this time I read dozens of novels by Mormon writers, and they almost never had Mormon protagonists, because these writers (accurately) believed that they needed to obscure the details of their faith if they wanted to reach a mass audience. As a result, secular Americans tend to consume a lot of narratives that are by very-religious people, but those narratives often have this uncanny quality, where they seem to implicitly endorse traditional values (a lot of Mormon YA writers write very clean, chaste romances, for instance), but the characters never mention God and don’t go to Church.

And this content succeeds because it is very appealing! Both secular and religious Americans have many of the same values. We want domesticity, clean living, good food, close contact with nature, and strong relationships with family members.

Everyone loves domestic perfection. It doesn’t matter if you’re queer, PoC or feminist—you’ll always be fascinated by a thin, pretty woman with five kids who spends her days baking bread and homeschooling the kids. But these images also inspire envy and rage and a (wholly unfair) desire to punish this woman.

And what makes Yesteryear good is that it indulges in that desire to punish the woman from Instagram. It doesn’t punish some perfectly-nice Mormon woman who’s good at making videos. Instead, it invents a cynical, calculating woman who is creating videos purely for the purpose of making us, the liberal viewer, feels bad. And then the book systematically tortures this woman.

Yesteryear isn’t perfect

It is definitely worth asking whether it is good that there is a popular novel that’s built around the reader’s desire to hurt some poor woman who (at least in her real life incarnation) has done nothing wrong.

I think you could easily argue that this novel is harmful, because it indulges very negative feelings that should not be indulged.

But I don’t think you can argue that the book is somehow unsuccessful or poorly-constructed. The book wants to torture the woman from Instagram, and that’s exactly what it does.

If I have any critique of the book, I’d say that it needs a villain. Gone Girl was powered by multiple conflicts, between the husband and the detectives, then between the husband and wife, and then between the wife and the crazy guy keeping her captive.

Here, in this book, there’s no real cat-and-mouse game. There’s a woman, Shannon, who is trying to take down Natalie, but her plot takes a long time to develop and isn’t really revealed until the final pages of the book. And other conflicts, between Natalie and her husband, between Natalie and her father-in-law, and between Natalie and the people in the 1855 version of her life, aren’t as well-developed as they could be.

But Gone Girl is sui generis. That was Gillian Flynn’s third novel, and she’d honed her plotting skills to a sharp point. I mean…that was a novel that launched an entire genre that, fourteen years later, is still going strong. It was an unparalleled achievement. In contrast, Yesteryear, is just a pretty entertaining book.

The ending of Yesteryear also wasn’t quite right. It felt like too much—by the end of the book I’d attained a kind of respect for Natalie, and I felt like she deserved a triumph like the sort Amy got in Gone Girl. The big twist in Yesteryear also felt quite sweaty and unrealistic. Gone Girl had this problem as well—several times it introduced twists that didn’t really hold up, but the book moved so fast that you didn’t have time to think about whether stuff like Amy’s fake diary really made sense.

Lost Lambs

My real-life book club recently read Lost Lambs at my suggestion. This is a novel by a 29-year-old author, and my pitch to my book club of fortysomethings was “Let’s learn what the young are thinking about these days!”

I would say that opinion was somewhat mixed. One person was very enthusiastic, most others didn’t really care for the book. I was somewhere in between.

It would be extremely difficult for me to explain the difference in market-positioning between Lost Lambs and Yesteryear. They’re both basically intended for the book club market, but Lost Lambs is slightly more hip. It’s from an editor at FSG, Jackson Howard, who is known for publishing trendy authors with a lot of indie cred. The author, Madeline Cash, started a magazine called Forever that was hot for a while, and she had well-received short story collection that came out a few years ago from Clash Books. I would say the market-positioning of her book is more literary than Yesteryear, but only in some vague, hard-to-define way.

Anyway, I love Jonathan Franzen, and Lost Lambs was essentially Cash’s attempt to write a Franzen-style family novel. It’s about a suburban couple who’ve recently opened their relationship, which has resulted in negative effects on their three daughters. Everyone is very quirky, and they live in a Franzen-esque heightened reality. For instance, one daughter has an online relationship with a jihadist. Another daughter is dating an Iraq War vet who’s also the bodyguard to a shadowy tech billionaire. The husband is sleeping with a nun, who runs the local chapter of a religious outfit called the Lost Lambs. And there’s a lot of other zany antics.

I enjoyed reading it. But…it did feel like the book was trying too hard. You know, it felt like Yesteryear really came from somewhere deep inside the author. Caro Claire Burke had some feelings of envy and hatred towards this Ballerina Farms woman, and those feelings congealed into this hateful and intoxicating novel. In contrast, it felt like Madeline Cash just wanted to write an important literary novel that would be compared favorably to Jonathan Franzen.

Both books achieved their aims, but I respect the aims of Yesteryear much more. It’s a book that feels urgent in a way that Lost Lambs doesn’t.

Elsewhere on the internet…

reviewed my forthcoming nonfiction book, What’s So Great About The Great Books:

I really respect that she cops to having only read about two-thirds of the Lifetime list she recommends in What’s So Great, while reading almost 2,000 other books during the same period, including texts from a wide range of world traditions excluded from these lists, as well as 20th century and contemporary American books. She’s in no way arguing that these particular classics are the only books worth reading, only that these are the best, most “universal and timeless” reads if you want to really understand what is good in literature and how specific people thought and lived in societies very different from the contemporary world.

Danielle Shi also reviewed the book for ZYZZYVA:

Kanakia’s comprehensive survey of books draws on several traditions, borrowing from Clifton Fadiman and John S. Major’s The New Lifetime Reading Plan, their list a byproduct of a Great Books educational movement in 1930s-’40s America. That movement, “though it cloaked itself in tradition,” derives its stature not from its perceived social cachet, or any real influence within the mainstream literary world. Actually, Kanakia suggests, the “Greatest Hits compilation of 2,500 years of Western literature […] was a rather new way of educating kids and was a target of ridicule by most cultured people.”

I also have an SF event on May 30th, where I am in conversation with . To get into this event, you must RSVP, which you can do here.

What’s So Great About The Great Books?

I hope it goes without saying that you do not need to buy my book, and you definitely don’t need to read my book. Life is precious, you should only read books you’re interested in.

This book feels a bit awkwardly-situated between two genres of books that I enjoy very much. The first is the full-throated polemical defense of the liberal arts education (a la Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind). This kind of book is so enjoyable to read, but it suffers from the unfortunate difficulty that nobody is really against liberal arts education. Nobody is out there saying Plato sucks and nobody should read him.

Many people imagine, in their minds, that Plato is under attack, and thus they are able to write very strong, stirring defenses of him—defenses that I enjoy reading. But I unfortunately do not think Plato is under attack, so I am unable to write such a book.

The second kind of book that is very good is the humble guidebook, like The New Lifetime Reading Plan, the book that’s been my companion for almost twenty years now. What an excellent book this is! It just contains page and a half descriptions of the work of about a hundred and thirty authors. It is so good.

Unfortunately, this kind of guidebook is very hard to write. Basically, you need to actually be familiar with all these authors. And most people, even very erudite people, don’t really have the level of familiarity that is needed. I personally didn’t feel confident that I could improve on The New Lifetime Reading Plan.

So…what I’ve written is somewhere in between, which is a defense of a specific course of reading. And what’s great about my book is that it is actually controversial. Everyone is in favor of Plato in the abstract, but not everyone is in favor of the idea that you should just pick up the very readable Benjamin Jowett translation off Project Gutenberg and start plowing through the dialogues (the way I did) without much background or context for them.

Lots of people would say that this is something which is unlikely to be very productive for the average reader. But…I say different. I think it is likely to be productive. However, I treat very fairly with all the arguments both for and against this activity (reading the Great Books in translation, on your own, without a huge amount of outside context).

And…that’s my book! You will surely be hearing a lot more about it over the next six weeks, but by July 1st the release cycle will be over, and I’ll probably take a break from blogging for a month.

Preorder a copy from Amazon or from Bookshop or from your local bookstore. And you can RSVP for the NYC event here and the SF event here.

I recently read an article by Sam Kriss on this topic, where he used the ideas of an English professor (and Jesuit priest) named Walter Ong to try and imagine what a ‘post-literate’ future might look like:

....the post-literate age will have more in common with primitive society than it does with the industrial modernity that produced it. After writing, we will once again live in a world defined entirely by our direct sensory experience. But now, our direct sensory experience won’t be of the things that physically surround us, but the images streaming through our phones.

Over the next several weeks, I came across a few more mentions of Walter Ong while browsing the internet, and I realized something. This was the guy! Ong is this year’s guy! You know, just like the guy three years ago was Christopher Lasch, and two years ago it was Rene Girard, now it’s Walter Ong’s turn to be the literary theorist who gets resurrected to explain something about our contemporary condition.1

When a new guy gets anointed, you better get on it, because he usually disappears after a year or two (to be replaced by a new guy). If you wait too long, then there’s no point: I’m not gonna be the fool who’s wading through Rene Girard in 2026.

Where there’s a guy, there’s a book.

Each guy has a main book. Nobody’s got time to be reading seven or eight books by the guy. In Walter Ong’s case, the book is Orality and Literacy, which came out in 1982. And this book is about three things:

1. The difference between oral and written literature.

2. The difference between oral and literate individuals.

3. The difference between oral and literate cultures.

Right from the start, there’s some need for an awkward terminological explanation, because what is orality? I have never heard of this term before! I am used to this other term, illiteracy, which seems to resemble orality. However, I gather that it’s not PC to talk about ‘illiteracy’ if you’re someone who studies orality, because it implies that literacy is the superior state, and that illiteracy is lacking.

So Ong uses the term ‘oral’ or ‘orality’ to describe a state of existing without writing. He further subdivides this into ‘primary orality’, which is when there’s no writing at all in the person’s culture, and ‘secondary orality’, which is when your culture has writing, but there’s something within your culture that has oral characteristics.

Ong begins with oral literature. He talks about the discovery in the 1930s, by his thesis advisor, Milman Parry, that The Iliad and The Odyssey had begun as oral literature. This is a debate that is too complicated for me to summarize here, but I guess a lot of people thought that these works, although they’d drawn on oral storytelling traditions, had been composed for the pages, and they treated them as singular works, composed by an author, just like Herman Melville composed Moby-Dick. But Milman Parry said no, that he could tell from the structure of the texts, with their repeated epithets, and something about the organization, that they must’ve been composed on the fly by oral storytellers. And that each time these storytellers tell the story, it’s different. Oral storytellers don’t memorize a tale exactly, instead they learn certain formula for constructing a narrative, which means each time they tell it, there’s a different organization and different episodes. They also have a tendency to wander down certain tracks, extemporize for a bit, and then dig their way out. It’s a wholly different way of telling stories, Parry said.

And he claimed the written versions we have of The Iliad and The Odyssey are basically one particular instance of this style of storytelling. And then he did a bunch of work to try to demonstrate that this was true.

Ong makes a great case that The Iliad and The Odyssey are basically as close to oral literature as we can get—that they were translated directly to the page from some oral storytelling tradition, and thus they give us a very clear view of what orality looks like.

Downstream of Parry’s work, there was a big effort to define what culture in an oral tradition might look like. The big thing about an oral tradition is that it’s all remembered, nothing is written down. It’s not just that it’s recited aloud, it’s also that there’s no ur-text to consult, besides peoples’ memory.

There was a list of (I think) eight characteristics that were shared by oral literature. Parry said it tended to speak in aggregates (lots of simple declarative statements, often joined by ‘and’), to use lots of adjectives, to have a lot of redundancy and repetition, to be conservative (i.e. not introduce any ideas or concepts), to remain very close to direct human experience, to be ‘agonistically’ toned (i.e. concerned with conflict), to be empathetic or participatory, and to be homeostatic.

Orality isn’t worse than literacy (except it clearly is)

But if this was just a book about oral literature or culture amongst oral peoples, nobody would care about this book.

The meat of the book is that Ong makes a lot of statements about how literacy unlocks new modes of thought and new potentiality for a culture.

As he puts it:

Oral cultures indeed produce powerful and beautiful verbal performances of high artistic and human worth, which are no longer even possible once writing has taken possession of the psyche. Nevertheless, without writing, human consciousness cannot achieve its fuller potentials, cannot produce other beautiful and powerful creations.

It’s such an interesting rhetorical performance on Ong’s part, because he’s so insistent that literacy is not superior to orality—he harps relentlessly on this point. But he also keeps insisting, often in the very next paragraph, that civilization (and all the good things we derive from it) really depend on literacy.

There is hardly an oral culture or a predominantly oral culture left in the world today that is not somehow aware of the vast complex of powers forever inaccessible without literacy. This awareness is agony for persons rooted in primary orality, who want literacy passionately but who also know very well that moving into the exciting world of literacy means leaving behind much that is exciting and deeply loved in the earlier oral world. We have to die to continue living.

Basically, once you have literacy you get no more Iliads! Those are gone, they’re impossible. You just can’t do an Iliad anymore (Ong claims), unless your entire culture is oral. But...you do get science and philosophy.

Some illiterate people in Uzbekistan couldn’t do abstract thoughts (maybe)

There’s a lot of talk about how abstract thought is impossible without literacy. And Ong isn’t just saying that without literacy there is no way to advance a certain kind of scientific or philosophical knowledge, he is saying that it’s literally impossible for oral people to even do the kinds of thinking that would lead to scientific or philosophical knowledge.

The major evidence here comes from a study in the Soviet Union by A.R. Luria. This man went to what is now Uzbekistan in 1931 and studied illiterate people. He would ask them a lot of questions to assess their cognitive abilities, and he discovered that the cognitive abilities of people with even marginal literacy were very different from the cognitive abilities of illiterate people.

In Luria’s field work, requests for definitions of even the most concrete objects met with resistance. ‘Try to explain to me what a tree is.’ ‘Why should I? Everyone knows what a tree is, they don’t need me telling them’, replied one illiterate peasant, aged 22. Why define, when a real-life setting is infinitely more satisfactory than a definition? Basically, the peasant was right. There is no way to refute the world of primary orality. All you can do is walk away from it into literacy.

In Luria’s study there are a lot of answers like this, from illiterate people who argue with the premises of his questions and claim not to understand them. Ong claims these answers are redolent of orality.

‘Say you go to a place where there are no cars. What will you tell people [a car is]?’ ‘If I go, I’ll tell them that buses have four legs, chairs in front for people to sit on, a roof for shade and an engine. But when you get right down to it, I’d say: “If you get in a car and go for a drive, you’ll find out.”’ The respondent enumerates some features but turns back ultimately to personal, situational experience.

Whereas if one of Luria’s subjects had even a little bit of education, Ong often found their answers to be much more satisfactory:

By contrast, a literate collective-farm worker, aged 30: ‘It’s made in a factory. In one trip it can cover the distance it would take a horse ten days to make – it moves that fast. It uses fire and steam. We first have to set the fire going so the water gets steaming hot – the steam gives the machine its power. . . . I don’t know whether there is water in a car, must be. But water isn’t enough, it also needs fire’. Although he was not well informed, he did make an attempt to define a car. His definition, however, is not a sharp-focused description of visual appearance – this kind of description is beyond the capacity of the oral mind – but a definition in terms of its operations.

Many people find this section to be one of the most convincing parts of Orality and Literacy, but I am less convinced. To my eyes, the ‘bad’ definition of the car seemed fine! It wasn’t technical and didn’t talk about machines and how the car works, but that’s probably because the illiterate person just didn’t know how a car operated. It’s not that they were incapable of abstraction, it’s just that they were ignorant of details that Ong feels are somehow necessary for explaining what a car is.

On a broader level, it felt to me like a lot of things were described as cognitive differences when they could just as easily be cultural differences.

I mean, you’re talking about the Soviet Union in 1931. The central government had come to this remote area and were trying to undertake some sort of wholescale civilizational replacement. They were trying to alter the way of life of these people.

In that scenario, I think you’re going to find that there are lots of differences between literate and illiterate people. If someone is literate, it means they’ve become assimilated to this new culture, which contains things like researchers who barge into your home and ask you silly questions. You’ve learned that it’s best to humor them.

Whereas if you’re less acculturated—if you don’t work for wages in a factory, but are instead a pastoralist or subsistence farmer—then you don’t necessarily see the point of answering questions like this.

Like...is this measuring the difference between orality and literacy? Or is it measuring the difference between the native culture and the imported Russian culture?

Whence came modernity

You could say that there is no difference between those two things. That Russian culture is literate culture, and that this native culture is oral culture. But it seems to me like that’s the major question at the heart of this book.

There is a thing called modernity—this mysterious thing that happened around two hundred and fifty years ago, starting in England, where suddenly every aspect of society started to change. And modernity offered England these wild comparative advantages over other cultures, which enabled it to project a level of force much larger than its population would suggest. And as a result of that pressure, other cultures sought to emulate England. Through that process of emulation, modernity spread across the globe.

But...is modernity really the same as literacy? Does that ring true? I, personally, remain unconvinced. Literacy arose...what...five thousand years ago. Modernity arose two hundred and fifty years ago. There’s a pretty big gap in between that needs to be explained away.

Walter Ong tries to split the baby by using a bunch of caveats and just-so stories. For instance, he at one point claims that Egyptian hieroglyphics, Babylonian cuneiform, and Chinese ideograms are lesser forms of literacy. He goes through all kinds of other writing systems and explains why these systems are inferior to the Greek alphabet. As he puts it:

...the Greeks did something of major psychological importance when they developed the first alphabet complete with vowels. Havelock (1976) believes that this crucial, more nearly total transformation of the word from sound to sight gave ancient Greek culture its intellectual ascendancy over other ancient cultures.

That’s the first step. First you dismiss every kind of writing that’s not an alphabet. Anything that’s got pictographs is out—those guys are basically just oral, forget about them.

But then...he says that even once you’ve got literacy, you don’t have a truly literate culture until you’ve got printing. You don’t just need words. You also need mass distribution of words.

And then...even beyond that...there’s some additional stuff that needs to happen before you’ve got a truly literate culture. As he puts it:

Oral habits of thought and expression, including massive use of formulaic elements, sustained in use largely by the teaching of the old classical rhetoric, still marked prose style of almost every sort in Tudor England some two thousand years after Plato’s campaign against oral poets. They were effectively obliterated in English, for the most part, only with the Romantic Movement two centuries later. Many modern cultures that have known writing for centuries but have never fully interiorized it, such as Arabic culture and certain other Mediterranean cultures rely heavily on formulaic thought and expression still.

Basically, if you feel a culture somehow isn’t advanced enough, then you can just say they haven’t “fully interiorized” literacy yet.

This is convenient as a rhetorical tactic, because it means the assertions in this book are impossible to falsify.

(This circularity is something that occurs whenever you resort to essentialism. For instance, you might say that men are essentially aggressive. And if someone says ‘I am a man and I am not aggressive’, then the response might be that you’ve just insufficiently ‘interiorized’ the true nature of manliness.)

The essence of orality

But this is where the real meat of the book is. We are not necessarily interested in the cognitive abilities of people in Uzbekistan who can’t read. Maybe those Uzbek people had the ability to describe a car and maybe they didn’t. It doesn’t matter.

What we’re more concerned about are the kids right now, in contemporary America, who apparently can’t read very well. These kids may or may not be able to describe a car. They may or may not be able to engage in abstract thought. We don’t know.

Furthermore, these kids, whether or not they can read books and engage in abstract thought, have access now to forms of communication that allow them to broadcast their voices to millions of other people. They can make videos. They can record podcasts. They can do tweets (I read one article that said tweets are an essentially oral form of literature).

It’s true that it’s been decades since we’ve lived in a society where the printed word was the most important form of mass media, but even when most people were getting their info from TV and radio, these forms of communication were still governed by the printed word. They were owned and operated by highly literate people, who had very literate habits of mind.

Now, with the tiktoks and youtubes, it’s not like that. You potentially have people who are very influential, but who have an essentially oral frame of mind. There is nothing stopping someone from gaining millions of followers and influencing public affairs even though they can’t read good.

This is what it means to say our society might be becoming an oral or post-literate society. Not that reading scores are down, but that literate people themselves might no longer be in the driver’s seat.

I do think this ‘orality’ idea is somewhat useful, because otherwise people like me (people who are highly attuned to the written word) look at a lot of online discourse and think, “This is really stupid. We live in idiocracy. Dumb people are taking over.” But if you think, “Oh, some of these people are not stupid, they’re just behaving the way an intelligent oral person behaves” then somehow it’s easier to think about why people might be speaking the way they do.

Orality and ‘the discourse’

Reading this book has given me a lot to think about. You know, when you spend a lot of time online, you encounter something called ‘the discourse’. And this is basically just ‘whatever people are talking about today’. But if you try to describe ‘the discourse’ to people, it’s often quite difficult. You have to hunt up tweets and TikToks and other really ephemeral things.

And the discourse feels like it has some qualities that are reminiscent of oral culture, in that it’s quite repetitive, just the same thoughts and feelings, repeated consistently, and that whenever something happens, you can basically predict the form that the discourse will take, but somehow it doesn’t matter, because moving through the stations of the discourse fulfills some social function in our society.

However, I do feel like the discourse always existed! You know, I noticed this back when I was writing my piece on the New Yorker story. I’d encounter all these articles where critics referenced an ongoing chatter, on the cocktail party circuit, about whether the New Yorker was any good. This chatter was ephemeral—we only know it existed because it was written up in these article—and it was quite repetitive. You see the same complaints about The New Yorker’s fiction section (that it was simultaneously insubstantial and overly-sentimental), repeated again and again, across more than five decades.

Now, a lot of that cocktail party chatter happens online.

Similarly, people don’t have friends anymore. They don’t go to parties anymore. They don’t join organizations anymore. A lot of in-person conversations that were happening ten years ago—they don’t happen in-person anymore. Instead, they occur online, in a way that allows other people to overhear and eavesdrop.

I think it’s a stretch to say that the existence of this online conversation somehow means society has become more oral. Doesn’t it mean the opposite? That we have become less oral? Even our orality has become much more literate than it was in the past. Like, instead of doing phone calls, we do text messages—it’s a form of communication that leaves a trace, leaves a record. Even if text messages don’t look like literary texts, they are still texts of a sort.

It’s worthwhile to think about how there’s a lot of text now that partakes of orality, but I hesitate to make the next logical leap—the idea that somehow, because people do tweets and TikToks, that our ability as a society to engage in abstract reasoning has somehow decreased. I don’t necessarily feel convinced by that idea.

But I still highly recommend this book

None of that is a knock on this book. Orality and Literacy is a great introduction to the concept of orality. It’s only two hundred pages long. It’s written in what feels (to me) like a pretty straightforward style. Walter Ong obviously feels a kinship to Marshall McLuhan and references him in the text, but McLuhan has always felt like a bit of a charlatan to me. He would write in these gnomic utterances, and it was hard to tell what he really meant. Yes, you could read meaning into his work, but I never knew if that meaning was actually what McLuhan intended.

Walter Ong is different. His ideas seem pretty clear, and he communicates them effectively. I would say the ROI for picking up this book is pretty high, but you better act fast! I am pretty uncool, so once I’ve heard about something, then that’s the beginning of the end. We only have maybe another six months of Ong before he’s done, and we move on to the next guy.

What’s So Great About The Great Books?

It was nice to be ’s first podcast guest! It was a free-ranging discussion but my favorite part was when we discussed The Closing of the American Mind.

ISAAC: There’s something interesting about reading somebody who regards you with the utmost contempt…But that’s a turnoff, right? That’s obviously different from what you’re trying to do. I’m surprised to hear you sound so enthusiastic.

Naomi: Well, it was not a turnoff when I read the book. I was twenty-six; I had already read Proust and all this other stuff. So I was like, this book was so great. Yes, I am better than everybody else. The Closing the American Mind is really written for people who want to feel superior to other people, which is all people. In that way [The Closing of the American Mind] is a lot better than my book.

Although my book is sadly inferior to Allan Bloom’s, it’s still pretty good!

What’s So Great About The Great Books is about why people should read classic literature (and read it in this one very highly structured way that was invented in the 1930s by some professors at the University of Chicago) will be out on May 26th! Preorder a copy from Amazon or from Bookshop.

I also have two launch events. One is in NYC (May 27), where I’ll be in conversation with Clare Frances. To RSVP click on the button.

RSVP to New York event

And the other is in SF (May 30). Here I’ll be in conversation with Ross Barkan (who also has a novel that came out recently, Colossus). This is at an undisclosed location, so you definitely have to RSVP if you want to attend.

RSVP to SF event

Read more

From her review, I discovered that Mia Ballard’s Shy Girl has an insane premise. It’s about a sex worker who gets hired by a man to sexually role-play as his dog. But then he locks her up and keeps her captive for seven years.

I was a bit amazed that a big corporate press would publish this, since it’s obviously the author’s sexual fantasy. You know, the treatment of the subject isn’t overtly erotic, there aren’t a lot of stroke scenes (I hunted down a copy of the book and looked through it), but the overall scenario is basically an erotic scenario and the protagonist seems like a self-insert for the author (her physical description resembles Ballard’s author photo).

I found myself kind of admiring the book. Yes, it’s hard to read because it has that uncanny AI voice. But at the same time it is very brave to release something that so clearly seems like a sexual fantasy.

I should clarify that, in the novel, the woman isn’t particularly aroused by the situation, but, to me, that makes sense for this kind of book. In real life, if you’re interested in being sexually objectified as a dog, then you need to pursue it as a fantasy, as a roleplay, with strictly defined limits that make clear everything is in good fun. But if you’re going to write a novel about that fantasy, then it’s more arousing to write it as reality, with no consent and no limits. What if it actually happened! What would it be like?

In the novel, the main character struggles to escape her captor’s control—in the author’s note, Ballard goes out of her way to say she sees the novel as empowering “assertion of autonomy in a world that often strips women of choice, dignity, and freedom”)—but to my eyes many parts of the story read like erotica, and there’s another character in the story, Cupcake, who’s fully bought in to the fantasy and in love with her captor.

It’s probably too reductive to call the book an outright erotic fantasy, but it does feel like it’s cutting very close to the author’s desires.

As I browsed this book, I found myself thinking, “This book seems to come from deep in the author’s psyche, to a degree that feels quite unusual for a traditionally-published book. And what does it mean that this deeply personal book was apparently written with AI assistance?”

My second thought was that perhaps I am mistaken in seeing this book as unusual in its subject matter. Maybe there are lots of traditionally-published books that have outrageous nonconsensual dominance fantasies, but I have never heard about them, because they didn’t make the news due to an AI scandal.

However, this book started as a self-published novel. It only got republished by Hachette because it got heat in the self-pub world. And that makes me think that it was filling some kind of gap. Like there’s obviously room out there for books that aren’t sold as erotica, but which eroticize nonconsensual sexual situations with a wink-wink nudge-nudge of plausible deniability.

In the literary world, a similar book that comes to mind is A Little Life. This is also a book that was full of nonconsensual sexual situations, which it related in a closed-off, detached way. You weren’t necessarily meant to be aroused by the sex, but the situation as a whole—Jude’s utter abjection—is very compelling (I reviewed A Little Life earlier this year).

That was also a book that came very close to being in poor taste. The editor of the book, Gerry Howard, really wanted the author, Hanya Yanagihara, to tone down the rape and torture, but she refused.

I feel like the broader lesson here is that most people who are capable of writing a competent novel are unwilling to write something like Shy Girl or A Little Life. Something about the process of becoming a good writer tends to domesticate the imagination, so you become wedded to certain norms of taste that make it impossible to imagine releasing a book that might reflect poorly on you the way Shy Girl and A Little Life could’ve reflected poorly on their authors.

Most authors would be mortified to have to have their name attached to a novel with Shy Girl’s premise. Like, can you imagine querying agents telling them about your sex slave dog book? Can you imagine reading reviews for this sex slave dog book that you’ve written? Can you imagine having the sex slave dog book attached to your authorial identity forever? Even without the AI scandal, this book’s premise would be a lot to live down.

Becoming a good writer means caring what other people might think of your work. And once you’ve been taught what a ‘good’ novel looks like, it’s very hard to fully let go of that idea so you can write about the part of your psyche that wants to be penned up like a dog.

Obviously a great writer is able to forget themselves and write whatever they need to. A Little Life wasn’t written with AI—Hanya is just a great writer who’s somehow able to tame her kink and make it conform, to some extent, to the norms of the literary novel. But if you’re not great like Hanya, now you still have the option of just guiding AI through the process of turning your fantasy into a competently-told work of fictional prose.

Right now, millions of people are probably engaged in AI-assisted fantasizing just to get their rocks off. And over the next few years, some of those people will master the art of erotic prompting to such a degree that they start thinking, “I bet other people would pay money for the text I am producing.” And oftentimes they will be right!

This AI-assisted erotica probably won’t be better than fully-human writing on the level of structure or storytelling or voice, but it is very possible that it will come across, at least to some readers, as being more authentic and unselfconscious, precisely because it seems to spring directly from the part of the human psyche that doesn’t usually get the chance to author a book.

When I wrote about effort-posting, I said that writing for these journals was a decent credential, but it wasn’t a great way to reach readers. This drew the response that you write for these journals if you want to reach the right readers—the subset of readers who want to explore big ideas in some depth.

I wondered if maybe there was something to this critique, so I ordered stacks and stacks of journals (including at least four issues from all the journals named above).

The first stack that arrived was from The Hedgehog Review. I picked this journal because often writes in it, and whenever I click through to his writing, it’s really good. He is a classic essayist—a bit like Montaigne—he picks a topic, and then he tells you a bunch of information related to that topic, but he cycles through the information in a very orderly, logical way. For instance, I read a piece of his in a recent issue that was about college towns, and he described the two types of college towns that he understood, liberal arts college towns and big public university towns. And then he talked about how town vs. gown tensions tended to be worse in the latter, and why that might be, and it was all told mostly from the townie perspective—which he seemed able to inhabit very believably. I was quite entertained. With Phil Christman you’re in good hands.

I guess going into The Hedgehog Review, I was guided by the name, which is from that saying about how the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. I assumed this journal would be full of people who only know one thing—people who are obsessed with something, and who would expound upon that thing in a slightly wide-eyed, insane way.

And the best articles were actually like that. For instance, there was an article about architects. Basically this author, Witold Rybczynski, had read a book about the effect of time on an art form, and he applied the lessons of this book to architecture. And he described how various architects suffered because they were born at the wrong time or somehow didn’t change the time:

It makes a difference when an architect appears: Is it during the early days of a movement, at its full-blown height, or closer to its fizzling-out demise? The early days are tolerant, finesse is not yet required; at its height, a style demands more, more sophistication and more expertise; and in the final stage, a practitioner risks being left behind as the most ambitious talents are already onto the next new thing.

The article was a beautiful series of anecdotes about how various architects either adapted to changing times or refused to adapt, and the ways that their natural temperaments either allows them to succeed or got in the way of their success. The lesson was...there is no lesson. To succeed, you need to be aligned with the spirit of the age: sometimes that means fostering new styles, other times it means aligning yourself with the reigning style.

Another great article was this one by Colin Wells about how the Ancient Greeks were superior because they were the first culture to develop an alphabet. The author claimed that the alphabet led to the development of abstract thought and to the efflorescence of philosophy and science in Ancient Greece. Wells also said, “tracing the slow development of abstract language and thought in what remains of Greek and Latin literature is the true task of classics.”

Basically, the author really wants to argue, in some scientific way, for the preeminence of Ancient Greek culture, but without being accused of cultural chauvinism or scientific racism, so he’s like—the Greeks weren’t inherently superior, but they’re still noteworthy as the first people in history to use this groundbreaking cognitive technology and the reason we study them is in order to study the effect of this technology.

This article doesn’t really hold up because…the Greeks didn’t invent the alphabet—the Phoenicians did. And the Phoenicians did have a literature, so why didn’t they come up with all this great philosophy and science that Greece did? Secondly, it seems to ignore China. They didn’t use an alphabet. And this author tries to argue that as a result, they were mired in orality: “Despite the variety, sophistication, and complexity of, say, Chinese...traditions, those traditions, even when written, express themselves in oral patterns of language and thought.” I didn’t really buy it. China seems like they have some pretty complex, abstract thoughts.

But at least it was interesting!

A third article, not as crackpot but still weird, was this one by Adam Garfinkle about how Edith Wharton and F. Scott Fitzgerald mentioned, in their fiction, a certain father-son pair. The father was an educator who’d travel America with a 19th-century slide projector, delivering lectures about his travels to the Holy Land. The son wrote books about the inherent superiority of the white race. And it was all mixed up in some complicated way with Wharton and Fitzgerald. I loved it.

I feel like I am making this journal sound incredible right now. The journal I am describing is just so good! Can you imagine? What if every piece in this journal was wacky stuff about slide-projector guys and weird, incorrect theories about the cognitive effects of developing an alphabet. That would be a journal that I could proudly recommend to you.

The themed sections were underwhelming

Unfortunately, all these incredible articles (with the exception of the Christman piece) were in the back half of the journal, where they stick the miscellany.

The front half, the bulk of the journal, was devoted to these themed sections. Every issue had a theme. In one issue, the theme was “Lessons of Babel” (i.e. it was about translation). In another issue, the theme was “Humanism In A Posthumanist Age.” And these themed sections were disappointing.

Basically, for these sections, they asked their regular contributors—the kind of people who’d ordinarily be writing the wild-eyed stuff in the back of the book—to write about some topic of pressing importance. And you can tell that a lot of these people felt constrained by the need to make their personal obsession fit somehow with the theme.

Sometimes, the person would just talk about their pet peeve, and that was almost always fine, like Gary Saul Morson had a piece that was essentially about why the Pevear and Volokhonsky translations (of Russian literature) suck and are horrible. I personally don’t think the various translations differ that much, but he had very strong opinions, and he really felt like translators shouldn’t try to capture the rhythms of the original language, because then all their translations end up sounding the same. You should instead translate them into regular English, and try to capture whatever made that particular author unique—what made them stand out from other authors. It’s an understandable point.

Other times, it felt like people were really straining to make their thing fit with the theme. For instance, Catherine Moon really wanted to be telling me about Edith Stein, this fascinating nun and Catholic saint who also studied with Edmund Husserl. After she became a nun, she tried somehow to reconcile Husserl’s teachings and Catholicism, but...here the article became confused, because it started to be about translation and Stein’s thoughts about translation, and it just didn’t really fit with the Husserl stuff! It didn’t cohere, and I got quite confused .

The themed essays were full of platitudes

But the bulk of the themed contributions weren’t even as good as those two. Most of the themed essays felt insubstantial, as if the authors were reaching for big ideas and finding only the conventional wisdom.

For instance, Richard Hughes Gibson talked about AI and machine-translation, producing one of these articles about how AI is going to destroy our ability to think. It ended with the lines:

Automatic machine translation is being marketed as a means to expand our little worlds. It may just as easily render the world back to us on even more narrow terms.

I mean come on. This is not good! Like...surely there is something more interesting to say about the fact that now, with AI, we can translate easily foreign text easily and rapidly in a way that wasn’t possible before—something that goes beyond the idea that this is somehow scary and bad.

Even if you genuinely think machine translation is scary and bad, it’s not useful to write an article about it, because we’re all capable of having those thoughts. I also am like, “What if this machine translation isn’t accurate!? What then?”

This style of article felt a bit disrespectful to the reader. It felt...ponderous and pretentious. Like, just because you’re a professor you somehow have a privileged insight into a reality that we all, as human beings, are experiencing at the same time.

The “Humanism in a Post-human Age” themed section was particularly bad. Antón Barba-Kay was generally one of the best contributors to The Hedgehog Review (he usually writes about how technology is affecting our culture and institutions), but in this case he tried to make some point about how social media was affecting empathy. He seemed to be saying that social media somehow heightened our empathy, by exposing us to many more images of suffering, and from very diverse places. But that this heightened empathy resulted in fatigue and backlash.

Normally in Barba-Kay’s articles there is evidence of some deep thinking. Like he had a great one in a different issue about how social media undermined democracy. And in that article, he made some great points, which is that by democracy, we really mean these democratic institutions that’re used to channel public opinion and turn it into something actionable. Anger that gets whipped up through social media then gets turned on those institutions, weakening them, but that anger can’t be turned into direct action on its own. He had clearly thought very hard about the relationship between social media and democracy.

But this social media and empathy article was just...musings. It wasn’t well-thought out. And that was the best of the “humanism in the post-human age” articles.

Geoff Shullenberger had one where he claimed that “antihumanism” has prevailed in late-20th-century academia. But the article was all over the place. There’s one anecdote about something called ‘Queer Chemical Studies’, where people apparently study how chemicals ‘queer’ the body. And then some stuff about Nick Land. And it’s like...this isn’t really gelling. You’re trying to say that the academic humanities somehow hates humanity? Except he doesn’t even say that—he doesn’t say anything you can pin down—it’s all just sly, sneering talk that never actually makes any points you can hold onto (a typical example: he says “various forms of antihumanism…prevailed in late-twentieth-century academia, which, even as they repudiated the human, valorized a certain human subject position: that of the critic of humanism.”) It’s just words—a waste of time.

Same with David Polansky’s “The Human Condition or the Conditional Human?“ This one is about how humanism can provide a counter-balance to the ‘antihuman’ tendencies of the modern era—various technologies are mentioned that seem ‘antihuman’ (genetic engineering, euthanasia, generative AI). Then there’s some talk about what humanism means, but the opposition between technological progress and humanism didn’t ring true. It involves drawing some opposition between Scott Alexander, a thinker who is interested in the effects, on humanity, of high technology, and a classical humanist like Cicero who, Polansky claims, “described philosophy as learning how to die.”

This, again, seems to lack substance. You’re making an assertion about the beliefs of people who believe in technological progress, saying that they are avoiding reality. But the reality is that certain things are (or might be) possible, and Scott Alexander does much more to examine those possibilities, and their effects on human existence, than this article does. I don’t think it does credit to the humanist tradition to simply assert that proponents of technological progress are living in denial.

Out of the four themed sections that I read, the strongest was “After Neoliberalism”. I could quibble with this section—its two centerpiece essays, by Blake Smith and by James Block, covered the same ground. Smith’s was much stronger, which highlighted the weakness of Block’s piece (Smith’s piece cited actual thinkers on the subject, while Block made a bunch of sweeping assertions about the nature of neoliberalism, making me wonder if these were generally accepted ideas or merely his own notions). But with this section, it felt like the authors were doing more than merely phoning it in.

(Idea articles also tended to be better if they had a narrower scope. For instance, this piece by Sam Gee has the same “humanism is under threat” tone as many of the other pieces, but it focuses narrowly on Lionel Trilling and how he defended humanism in the wake of World War II, when many liberals became disillusioned with it. Similarly, I enjoyed and was edified by Tara Isabella Burton’s piece on right-wing vitalism and Antón Barba-Key’s piece on Curtis Yarvin.)

The journal has muddled aims

Probably I am being too hard on this journal. Not every article can be a slam-dunk. God knows I have written some pretty tendentious stuff in my time. And some of these writers are really good.

But the journal’s aims are muddled, which is why they can’t pull together a good themed section.

The journal is published by the Institute for Advanced Cultural Study at UVA. This is an institute dedicated to humanism. They seem have a bit of a religious bent—not too much—but they’re the kind of humanists who believe that there exists some telos, some purpose to humanity, that we can derive using our reason. (As they put it, the Institute operates from the “assumption that all humans are normatively ordered creatures that seek to flourish.”)

I’m also this kind of humanist, by the way. I’ve mentioned a few times that I’m a Hindu. I believe in dharma. I believe that the universe is underpinned by some principles of cosmic justice, and it’s possible for human beings to understand and to bring our society into line with these principles.

The institute also operates from the belief that this humanism is under threat. It says in academic life—particularly in the humanities and social sciences—there is “a pervasive skepticism toward the very possibility of truths capable of establishing the ennobling ideals of human dignity, standards of decency, codes of personal character, and public moral obligation.”

But it’s not just academia that’s got it wrong. The Institute’s mission statement also says: “For the most part, our major institutions—including the market, political liberalism, medicine, science, even education and law—either deny or are unable to acknowledge the normative foundations that underpin them.”

Basically, everyone is in denial about the fact that there is such a thing as goodness, and that human institutions ought to pursue goodness.

I personally don’t agree with this assessment. From my perspective, I hear a lot of talk about goodness from people in the humanities, from medicine, from science, even from judges, lawyers and politicians. Everyone seems very concerned with doing what is right!

The problem is that they often disagree with me about what is right.

It’s true there are also a few nihilists, people who think might makes right (I am thinking now of Peter Thiel and Stephen Miller). But these people mostly only have power in certain parts of the tech sector and the Republican party and aren’t a majority even in those places.

However, I accept that the folks behind The Hedgehog Review see things differently. They see a pervasive sickness in all of our institutions. Everything, from academia to medicine to the law, has lost its way.

That’s their perspective. Great.

But…then…if that’s the case, you need big changes, right?

Here’s where the journal starts to seem muddled. Because usually when someone thinks our society is sick, they want a regime change. They want a completely different set of people to be in charge. Some people would like the post-liberal right-wing types to be in charge; others would like some sort of undefined leftist socialist regime.

But The Hedgehog Review doesn’t want either of those things. It generally seems pretty critical of the illiberal right. And there’s nary a mention of socialism anywhere in its pages.

What it wants is a return to an older sort of liberalism. This is what I got mostly from the Trilling article and from the “After Neoliberalism” article. Right now, we have this society that has a public and a private sphere. And the private sphere, which was once occupied by church, by civil society organizations, by small businesses and local ties, now seems increasingly dominated by large corporations. And the vision, I think, is for some sort of localism.

But this is the same thing that the illiberal right wants too! And I don’t think socialists are against this either. Everyone wants the same thing: local autonomy, as expressed through strong non-governmental community organizations (although, for socialists, the community organizations wouldn’t be churches, they’d be unions and co-ops). We’ve all been hearing this same rhetoric for so many years now.

It’s an essentially nostalgic, conservative vision. And I think it’s great. I love this vision. I love imagining a world that’s just like the present day, but minus the huge corporations that seem to be ruining everything. And what I also like is that The Hedgehog Review is attempting to tell me that our institutions can be rejuvenated without the massive social upheaval that the far-right and far-left both seem to want.

The major problem is that it’s hard to spin this vision in a believable way.

Right now the journal keeps saying that we need a revival of ‘humanism’. That if people accept that human beings are ‘normatively ordered’ (i.e. that there is purpose to human existence that we can derive from reason) then our institutions can be re-organized in a more sustainable way.

But…this is exactly what the post-liberal right believes. It’s the exact same rhetoric. So…obviously there is a lot of disagreement about what ‘humanism’ really entails. Now maybe The Hedgehog Review actually does believe in Orbanism—in some right-populist takeover of liberal institutions—but if so then they ought to say that.

If they don’t believe in that, then it’s hard to really see what they want. All this mealy-mouthed stuff about how everybody else is ‘antihumanist’ is just cope. It’s saying, ‘Oh, these other people don’t actually want human flourishing, and if they wanted human flourishing then they would agree with me’. But you yourself haven’t really articulated what you actually want or believe!

It is so frustrating to read pages and pages of these critiques of other people, but there’s no sense of how the author would actually do it differently.

Terror of AI

The strongest feeling I got from this journal was that the editors and the authors are absolutely terrified of AI. They think it’s bad. They want it to go away.

Great! I am also terrified of AI.

But…if you really think AI is bad, then that raises some questions about society as a whole. Because AI is basically capitalism run amok. It’s private industry, releasing this revolutionary product with no government regulation, no safeguards. And our system of government, and our society, is really based on allowing capitalism to run amok. Even Democrats were never really able to regulate big tech companies; Republicans don’t even try. So...if you don’t want government control of the economy, then I don’t know how you’re gonna stop this incredibly powerful corporate force. Like, our society is built on this engine—capitalism—which requires the government to use its power to protect the property rights of private companies. And AI, if you really think it’s an existential threat, means that our system of government—and the whole organization of our society—is bad, and that it has to change.

But The Hedgehog Review would never say, so openly, that a major principle of our society is bad or needs to be rethought in a substantial way. Instead it just insists that our institutions need to somehow be more humanist.

The Hedgehog Review probably can’t be different

Obviously, it’s their magazine. They can print whatever they want. In order to keep publishing this magazine, they need to make sure that UVA and their own donors are happy. And I imagine that the university and the donors would be substantially less happy if this magazine started taking strong political stances. Their ambiguous, indecipherable approach is probably necessary for their own long-term stability.

But from my perspective as a reader, the result is depressing. It feels like intellectual exhaustion and makes it hard to fully recommend the magazine.1

Whenever The Hedgehog Review writes about little ideas, it is great. Very playful, energetic, and interesting. But they obviously have larger ambitions. They want to make big statements about the nature of things and how we should move forward as a society. But to make those big statements, you need to take risks. You need to say something that’s provocative, which might upset somebody.

And you also need to respect your readers more. Anyone who’s reading The Hedgehog Review has probably encountered the idea that technology is bad, that AI could destroy the human soul, and that maybe there’s something messed-up about our universities. At this point, these are mainstream, majority opinions. To really make an impact, you need to either undercut them or take them as a baseline. You can’t just repeat the majority opinion as if it’s somehow controversial.

The good thing about The Hedgehog Review is that the magazine’s political and philosophical inclinations (to the extent they have any) are pretty similar to my own. I enjoyed a lot of the miscellaneous articles, and I have high respect for the accessible, jargon-free writing style. It’s rare to see so many humanities professors writing in a way that a non-specialist can actually understand. There’s a lot here that I like, and maybe after I read the other intellectual journals I’ll come back and decide The Hedgehog Review was the best after all.

Elsewhere on the Internet…

• had me on his podcast recently. Covered a lot of topics, including whether writers ought to read the Great Books.

  The more that stuff takes you away from the mainstream of what people are writing now, the harder it is to find a market for the writing. You see this a lot with people who really enjoy the great modernist works, like Ulysses or Gravity’s Rainbow. They’re like, yeah, this is what I want to do. But who’s going to read that? From the perspective of making a career as a writer, it could be better to not read those things!

• I was also on the “A Small Good Thing” podcast talking about the New Yorker story. This recording came out really well! The host, Andrea Marzocchi, is an excellent interview and great at keeping things short. If you want the precis of my New Yorker article, this is a good place to get it.

She told me, “I used to be very depressed. I didn’t see any point in life. I hated and loathed myself. Thought I was ugly, didn’t see why anyone would want me.”

Sometimes, with medication, her sadness went away for a while, but it would often come back, worse and more prolonged. During these periods, she would fantasize a lot about not feeling this way anymore. And one of her fantasies was that her heart would turn into stone.

This girl spent a lot of time, in her early twenties, mentally constructing this stone-heart daydream. It would be a Dorian Gray scenario, obviously. She wouldn’t feel anything anymore, she’d be beautiful and well-loved, but very cold and empty inside, so nothing would be able to touch her.

And one day, the wish came true.

I knew the girl back when she was really depressed. I’ve known her for twenty years. And then at some point she seemed to get a lot better, and I heard, through mutual friends, that it was because her heart had turned to stone.

You know, we don’t live that close, this girl and I, so it was only a few years ago that I actually got to see the heart. I was in her city for a book tour, and she invited me to crash on her coach. That’s when she led the conversation around to that period when she was depressed (in retrospect, I think she had a well-practiced ‘coming-out’ routine she would trot out to confess to friends about her stone heart).

As I said, she described to me this stone-heart fantasy she’d entertained in her youth, and then, “the wish came true,” she said.

“How?” I said.

“You know how,” she said. “There’s a demon, Valac. Have you met him? He’s the demon who gives people exactly what they want, with no catches or strings. I met this demon one day, and I explained my fantasy to him, and he said that makes sense.”

“So now what?” I said.

“Well...now,” she said. “I have this stone heart. And I keep it on the table. And...I’m immortal, I’m beautiful, you’ve seen me, you’re a writer, how would you describe me?”

“I’m not great with that kind of thing,” I said. “Physical descriptions. You’re thin. You have long hair—you’re definitely looking great.”

“But you’d fuck me.”

“Well, I’m married,” I said. “And monogamous.”

“Anyway...I am everything that I could’ve wanted to be. I have lots of money. Sometimes, once a year, I get the urge to travel the world, and I’ll book a trip—I saw Machu Pichu last year. And I think that I enjoyed seeing it. It was definitely worth the visit. Anyway, sometimes I go on dates, and some of the men are okay. It’s hard to pick. Regular women actually need a man—I don’t need one. And no man can ever really know me or provide me with anything, but still I suppose at some point I’ll pick. And that’s my life. I experience boredom sometimes, but no real pain or anxiety or insecurity.”

“That sounds great. Like...very ideal.”

“Yeah, of course. People act like happiness and contentment aren’t possible. I don’t know what they’re talking about. I’ve experienced real suffering. The cessation of suffering—that’s happiness.”

“Okay, but...isn’t there...I don’t know…You have a stone heart. What’s the broader meaning here?”

“Sometimes I go and I touch the heart,” she said.

And while she was talking, she had the heart in her hand. She was weighing it, jogging it up and down slightly. “And when I’m holding this stone, I remember that suffering. How I was all alone and nobody helped me—nobody could help me. But they didn’t try very hard. They left me alone and went about their lives. And I feel this terrible anger, and I know that if I went and found those friends, from my old life—if I killed them, then nobody could stop me. I could kill anyone, and nobody could stop me. Even if they shot me or exorcised me—somehow got rid of me, so what? I am not afraid of non-existence anymore. But luckily there’s no need to hurt them. It’s not even that I’ve forgiven them—there’s just nothing to forgive. Nothing anyone could’ve done. Suffering just exists. But when I hold this stone, I feel that suffering again—it’s always waiting for me there, if I want to experience it, for whatever reason. And sometimes I do.”

“You do?” I said.

“Sure. Just to remember what it was like. It’s a really powerful feeling. I don’t know...sometimes in the news there’ll be a person who does something antisocial. They kill someone, or they post some manifesto. And, whatever, I have a good life. I’m part of the system now, with my stock portfolio and my stone heart. These sad kids with their manifestos, I just shrug my shoulders, because my solution, finding a demon who could give me a stone heart—it obviously doesn’t scale.”

“No,” I said.

“It doesn’t scale. But...I just don’t know if human society can really continue when so many people are so miserable. And...if they’re so miserable in our society, then I don’t know...like can we really affirm this existence where so many people are so sad?”

“You affirm it by having a child at all, I guess.”

“Which I am not going to do,” she said. “I just don’t have the spark of life. That’s what I realize, holding this stone heart. That something died in me back then—I saw something—I saw death. It touched me. And it won. It didn’t claim my body, but whatever good was in me, it destroyed.”

“Come on,” I said. “Isn’t this a lot of drama?”

“What?”

“Look...maybe you’ve been touching that thing too much. Like that stone heart. That’s no good. Get rid of that thing. Throw it in the ocean. You don’t need it anymore—I know Valac—this magic isn’t going to go away if you don’t hold onto that black heart. Just get rid of it.”

She said, “This stone heart reminds me of the truth, which is that our society is not good.”

“What do you mean?” I said.

“It’s not good,” she said. “My own existence is about the best that anyone could hope for, and it’s not good. Can you really say differently?”

“What?” I said. “Say that our society is good? I do think it’s good. My existence is good.”

“This stone heart will get thrown through your window one day,” she said. “And then what’ll you say?”

“I don’t know.”

“People who are suffering, you’re going to tell them...what?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I see what you mean. This stone heart is really a problem. Like it’s got so much metaphorical weight! What’re gonna do with it? Let’s just put it back on the table for now.”

There was a table! I’m sorry, I’m not conveying very well the mechanics of my encounter with this woman. The truth is, I am just not very good at that kind of thing. Like, explaining where we stand in a room. Making a room come alive. Making a scene come alive. I am really not good at it. But you’ll have to trust me that I was in a very awkward encounter in this woman’s living room. And it was really my fault, because you know...I had questioned her pain. Like this woman had trusted me with her stone heart, and I had not behaved well. That was the root of our conflict.

“Look,” I said to her. “This stone heart thing...it sounds incredible.”

“What do you mean?” she said.

“Like, you can relive your worst pain whenever you want, by touching this rock?”

“Yes...I mean it’s complicated, but I get transported into...like I am that person again.”

“That sounds great,” I said. “I honestly wish that I had that, because it would make writing stories so much easier.”

“Hmm,” she said.

“Better than therapy, honestly,” I said. “Like what’s therapy going to do that touching your stone heart won’t do.”

Anyway, in real life this woman was not convinced that it was a good thing to have a stone heart that she could touch whenever she wanted to make her relive this horrible despair she’d once felt. She didn’t think that was good at all. She really disagreed with me on this point and felt quite vehemently on the matter. She felt like having a stone heart was actually very extremely terribly bad.

P.S. This is the second tale to feature Valac, the demon who gives people exactly what they want, with no hidden catches or tricks. The first was posted about a year ago. I also have a third Valac story coming out in Lightspeed magazine at some point.

You move to New York and publish two well-received novels in your twenties. You work a few years on contract at MGM, writing movie scripts (nothing gets made while you’re there). Then you move back to New York and spend the next decade writing light short stories—often satires or romances—for popular magazines. You write another novel, but your publisher passes, saying (essentially) that your work has no depth. After a breakup, you suffer a severe depression, spend two years in a mental asylum.

After you get out, you ghostwrite a memoir for a famous brothel-keeper (but are never paid for the work), and then go west, spending three years in a motel in California, where you take six hundred pages of notes for a study of Willa Cather (that you never write).

You’re now forty-two. And you return home to Nebraska, where you’re offered a job at University of Nebraska press. You find love again, this time with an English professor, and you spend the next two decades working at the press, where you reprint a lot of Willa Cather’s backlist and try to encourage scholars (including your now-partner) to write books about Cather. Over time, you become one of the world’s biggest experts on Willa Cather—but this entails a lot of wrangling with other Cather experts and with the Cather estate. You have a harsh, caustic side, which often comes out in your dealings with writers and with other editors at your press—you work hard, make few friends, and are eventually forced out by the new director of your press. A month later, you die.

Is this a good life?

I don’t know. But it’s a great book.

The life I’ve outlined is drawn from Brad Bigelow’s recently-published biography, Virginia Faulkner: A Life In Two Acts.

Faulkner (no relation to William) is an odd choice for a biography. I’m sure there are other biographies that are about minor literary figures, but this is certainly the most marginal literary biography I’ve ever read. Faulkner’s work is out of print, and Bigelow himself admits in the book that it’s not really worth of rehabilitation. She is not an underappreciated or overlooked writer: she’s a writer who was mostly dismissed, even in her lifetime, as a minor talent, and who ultimately dismissed herself as a minor talent too (and as a result quit writing fiction entirely during the last three decades of her life).

So why write about her? Well, Brad Bigelow runs an incredible blog, The Neglected Books Archive, which reviews out of print books. In 2008, he read a collection of Virginia Faulkner’s magazine pieces, about a recurring character named Princess Tulip who functions as a send-up of the international Smart Set. But when he researched the author of this book, he found something odd:

I learned that she was born in Lincoln…worked for the Washington Post, Town and Country magazine in New York, and MGM in Hollywood; wrote several novels and a Broadway play in addition to My Hey-Day; then worked as an editor at the University of Nebraska Press from 1956 until her death in 1980. That last bit stuck in my head. It seemed an odd trajectory: Washington, New York City, Hollywood … and then the University of Nebraska Press?

In early 2020, while taking a class in the Creative Nonfiction program at the University of East Anglia, he remembered Virginia Faulkner and challenged himself to learn as much as it was possible to learn about her from online, digitized mentions in various Lincoln, Nebraska newspapers.

He got drawn further and further into researching Faulkner’s life, and eventually he came to a crossroads:

In the course of researching Virginia Faulkner’s life, I realized that my task was not, as I thought originally, to write a literary biography. A literary biography…tries to illuminate a writer’s work through the context of their life. In Virginia’s case, however, her novels and short stories, however funny and well-crafted, were simply not of the caliber to merit close critical study….

The reason for writing Virginia’s story was simpler than to illuminate her work: it was to tell her story, the story of a woman of ferocious wit and intelligence who struggled with alcoholism and depression and had the courage to start again at the age of 42, setting aside her own career as a writer and devoting her energy to advancing the work of Willa Cather and the numerous writers she guided as an editor of genius.

It’s clear that Bigelow thinks that her work at the University of Nebraska press was much more important than her own written work, and that’s why he chooses to devote more than half the book to Faulkner’s life after moving back to Nebraska at age forty-two.

This decision to focus on Nebraska was completely correct

The first act of the book, detailing her childhood and her time as a fiction writer and screenwriter, is interesting—I don’t want to sell it short—the book moves very briskly. But even in this first half, the most interesting part is the portion that’s set in Lincoln, where her grandfather and father and uncles were all local notables, who ran an insurance company. The way Bigelow portrayed these Nebraska gentry was pretty fascinating. They’re always founding fraternities and leagues and country clubs and just slowly building out the life of this town. It feels like you’re reading Winesburg, Ohio or Main Street, but spread over just forty pages.

Then when Faulkner leaves Lincoln, the story becomes sketchier. She works briefly as a reporter in DC. She moves to New York. She drinks a lot. She moves to LA. She drinks a lot. She has a lesbian awakening, and, back in New York, she becomes partnered to Dana Suess, a pianist and composer. Faulkner struggles to try and write something that has more depth to it. When her partner leaves her, she has a crack-up, gives up writing fiction, and (after a circuitous path that involves ghost-writing a famous madam’s memoir) she returns home.

The second half of the book, when she’s an editor at University of Nebraska press, is much more lively and fascinating. I think because it’s a world that I’ve never seen written about before. I already know, more or less, the story of an alcoholic writer who never quite gets their head above water. That’s the story of John Cheever, the story of Dorothy Parker, the story of so many other writers.

But the university press editor is something else! First of all, this second section begins on a really sweet note. Faulkner meets Bernice Slote, an English professor at UNL, and they slowly become companions. One of Bigelow’s talents in this book is for painting a portrait of a character, and he devotes a dozen pages to Bernice Slote’s early life: she’s also from Nebraska, and her father died at a young age. Unlike Faulkner, she doesn’t have money, so she goes to work teaching high school, and she gets her master’s degree at night.

While Virginia was in New York and Hollywood, socializing with the likes of Garbo and Tallulah Bankhead, Bernice was supervising the yearbook, playing piano accompaniment for student productions, and organizing ice cream socials. She was the faculty sponsor for the Ord Oracle, the one-page high school news that appeared in the pages of the town’s paper, the Quiz.

She becomes a published poet, with work in The Atlantic Monthly and other major periodicals, and gets a job at a community college, and then at UNL (this was back when you could become a tenure-track college professor even if you only had a master’s). And her personality is sweet, open-hearted. She wins award for her teaching.

Slote was completely different from Faulkner, who turns into a terror at this university press.

Indeed, in her work at this press, an awful side of Faulkner’s personality comes out. The portrait painted by Bigelow is really not appetizing. One writer tells her that the experience of working with her was so shattering that it led to “an utter loss of confidence” and revealed to him that “I am not a scholar” but merely “an average teacher”.

Bigelow also reports her difficulties getting along with several colleagues, Kaste and Spatz, who were hired to assist her:

Kaste left after too many tongue-lashings from Virginia, moving across town to Centennial Publications, the publisher of Cliff’s Notes. Spatz lasted just three months, managing in that time to disappoint Virginia so completely that she sent Nicoll a thirteen-page report that detailed Spatz’s failings in even the most basic editorial tasks and questioned her sanity. Over the coming years, the personnel files of the press would be filled with similarly lengthy and critical assessments by Virginia of other assistant editors and copy editors.

So it’s really good that she has Bernice Slote in her life, because it shows that at least someone loves her. And Slote really does become a partner in every sense, because they both become very involved in the effort to preserve and extent the reputation of a fellow Nebraska writer, Willa Cather.

There’s many pages of description (which I found fascinating) of their dealings with the other local Cather expert, Mildred Bennett (who runs the Willa Cather Foundation and has an annual Cather conference in the author’s home town of Red Cloud, Nebraska). They’re constantly embarking on collaborations with Mildred, and then slowly trying to muscle her out, because they think she’s not much of a writer or a thinker. (Alfred Knopf, in a letter to Faulkner, says Mildred is an example of “what happens so often after a truly distinguished author’s death: a second- or third-rate person latches on to his or her memory with great energy and industry.”)

Then there’s all the wrangling with Cather’s estate and her publisher. They always have to think about Cather books that the estate will do. As Cather material enters into the public domain, they try to publish it, but they need to do it in ways that won’t piss off the estate, because then the result will be that they won’t be able to get permissions to license or reprint still-copyrighted material.

I love Willa Cather’s work, and it was quite fascinating to see how her reputation developed. My sense is that she was a relatively popular author right up to her death in 1947, and she remained a popular author afterwards, with her major works still in print, but she was not regarded as an important author. For instance, there’s an anecdote about a scholar being discouraged from doing their dissertation on Cather, because their advisor thinks she doesn’t merit it. And there’s no biographies of her, no full-length critical books about her either. There’s a small cottage industry of people presenting papers, but that’s it, and much of the Willa Cather critical apparatus is contained in the prefaces and appendixes to these reprints that’re done by Faulkner and Slote at University of Nebraska Press.

And that slow insistent work, of having these conferences every year and producing these books and these papers, is what keeps Cather in the public eye. Because even if people don’t take her seriously, they at least have to acknowledge that someone is taking her seriously.

In fact, Faulkner’s insistence on Cather’s value becomes somewhat of a joke:

The novelist Shirley Schoonover, having only recently left Lincoln for Rochester, New York, published a “Letter from Nebraska” in the New York Times that asserted, “There are a couple of women associated with the University of Nebraska Press who do endless research on Willa Cather. And if you don’t love Willa Cather’s work you are not included in the literary life of the university.”

But that work pays off. That work is part of the reason that Cather’s reputation grows in comparison to contemporaries like Edna Ferber or Sinclair Lewis—those guys don’t have this cottage industry of people insisting on their worth (or at least not to the same degree).

Obviously, you can never know for sure, but I found it very believable that it was due to Virginia Faulkner, Bernice Slote, and Mildred Bennett that Cather has such a secure place today in the American canon. She really does feel unique. As I wrote in my piece on Edna Ferber, there is a type of middle-class realism that was (and still is!) the dominant style in American fiction over the last hundred years, and very few writers in this vein have really forged an enduring critical reputation--Cather is probably the only practitioner of this type of fiction whose critical reputation is truly secure.

Anyway, the book is incredible

My daughter was home sick on Friday, and I read this book over the course of a few hours while my girl watched Sing and Moana 2. I was gripped. The writing is really sharp. I couldn’t believe the level of compression and the types of details that Bigelow managed. Even though there was sketchiness in some places, he still gave the illusion that he knew absolutely everything about her life.

And as a portrait of both life in a midwestern university town and life in mid-century academia, it was superb. The book read like a novel. It was honestly a lot like reading Stoner, because it was suffused with the same kind of quiet melancholy. But...in the end, there was more hope and more joy. I think, ultimately, it was a good life. It’s a life to be proud of. Yes, Faulkner had a harsh personality, especially when it came to her editorial work, but maybe that’s what the job needed.

In any case, I have met many officious and annoying academics, and it’s nice to get a peek behind the curtain and think about what kinds of disappointments and ambitions might’ve been driving those people. This book does honor not just to Faulkner, but to a whole swathe of American literary life that is composed of people, like Faulkner and Slote, who carefully devote themselves to marginal literary activity, because...well...because they’re paid to do it, but also because it feels somehow meaningful, like it matters.

And although their names aren’t famous, their work is written into the canon, in the form of Willa Cather. They chose her, because she represents people like them. She has an entire novel, The Professor’s House, that’s in part about this kind of painstaking, unheralded intellectual labor. It’s about an old professor, who’s left alone, and who’s been passed-over by his own era. I read this novel, The Professor’s House, in part because of the work of people like Faulkner and Slote. If you devote your life to an author, then that really does matter. Yes, we joke about how there’s a Cormac McCarthy guy (Aaron Gwyn) and how there’s Thomas Bernhard guys and Philip Roth guys and whatnot—but if an author is going to survive, then they to eventually acquire a guy who’ll be utterly tedious about insisting publicly on that author’s importance.

And as a portrait of a devoted Willa Cather gal, this book is exemplary, and I think fulfills a valuable literary function.

The Neglected Books Archive is also excellent

I’ve been running across this site for years, when googling various obscure authors, and it feels by now like an old friend. The site is quite strange—it’s basically a Wordpress site, and feels like a remnant of the first blogging era. There’s also a mysterious quality to the site—for years Brad’s name was nowhere on it and even the contact email was just for editor@neglectedbooks.com, so the site felt very anonymous (although it was written up by the New Yorker about ten years ago!).

What makes the site good is the honesty. The site itself is not about rehabilitating any particular author’s reputation. Instead it’s just about bearing witness to these books that’re no longer with us. Brad has a pretty good sense for what kinds of books are interesting to write about, and all the reviews are quite engaging—some of them really make me want to hunt up the book—but he’s very clear-eyed and open about the literary merits of these various books.

That same honesty is on display in this book. I was honestly a bit shocked, at times, by how poorly Faulkner came off. There was certainly an ambiguity here about whether the harm she did—including to her authors and to Mildred Bennett—was really outweighed by the good. I think, on balance, that it was a good life, but the possibility certainly exists that it was not good. That ambiguity increases the literary value of the book, but it probably decreases the public interest in reading it.

It’s tough. Obviously Brad would be in a better position if he could claim that Faulkner was unambiguously an important figure in American letters, but he can’t necessarily do that in a way that’s honest. I really respect the integrity.

In thinking about who this book would be good for, I’d have to say anyone who’s interested in Willa Cather should read this book, because it’s a fascinating look into her early literary reputation.

I also think if you’re interested in academic publishing, it’s worth studying. This book makes me think there should be some broader study—some sociology of literature thing--written about academic publishing. But I honestly don’t know if any other book could do a better job than this one did of conveying the reasons for academic publishing and the various political considerations and trade-offs involved in trying to publish an author’s backlist.

The book itself is beautiful. It’s in hardback, and I was astonished by the production value. The typesetting and layout feel very much like a trade book, and it’s got wonderful black-and-white photos throughout--I can tell the press (it’s published by University of Nebraska Press) put a lot of care into this book, maybe because it’s honoring one of their own.

What’s So Great About The Great Books?

My forthcoming nonfiction work has been delayed by a week. It’s now coming out May 26th! But this shouldn’t affect the two events I’ve scheduled.

• NYC - May 27 (7 PM) — I’ll be in conversation with at McNally Jackson Seaport. You can RSVP here.

• SF - May 30th (6 to 10 PM) - This is the Woman of Letters party! There’ll be an hour-long event where I’ll be in conversation with , and then you know…it’ll just be a party. It’s at a private venue, so to attend you must RSVP. I’ve provided this helpful button for this purpose

• RSVP for Woman of Letters Party in SF

  Today I also got an email about a possible DC event, so that might happen too. Details TBD.

I had a second book on my contract with my publisher—this second book was completely TBD, when I signed the contract we hadn’t agreed at all on the second book’s contours. Over the next year I kept sending my editor proposals, asking for some agreement-in-principle to what the second book might be, and they’d shoot them down. I also sent a book for adults to my agent during this time, and he didn’t like it. I sent a middle-grade book to my agent, and he decided, after a short round of submissions, that it wasn’t marketable.

It’s hard to write when you’ve got the market in your head.

This is something you don’t really experience until you’ve sold a book. It’s just hard. A lot of writers get blocked after selling their first book. I really struggled for about three years to produce a second novel.

There is a misconception that writer’s block means you sit down at the computer and nothing comes out. You can’t write words at all.

But this isn’t really what it’s like.

Read more

Because my membership in this club means one new book comes to me every month. I have no idea what the book will be, but it’s always a new release in the line of rediscovered classics that the New York Review of Books has been publishing since 1999. And usually when the book comes, I open it, glance at the name, and put it straight onto the top of the tottery vertical shelf that she’s always asking me to ‘tidy up’ because ‘it’s an earthquake risk’ and ‘a danger to our child’.

I’ve belonged to this Book Club for four years now. It’s been a long time. I am a satisfied NYRB Classics Book Club member, and I have no plans on canceling my subscription.

For a time I also belonged to the New Directions New Classics Club, but their books don’t come in a uniform format—you can’t just stack them on a vertical shelf. Their books are also slightly less to my taste. I feel like the New Directions taste is too arty somehow—it’s very associated with modernism, and they really just feel like the books you’re supposed to like. With NYRB, it feels like there’s more brio, there’s more sap. NYRB doesn’t publish these dense modernist books, they weird-but-entertaining books like Lolly Willowes, an excellent NYRB Classic about a lonely woman who makes a deal with Satan or something.

When I open an envelope from NYRB, I always hope I’ll find something like Lolly Willowes—some weird book that is enjoyable and really wants to be read by me. Lolly Willowes is not some fancy book—it was the very first Book-of-the-Month Club pick in 1925.

The first middlebrow book club

The Book-of-the-Month club was a 20th-century institution very similar to the NYRB Classics book club. It mailed one pre-selected book each month to its subscribers (although for BOTMC you also had the option of refusing the pre-selected book and either picking an alternate book or choosing no book at all for that month).

BOTMC’s selections were made by an editorial board composed of five eminences who had a particular combination of popular appeal and literary cachet. Harry Canby was a former Yale professor who edited a literary periodical, The Saturday Review. Dorothy Canfield Fisher (who I’ve written about before) was a best-selling novelist and leading progressive—she was an early proponent of Montessori education, prison reform, and all kinds of other progressive causes. And the other three members were journalists and newspaper columnists (in the mold of a David Brooks or William Safire).

With this club, you paid for the curation. The books were, notionally, books that were good to read and had literary merit of some kind.

I’m bringing up the Book of the Month club because I recently read a book about it, Janice Radway’s A Feeling For Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire. This academic volume, published in 1999, was based on time that the author, a professor at UPenn, spent observing the editorial board of the club in the 1980s.

This volume, A Feeling For Books, did a good job of describing how the BOTMC editorial board conceptualized its own mission.

Okay, so the way the club worked was that publishers would submit forthcoming books to the club to be considered as ‘main selections’. If you were selected for a main selection, then it meant hundreds of thousands of additional sales, and a lot of extra exposure for the book. The editorial board, in going through these books, had two ways of dismissing them. Some books they would dismiss as ‘too academic’. As Radway describes:

Not only was this criticism (”too academic”) repeated regularly thereafter, but the editors occasionally embellished what was, for them, a kind of epithet, by using it in conjunction with modifiers such as “desiccated,” “too technical,” and “highly specialized.”

Other books, they would dismiss as being too much like something that’d get picked by ‘the Guild’ (this referred to the Literary Guild, their chief rival, which they considered too low-brow). As Radway puts it:

I picked up very quickly that, from their point of view, the Guild’s literary province was the inferior world of women’s reading, romances, books on forming relationships and rehabilitating marriages, make-over manuals, and the most salacious celebrity biographies — the publishing equivalent of Phil Donahue and Oprah Winfrey. The Book-of-the-Month Club, they would tell me later, was PBS and the Smithsonian. Their tolerance, clearly, had its limits. And the limits were familiar.

It was so interesting to see how the BOTMC differentiated itself by referring to its two mental rivals. On the one hand, it denigrated the literati, who didn’t care enough about what readers might enjoy. And on the other hand, it denigrated ‘the Guild’, which cared too nakedly about catering to readers’ presumed tastes.

Radway does a great job of showing, in this first section of her book, how this editorial board always tried to find books with mass appeal that also had something extra.

I think we basically understand the kind of book they’re talking about: 1984 was a BOTMC selection, so was Of Mice And Men, Kon-Tiki, Catcher in the Rye, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and many books by Herman Wouk, James Michener, Winston Churchill, and others. You know...serious books that aren’t too difficult to read.

Learning to disparage the Book-of-the-Month club

Radway also claims that the BOTMC wasn’t held in high respect by her professors or by a certain subset of literary critics:

…three years into graduate school, I had learned to disparage the club as a middlebrow operation offering only the come-on of free bestsellers to people who wanted only to be told what to read in order to look appropriately cultured.

Although she claims the BOTMC wasn’t respected by academics and critics, she doesn’t actually show us that many reviews where people talk dismissively or take it down. She cites a spate of negative mentions from 1925-27, when the BOTMC was just beginning, and that’s mostly it, aside from a sneering mention in Dwight MacDonald’s 1960 essay “Masscult and Midcult” (He wrote that “midcult is the Book-of-the-Month Club, which since 1926 has been supplying its members with reading matter of which the best that can be said is that it could be worse.”)

However, I think the sparsity of notices might just be typical for the pre-internet era. Today, it would be fairly easy for me to go online and find plenty of people trash-talking Oprah’s Book Club, but in the 1950s perhaps people didn’t necessarily publish these kinds of hot takes, and, even if they did, those articles might not’ve been easy to find in the late 1990s when Radway was writing her book.

Despite the lack of documentation, I find it easy to believe that there were some highly-educated, sophisticated readers who thought the Book-of-the-Month club was middlebrow pabulum.

But...does that mean we are required to take their contempt seriously? Everything has haters. As I’ve just described, the editors of the Book of the Month Club also had contempt for the offerings of a rival book club, the Literary Guild, and for books that were too academic, too literary.

Perhaps because they were guided by their own hater tendencies, these editors had a coherent vision of literature that comes through when you read this book and when you glance at a list of Book-of-the-Month club selections.1 It contains well-wrought, accessible books on a number of topics. Some of the books, like For Whom The Bell Tolls or Isak Dineson’s Seven Gothic Tales, are overtly literary. Others, like James Thurber’s Life With Ross, are lighter reading. Some are weighty historical works, like Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Others are works of fiction about social issues, like Native Son or Hans Fallada’s Little Man, What Now? And some are just about exciting new ideas, like Kon-Tiki or Arthur Clarke’s The Exploration of Space.

I have read a fair number of the books on their list, maybe about one in thirty of their selections, and they’ve all been pretty good—looking at this list is like looking like a list of old friends. I would love to be reading Marjorie Morningstar or Silent Spring or Working or Darkness At Noon again.

The silent mass of readers

The one thing that’s missing from this Radway book is the voice of the subscribers. We know very little about them or about the reasons they subscribed. In the last third of Radway’s book she recollects her own history with the BOTMC’s selections—she realizes that her local library must’ve subscribed, because she was given a box of books in her teenage years, while she was recovering from a surgery, and this box contained a surprisingly large number of BOTMC selections.

Usually the BOTMC and the literature it selected are grouped together under the ‘middlebrow’ heading. This is a kind of literature that promised to be good, promised to be improving, but which was still broadly accessible. As Radway puts it:

This book, then, is the result of my effort to understand the origins, the substance, the particular promise, and the multiple effects of what has been called middlebrow culture in the twentieth-century United States. That culture was aimed at people like me who wanted desperately to present themselves as educated, sophisticated, and aesthetically articulate.

But Radway’s framing implies that there exists some other different type of non-middlebrow reader—some reader who is just naturally sophisticated without wanting or trying to be sophisticated—a person who reads great literature not because of aspiration, but because of natural affinity. And I really question whether the effortlessly-sophisticated literary reader actually exists.

Like...who is being set up in opposition here to the ‘middlebrow’ reader? Every single person is born not knowing how to read. We learn how to read, and then we start choosing books for ourselves. Then, some of us start seeking out books that have literary merit. How does that happen? Surely not naturally! We do it because we’ve heard some good stuff about literature, and we want to experience that good stuff for ourselves. There is always an element of striving involved.

Secondly, when we call the BOTMC middlebrow, it also takes for granted a certain kind of judgement about 20th-century literature. Right now, in the 21st century, we have collectively agreed that the best 20th-century literature was all this modernist and late-modernist fiction: Faulkner, Ellison, Heller, Pynchon, McCarthy, DeLillo, etc. These kinds of authors generally did not get picked for BOTMC (at least not as main, rather than alternate, selections).

But if you were a reader who actually lived in 1950 and someone asked what’re the best books, it’s very possible you would’ve said, “Dickens, Tolstoy, George Eliot, Jane Austen, stuff like that.” You wouldn’t have said Faulkner, because that would’ve been crazy—that guy wasn’t even dead yet!

So if someone came up to you and was like, “Why are you not reading the best books?” Your answer might very well be, “But I’ve already read Tolstoy. When I want to read the best books, I just go and read Tolstoy”—keep in mind Tolstoy only died in 1910, so he was more recent than Faulkner is to us—“I don’t go to Book of the Month Club looking for the best books, I’m just looking for some recent books that happen to be good.”

We hear a lot in Radway’s book about how the editors of the BOTMC conceptualized it to themselves, but very little about how it was perceived by the readers.

This is not a knock on Radway’s book—she does gesture at the possibility that BOTMC readers had a variety of different relationships to the club. And the truth is that we just don’t know—we don’t actually know how they felt about it.

My favorite middlebrow book club

Which is what brings me back to the NYRB Classics book club. Because while I was reading about the BOTMC club—this middlebrow institution that is situated, in Radway’s book, as being essentially for other people, and not for people like us (the readers of academic books), I kept thinking of the book-delivery service that I, Naomi, actually subscribe to!

Here I was, asking myself why people paid all this money to subscribe to the BOTMC club, and I hadn’t asked myself the very same question. Why do I pay hundreds of dollars a year (I think it’s like $200 a year or so) to subscribe to the NYRB Classics Book Club?

Well, the simple answer is that I have an emotional attachment to this line of books.

I looked back through my reading log to see the very first NYRB Classics book I read. It was Stoner, in 2012, when I was in the first semester of my MFA. I was twenty-six years old. After that, about a year later, I got very into Austrian and German and Hungarian literature, and a bunch of the books I read were from NYRB Classics: Skylark, Beware of Pity, and Confusion.

After that, I noticed that the NYRB Classics brand was very good (and, moreover, their eBooks were almost always available at the library), so I started searching them out. A lot of these books weren’t necessarily the greatest literary classics on Earth, but they were definitely interesting.

NYRB Classics tend to be relatively short—under three hundred pages—and are usually at least thirty years old. They have a distinct sensibility, but I’d be hard-pressed to define it. I’d say most of their catalogue consists of British and American books that were critically-acclaimed on their initial release, but subsequently fell out of print. These books were well-respected in their day, but then their day ended, and now…who knows…maybe it’s time for that day to come back.2

Over the next few years, I read Novels in Three Lines, The Dud Avocado, Lolly Willowes, Angel, A High Wind in Jamaica, Masscult and Midcult, Tristana, The Doll, Rogue Male, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearn, Making It, Late Fame, Apartment in Athens, Life With Picasso, The Inverted World, Manservant and Maid-Servant, Our Spoons Came From Woolworth, and maybe thirty or forty others.3

In most cases, I enjoyed the books a lot. I absolutely adored Our Spoons Came From Woolworth and The Dud Avocado, but I don’t know that I feel a strong urge to sell them to other people. They’re merely very good books. In other cases, I’ve come to realize that the books were genuine classics that really deserve a place in the canon, like Richard Hughes’s A High Wind in Jamaica—this novel is so dark and unsettling. It’s about these four kids who get kidnapped by pirates and kind of go native, becoming piratical themselves, but in a very dreamy, hard-to-describe fashion (this novel was a major influence on my short story “Lonely Island Adventures”).

And in a few cases, these reissued books had a big influence on the culture at large. Dwight MacDonald, the famous snob that I am constantly bringing up whenever I talk about middlebrow literature, was completely out of print until his work was reissued by NYRB Classics in 2011. Every time you see his essay “Masscult and Midcult” mentioned by a literary critic, it is because of this 2011 essay collection. All of us, all of us millennial literary critics, who were all in grad school at the same time, we all discovered NYRB Classics at the same time, and we all read this very same essay collection! In retrospect, this release was a huge deal, although I certainly wouldn’t have known it at the time.

A few years ago, I got to thinking that now I have more money, I really ought to support some small presses, and that’s when I remembered that NYRB Classics had a book club.

“Stoner is…not very good at all”

NYRB’s most controversial book is also its best-known and most successful: Stoner. This is a 1965 novel by John Williams, a professor of creative writing at Denver. According to Wikipedia, it sold fewer than 2000 copies in its initial run. Then it was reissued FOUR times, as a paperback in 1972 (by Pocket Books), and then again by a university press in 1988, by Vintage in 2003, and finally by NYRB Classics in 2006.

Since being reissued by NYRB Classics, it has apparently sold two MILLION copiesm according to this Airmail article. Which seems wild! This is a book that got plenty of chances—so why did it finally, on its fourth reissuing, catch fire?

Moreover, it didn’t really happen right away. NYRB Classics republished the novel in 2006, but the book didn’t really take off until 2011. The story is explained by this NPR article: What happened was a French novelist, Anna Gavalda, translated it into French. She is a well-liked novelist in France, so once other countries saw her name attached to the translation, they also bought translation rights, and it became a bestseller in Europe. Only then did it come back across the pond to America—I must’ve heard about it because of all this European buzz—and become a hit over here, in a phenomenon (which Williams’s biographer called “Stoner-mania” that was written about later that year by the New Yorker.

Since then, there’ve been a number of attempted Stoner takedowns. Many people have argued that this book is overrated. That it’s mediocre. Or, worse, misogynist! wrote a whole essay about how John Williams sucks (“Stoner...has the interesting distinction of being, despite all this recent advocacy, not very good at all. None of Williams’s books are very good, in fact.”)

Katherine Coldiron wrote another takedown in a similar vein:

“In sum, Stoner is a minor novel by a minor writer...A scan of the NYRB Classics list shows that male names outstrip female names; the same editors who chose to put two editions of Stoner into print within ten years choose mostly men from the annals of out-of-print literature to reissue and promote.”

And has posted on Substack Notes that Stoner‘s success is all due to marketing, not organic word of mouth at all.

Stoner is so good

The book is about this Midwestern farm kid who goes to college, discovers a love of literature, becomes a college professor, and leads a sad, quiet, somewhat thwarted life, that’s marred by his wife who doesn’t really get him. The only bright spot is his affair with a student. Then he dies one day, and he is forgotten forever—an event that is described in the very first chapter, by the book’s second paragraph (“Stoner’s colleagues, who held him in no particular esteem when he was alive, speak of him rarely now”)

I loved Stoner. I even played a small part in Stoner-mania by giving it to my professor, Alice McDermott, for our MFA Secret Santa, and she then recommended it on The Millions in 2013:

I began the year with a gift from one of my students, Stoner, by John Williams. I was, perhaps, somewhat late in discovering this marvelous novel of university life, first published in 1965, but I’m grateful now to have had the experience of it, to have lived William Stoner’s life: to have been the shy farm boy entranced by the power of literature, the earnest professor, the long suffering spouse and the doting father, the middle-aged lover surprised by joy. It is a kind of enchantment, to be lured so completely into the life of this character.

Anyway, Stoner is a quintessential NYRB Classic because...it’s just a good book that didn’t succeed the first time (or second, or third) time around. Reading the book, you can’t really figure out why it didn’t work out back in 1965. It’s not representative of some difficult modernist trend that the public wasn’t ready for. It’s not a book that’s ahead of its time. It’s just...a book that suffered bad luck.

Because of this, it’s also hard to make a case that the book was underrated. Probably there are many books that deserve to blow up like Stoner. I love A High Wind in Jamaica just as much as I liked Stoner, but A High Wind in Jamaica hasn’t sold nearly as many copies. Like, there’s no real narrative you can attach to Stoner‘s late-in-life success. And that’s why it’s easy to argue that the book is overrated and doesn’t really deserve this level of attention—a claim that could certainly be leveled, as Blake Smith did in a memorable essay for Tablet, against the NYRB Classics as a whole.

Always good, sometimes great

But I don’t think the readers of NYRB classics actually go into these books thinking they’re going to be timeless classics—nor does the editor, Edwin Frank, claim that he is raising these books to some kind of canonical status.

What makes the NYRB Classics work as a whole is that they’re very consistently entertaining. It’s really the consistency that sells them—they’re almost never boring.

Moreover, because you’re usually unfamiliar with the context for the book, it comes at you with outside-of-time feeling. For instance, I understand now that there was a bohemian scene in England in the 1920s and 1930s, and people were making all kinds of radical experiments in how to live and love differently, but when I read Barbara Comyn’s Our Spoons Came From Woolworths ten years ago, I didn’t know this, so it was a bit shocking to read this depiction of a woman, a painter, raising her two kids amidst am atmosphere of license and free love (and terrible privation).

Moreover, there’s now a culture around these NYRB Classics, so each new release actually gets a fair amount of press coverage. Just this month, they reissued Robert Coover’s Universal Baseball Association, and I see it’s gotten reviewed in The New York Times and Harper’s—a lot of contemporary big-budget novels don’t manage the same amount of coverage. So if you read these books near the time of release, then you also have the potential to be part of some kind of zeitgeist.

Not really classics

It’s been interesting to see Edwin Frank repeatedly duck the question of whether these books are actually classics. For instance, in this interview with New American Studies Journal, his interlocutor begins with some quotes from Italo Calvino’s “What is a Classic” (about how a classic can be read again and again) and asks Edwin Frank if theese quotes describe his motivations for starting NYRB Classics.

Frank replies:

Well, really the series was started to give people a chance to read books that they couldn’t read, either because they’d been put out of print or never translated. And yes, some of those books were books that I thought should be out there for people to read and read again, but they were for all that little-known. So it’s a rather different situation.

To me, this makes perfect sense. All of the books in the NYRB classics are books that people should be able to read, because they’re good books. Some of the books are also classics—books that reward re-reading and deserve to endure because of their literary merit. But the purpose of the imprint isn’t necessarily to perform some canonization or anointing function.

I think he put it best in an interview with The Point, where he said NYRB Classics puts “old wine in new bottles” and performs a recirculating function, bringing books back into the public eye for a time. In that same interview, he says that he doesn’t really regard Penguin Classics or Oxford Classics as rivals, because his aim isn’t to publish canonical classics.

It’s clear, both from these statements and from the types of books that they publish, that there’s a modesty to NYRB Classics. They would be happy to have an impact on life, literature, and letters, but their aim is to provide books that a certain kind of reader will enjoy.

The competition

New Directions, the chief rival to NYRB, operates quite differently.

For one thing, New Directions has a strong focus on modernist and post-modernist 20th-century literature. They don’t republish many 19th or even early-20th century books.

But, more importantly, they’re most known for making a strong commitment to republishing a lot of work by the authors that they publish. Where NYRB usually does just one or two books by a given author—it is much more the norm at New Directions to republish, or attempt to republish, a substantial fraction of the author’s ouevre.

If you look at just books that both presses have published since 1999, you can see that although New Directions has published more books (904 vs. 716), it’s published fewer authors (349 vs. 460). There are 66 authors that New Directions has published 4+ times (since 1999), and these 66 authored more than 50 percent of the books its published in this period. In contrast, NYRB only has 33 such authors, who’ve authored 25 percent of its catalogue.

Moreover, there are 9 authors that ND has republished more than 10 times; NYRB only has one such author (Georges Simenon). For ND, those nine authors are:

• Tennessee Williams — 32

• César Aira — 22

• Muriel Spark — 17

• Roberto Bolaño — 16

• Clarice Lispector — 14

• László Krasznahorkai — 13

• Susan Howe — 13

• Yoko Tawada — 13

• Javier Marías — 12

And this is just counting the authors they’ve published since 1999!

It feels to me like New Directions is much more committed to influencing canon-formation than NYRB is. That’s because it’s much easier to study an author if you have a lot of their work available and in print. I am finding this right now with a piece I am writing on Thomas Bernhard—because of the efforts of one editor at Knopf, Carol Janeway, a lot of his work is available in print in English, and this means it’s a lot easier to read and characterize his body of work as a whole. Whereas if all you have is access to one or two of an author’s top books, it’s hard to come to a conclusion.

Moreover, republishing a lot of work by one author is really beneficial when it comes to reputational dynamics in the English-speaking world. That’s because every time a book comes out, there’s any spate of reviews (hopefully) in NYRB, LRB, TLS, NYT, New Yorker, and in the smaller LARB and Cleveland Review of Books style journals. And each time a book comes out, people will be incentivized to go back and read some of the earlier books. Over time, by bringing an author repeatedly into the public eye, you increase their name-recognition amongst people who care about this kind of thing. For instance, I had definitely heard of Osamu Dazai and Cesar Aira before, but my feeling is that their critical reputation has grown significantly, in the US, over the last ten years precisely because New Directions has brought out so many more of their books.

New Directions’ approach is really geared not to the general reader, but to the critical apparatus that evaluates various sub-canonical writers—they are publishing not for today, but for posterity.

Not sold on New Directions

ND is a great press, and I fully support it. But...not with my money.

I mean, I support it with my money too, when they publish an author like Fleur Jaeggy or Roberto Bolano that I actually want to read. But...I don’t know...during my year of belonging to their book subscription service, New Directions sent me a collection of Cesar Aira’s short stories, and I was like...hmm...If I was going to start reading Cesar Aira—an author I’ve never read before--I would likely not start with this book, which was the tenth[!] book of his that they’d published. So, given that’s the case, why should I keep this book in my house?

New Directions is making a bet that there are some authors in translation who will be considered essential in fifty years—the kinds of authors that will someday be reissued by Penguin Classics—but in order to get to that place in the English-speaking world, they first need to be widely-available in America. That’s a great bet, but...I personally am not in the business of evaluating whether Cesar Aira or Osamu Dazai ought to be the next Borges or Kawabata. That’s just not a strong interest of mine. I personally do not really enjoy making judgements about whether semi-canonized authors ought to be more-canonized than they are.4

There is a type of person who really likes this sort of thing! They want to be in on the ground floor with some new(ish) author.

This type of person tends to really love 20th-century literature. And many of these people really love a certain kind of late-modernist literature. They don’t read a lot of 19th-century literature. They’re not into antiquity. They’re not into popular literature. They just like this very self-consciously high literature. And they love ranking these various authors against each other and trying to figure out who’s truly great.

And I can easily imagine this type of person wondering why New Directions reprints don’t seem quite as popular NYRB Classics. This type of person might think, “Oh, folks love simple, easily-digestible American writers like John Williams and Eve Babitz, they don’t care about reading these other truly innovative writers who are often writing in other languages and whose work isn’t as easily legible to the contemporary American reader.”

In other words, they might say that NYRB Classics succeeds because it is more middlebrow than New Directions. That NYRB Classics offers the thrill of discovery, but none of the effort of discovery.

It’s a miracle when something good actually exists

Personally, I just think...New Directions and NYRB Classics are a little different, and they’ve each created a slightly different culture around themselves.

The reader who feels strongly invested in NYRB is like probably somewhat like me—their major reading interests probably lie with the established canon, and when they venture outside the canon, they prefer something shorter and easier, but which still has literary merit and the potential for canonicity.

The New Directions reader is more adventurous, in a sense, more willing to give a lot of their time and energy to authors, like Osamu Dazai and Cesar Aira, that haven’t quite reached the same canonical status as, say, Yasunari Kawabata or Jorge Luis Borges.

But I don’t think this adventurous quality makes the New Directions reader more highbrow. You could easily say that it makes them less highbrow, because they’re paying less attention to books that we really know are good (i.e. the real canon, the real classics, the great works of antiquity and the Renaissance and the Enlightenment) and more attention to authors who will quite often prove ephemeral.

Arguments about who is better or worse—these arguments seem to miss the point. And, to me, the point is that it’s a miracle when something good even exists at all!

Both NYRB Classics and New Directions could easily not exist. They could be gone, defunct, closed. This is the point that Renata Adler made in her excellent book about The New Yorker. She wrote:

_”_An audience, for anything in the arts, does not pre-exist. It is part of what is created. When the audience for what had been The New Yorker dispersed, while the pollsters were trying to determine the preferences of some imaginary, pre-existing and statistically desirable new readership, there was really no New Yorker left.”

Similarly, the readership for these book clubs, whether ‘of the month’ or NYRB or New Directions cannot be neatly categorized. None of these book clubs taps into a pre-existing audience. They all create their own audience, by awakening, in a certain subset of people, a demand for something that they didn’t know they wanted. It’s the same thing that’s true of every magazine and every newsletter—they enter into a reciprocal relationship with their readers, where they both define and are defined by the reader’s taste. Hopefully, that relationship turns into something unique, that the reader isn’t able to get anywhere else.

I think it’s very valuable to study the nature of the relationship between publisher and reader, and the ways that this relationship can be used to advance the cause of literature. But I don’t think it’s very informative to treat that relationship as if it’s a simple matter of fulfilling some person’s inchoate desire to be filled up with culture.

A sign of the times

You also have to be careful when you use the existence of a literary phenomenon as some synecdoche for the times. With something like Book of the Month Club, we know that it existed and that it had subscribers, but don’t know whether its existence was reflective of some underlying shift in society that was any more complicated than “the postal system got better and now it was possible to order books by mail.”

I think it’s true that in our society, many people want to experience culture. And this aspiration has led to the existence of many different phenomena, from the humanities degree to the general-interest magazine. But the rise and fall of these phenomena isn’t necessarily indicative of a rise or fall in peoples’ underlying desire to experience culture. Like...book review pages in newspapers are in decline, but is that because people are less interested in book reviews? Or is it because digital metrics mean we can see now that people were never that interested in them? Or is it that the format of the digital (as opposed to the paper) newspaper means you have fewer and fewer of the type of person who just sits down and reads everything in the paper, so it makes less sense to pad it out with lower-performing content.

You can’t really say, because you don’t actually know what kind of relationship people used to have with book reviews.

And we face the same problem in talking about the BOTMC, where we really want to say something broader about the public’s relationship to this corporation that mail them these somewhat-ponderous, serious books, but...we don’t actually know the nature of that relationship. All we know is that people seemed to value that relationship, at least insofar as being willing to pay money for it. But not so much that anyone was willing to write the kind of encomia for BOTMC that I’ve now written for NYRB.

That, to me, is the test of whether something is good. If someone is willing to put some effort into writing about it, and characterizing it, then it was probably good. Because of Radway’s book, we know something now about BOTMC. It’s clear she felt a lot of affection both for the book club and for the type of literature that it published. And because she put in that effort, she’ll always, for the rest of time, have the final word on whether it was good:

For me [as a fourteen year old girl] middlebrow books accomplished many things. They staved off loneliness and peopled an imagination starved by enforced isolation. At the same time they preserved desire by delineating objects I might aim for at the very moment when I felt crushed by the necessity to contain every familiar want I had ever known, the desire to hang out with my friends, to ride downtown, to make the cheerleading squad, to go to a dance. Less immediately, perhaps, they surveyed, mapped, and made sense of an adult world. They described that world as one where the irreducible individual was a given, where knowledge was revered, and where expertise was to be sought after with intensity and a sense of purpose. They provided materials for self-fashioning as a result, and models to emulate. In the end they fostered my entry into middle-class selfhood and pointed me in direction of the professional middle class.

Definitely not how I would’ve chosen to end the book, because it really portrays these books-of-the-month in highly instrumental terms, as a function of class-formation, and this is not my preferred mode for describing books. I would much prefer if she’d opined about whether this middlebrow literature was good as literature.

However, if anyone ever did a sociology of literature type study on the NYRB Classics. I’d really hope that they would end the book differently, in a way that foregrounded the pleasure the books brought and the value they provide for shaping literary taste. I would hope they said something like the following:

Nowadays, in the year 2075, the NYRB Classics line is mostly famous for republishing this really great novel called A High Wind In Jamaica. You of course have all heard of this book, because it is world-famous, taught in school, universally-beloved—it’s almost impossible to believe there was a time it wasn’t well-known. But...NYRB Classics also published lots of other books. And these other books didn’t necessarily become as famous as A High Wind in Jamaica. You might think—why did they even bother? Why not just publish books of High Wind-level quality and nothing else? Well that’s a complicated question, but...basically...once upon a time people didn’t even know that High Wind was better than all the other NYRB Classics. They thought it was just another amusing mid-century novel, of a type that NYRB had become famous for republishing. You see, that’s the thing about this press. People read these books, because the books were like classics, but they weren’t classics. And that meant the emotional experience of reading them was a bit more relaxed than when you read an actual classic.

For instance, at the same time as I was getting into the NYRB Classics, I was reading Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. I think that I liked this book, but it was definitely an effort to read. I would not have read The Magic Mountain if it wasn’t a Very Important Book. So then, at this exact same time as I was brute-forcing Thomas Mann, it was such a joy to also have this stockpile of books that were also old and had many of the characteristics of VIBs, but upon which I was more free to exercise judgement. I could read them if I wanted, and I could respect them to exactly the degree that I thought they merited respect. These NYRB Classics were a source of ready entertainment that I could truly possess and call my own, in a way that I couldn’t possess—at least at that moment—the actual classics. And then sometimes, as with High Wind in Jamaica, you realized the books were real classics all along.

Elsewhere on the internet

has selected The Wayback Machine as her favorite of the Samuel Richardson finalists:

I picked The Wayback Machine for top billing from among the other contest entries because it most legibly draws upon its premise to fictionalize the kind of inescapable human dilemma that’s the stuff of great literature: “I wasted time and now doth time waste me.”

And has written a review of my forthcoming book What’s So Great About The Great Books?

If you’ve read Naomi’s literary newsletter, Woman of Letters, you’ll know that her great strength is in cutting through the noise. There’s so much broad theorizing in literary discourse and breezy pontificating in book reviewing; these can be fun, but they often mean very little, weightless and flighty enough to turn any reader into a Captain Beatty. Naomi doesn’t do this. Everything she writes (in her nonfiction) is a pointed argument, laser focused on trying to understand and clearly communicate what is actually happening here?

This woman preferred to do pleasant things instead. For this woman, those pleasant things included learning about math and solving complex math problems. The woman didn’t have a degree in math and hadn’t studied math formally, but she wrote a blog that contained talented, witty proofs of various math problems, which she claimed to have worked out herself.

Many people were quite interested in this blog. Some thought she was a faker, cribbing other peoples’ solutions. Others thought she was a genius. But the woman believed that this ability was simple and not a result of genius at all. Her secret was that she’d never accustomed herself to the idea of doing unpleasant things. The way kids were taught in school was unpleasant, so they didn’t want to do it, and they didn’t learn. If they just followed their curiosity without interruption, then they would learn lots of wonderful things.

This woman wrote a novel in which she dramatized this idea. It was about a poor boy, convicted of stupidity and sentenced to the remedial education classes at his school, who relentlessly tried to gain exemption from his schooling by explaining the solutions to complex mathematical problems.

When this novel, The Ordinary Kid, was completed, the woman went about the task of finding a literary agent to represent it. The woman hated doing unpleasant things, so this process was a trial, but with each step, she had hope that it’d be the last unpleasant thing. Just do a query letter. Just sign a contract. Just do some revisions, and then it’d be over, and the book would get published.

Unfortunately, the process of revising this book with a publisher involved a lot of unpleasant tasks. The book contained pages of complex equations, written in mathematical notation, which the publisher didn’t want to render. The woman fought and fought and fought with the publisher to make them publish the book the way she wanted—each time she re-read the galleys, she found newer and more maddening errors. And even when she wasn’t fighting, the woman was worrying and stressing. She didn’t understand how this terrible situation had arisen! This was so unpleasant! This was worse than working, because you could just quit your job. This was worse than school, because you could just drop out of school.

Here it was quite different! It was something she cared about very much, and she wanted it to enter the world in a perfect form, and that required a lot of unpleasant labor.

Nonetheless, she prevailed, and the book was published.

Over the next few decades, her first book gained a lot of fans. And these fans wanted to know if she was working on more books.

And her answer was always, “I am terribly harried by life concerns, and I have very little mental energy to do basic tasks, so I need a safe, comfortable place where I will be separated from the world and completely free from any unpleasant life tasks.”

As a result, her fans kept trying to find ways to give her money so she could afford this situation.

Some gave her money directly, but even this was complicated, because receiving the money involved unpleasantness. There was a newsletter platform that allowed people to give you money, but she couldn’t figure out how to connect it to her bank! Too unpleasant! This was unpleasantness, exactly what she most hated—exactly the thing she’d devoted her entire life to avoiding!

Then some of her fans thought, “Okay, so it’s hard to give her lots of little checks. Why don’t we give her one big check.” One of these fans was a part of a grant-giving organization, and they got this organization to award her a twenty-thousand-dollar grant.

But when this organization tried to get her headshot and bio to announce the award, they ran into problems. She didn’t have time to dig up all that stuff, because dealing with these trivial issues was extremely unpleasant! She sent many emails to the administrator of this grant, saying, “Listen to me, if the point of this money is to help me work, then just listen to what I am saying—I can only work if I never need to do anything unpleasant. And this seems very unpleasant! So if you want the grant to fit its intended purpose (helping me work), then don’t you see that I need it to be much less unpleasant for me?”

And the grant administrator kept emailing her back saying, “Okay, so what can we do to make this more pleasant?” But the woman had a problem. To attempt to communicate effectively with this grants administrator—that would be unpleasant. She could’ve sent an email saying, “Just announce my name, with no picture or bio.” Then this administrator would’ve needed to run it past their board. Maybe they would’ve said no! But it would’ve been an actual proposal.

The woman didn’t do this, because offering a proposal and waiting to hear back—this would’ve been unpleasant. Exerting self-control and attempting to put herself in the other person’s shoes—attempting to figure out what might actually work for them—this would’ve been unpleasant. So she didn’t do it. Instead she abruptly withdrew herself from contention for this award.

This was a recurring pattern with most of the people who attempted to help her. Many times in the last twenty years, some supporter had thought, “Aha! All she needs is someone who will give her exactly what she wants, with no questions asked.”

But the problem was that “What do you want?” was a question. And it was a question that she found it unpleasant to answer. As a result, her answer was inevitably somewhat confused, which meant that her erstwhile supporter needed to ask some follow-up questions to clarify her meaning. And these follow-up questions were just another round of unpleasantness (from her perspective). And eventually the dialogue would be cut short! Too many questions! And she would issue a proclamation about all these terrible people who seemed to want something from her, and then her many fans would think, “What a shame that nobody can just give her whatever she needs, with no questions asked.”

What this woman truly wanted, more than anything. was to be returned mentally to the state she’d possessed before the publication of her first book, back when writing books had been a pleasant activity that she had enjoyed doing.

The problem was that now she had experienced what happens when you write something. What happens is that you might perhaps want to publish that thing. And she’d learned that the publication process would involve a lot of unavoidable unpleasantness.

As a result, the very act of writing had become unpleasant. Whenever she sat down to write, she just thought, “Even in the best possible case—I produce something great—this will be an unpleasant experience.”

And this not only created a disinclination to write, it also harmed the writing itself. Because when she’d initially written her book, she hadn’t been forcing herself. She had actually enjoyed writing the book, and she had written the book by following her own enjoyment, by writing down thoughts and situations that seemed pleasant to her. This never-ending pleasantness was precisely what’d given the book its readable quality.

Back when she was writing that very-pleasant first book, she had also faced a lot of unpleasant worries about bills and life tasks, and the way she’d escaped those worries was through her writing. Now, writing was itself an unpleasant thing that she needed to escape (which she usually did by going online and complaining that she couldn’t write).

In truth, she wasn’t really the same person anymore. She wasn’t the person who’d written that one great book. Back when she’d actually been a genius, she had always denied that she was one—she’d insisted she was just an ordinary person (and had believed it too!). Now that she was widely considered a genius, she played into the role—comparing herself to Pynchon, McCarthy, David Foster Wallace, asking if male geniuses would be treated like she has been—all to obscure the fact that she is not really a genius anymore. The thing that once meant nothing to her—the title of genius—has become vitally important, because it feels that title is a promise that...that...that...somehow there are still pleasant things in store for her. That someday, somehow, she will once again be the person she once was, back when she was doing the genius-level work that she can no longer produce anymore.

Once upon a time, she very much wanted to be understood. She wanted people to understand what was happening inside her head—things that she insisted were no different than were happening in everyone else’s head—which is why she produced her genius book.

Now she no longer has that desire to be understood, because she’s afraid that the real answer to the question “What do you need in order to write a great book?” is, “Nothing, because I am no longer capable of doing so.”

So instead of writing something that people might want to read—a novel or an essay—she spent a lot of time faffing around online. At some point, she got into the habit of just listing all the various books she’d like to write if she was actually capable of writing books. She invented whole universes of authors, and she started going further, creating book reviews and biographies and wikipedia pages for these made-up authors.

Yes there were procedures online to prevent the spread of misinformation, but getting around these procedures was fairly simple. And it was very easy to create an author that people would believe was real, even if they didn’t exist. Her fake authors were usually someone published by the NYRB or someone who wrote essays for tiny journals. Or, oh, even better, a poet! You could invent poets all day long without anyone noticing they were fake.

Eventually, for a few of these writers, she even began publishing actual books. After all, these were fake books, not her real work, and she didn’t care whether they won the ‘Folio Prize’ (something that was apparently real). Some of these fake authors attracted literary agents too, and she even had to do revisions for the benefit of these agents, but because the work wasn’t serious—it was just a joke—she had no issues altering it if her various agents wanted her to.

Eventually, some of her fake authors even had backstories. One of them transitioned! Yep, went from Frank to Francine, just like that, and even got a memoir deal out of the whole thing.

(You might ask how this woman could possibly write twenty highly-touted books per year. Well....how could she learn how to solve complex math problems without any education? When this woman enjoyed doing something, she just did it, with no issues.)

But there was a problem. She was really proud of some of this pseudonymous work, but nobody was reading it! Her work under her own name was famous, but some of these fake authors seemed (to her) equally good, and nobody was paying attention to them. So she decided to snatch a little attention for these authors of hers.

It only took a few days to create the fake award, with the most absurd name she could conjure, to tie everybody together. Then with AI she created a number of videos of people announcing their gratitude for the award. Now, instead of publicizing a dozen authors, she just needed to publicize a single fake award.

But how to do it?

Well, she thought back to her past life, when she used to complain so vociferously about the publishing industry online.

She hadn’t really thought about those old grievances in a long time—they didn’t seem important anymore—but she remembered now that one time when she, silly thing, hadn’t been willing to give a headshot to that foundation. Oh she used to do crazy stuff like that all the time (now of course she had the income from ten or fifteen fake authors coming in, so she didn’t need to worry much). But she channeled that old self, and she wrote a tweet, linking the announcement for this very fake award.

So she wrote a tweet: “Now that the Twatworth-Farnham Prizes have been announced, I can talk about how their unconscionable demands led me to turn down...”

And then she thought. Hmm...the number of the real foundation award she’d turned down, that’d been just $20,000. That was too small. Too believable. It wouldn’t get people riled up. So she thought and thought, trying to come up with a number that would really set the internet talking.

Finally, with a grin, she wrote, “Here’s how I turned down $175,000, even though I’m broke, because of my artistic integrity.”

There, she thought. That number was big enough. Within an hour of her pressing send, she was sure that everyone would realize this comically-large award (that nobody had ever heard of before) was an utter fake. And then they’d go one step further and think, maybe all these other awardees are fake too! Like, their books were obviously real, but maybe the people themselves were fake.

Finally, this woman was ready for all her hard work to be exposed. Looking at the full roster of books she’d written (fifty or sixty by this point), she reflected that it really wasn’t very hard to do this work. Answering an email was an unpleasant imposition. Writing books? Not so much. Writing books was a very pleasant game.

The purpose of this post is to get RSVPs for the San Francisco event. Right now the capacity is 150 people. I have no idea whether we’ll hit that cap, but you won’t be able to attend unless you RSVP, so if you’re interested, please sign up.

For the San Francisco event I will be in conversation with Ross Barkan, whose novel Colossus is coming out April 28th. Dog-Eared Books will be selling copies of both of our books at this event. I think the in-conversation part should take under an hour, including audience questions, and then it’ll just be a party—the event starts at 6 PM and then I have the venue until 10 PM. There will be drinks and light snacks.

Basically, I got envious of all the New York literary parties I’m always hearing about. If The Metropolitan Review and The Drift can have parties then I figure that I can have one too.

This newsletter has been publishing for two years (in its current format) and over that time has built up a pretty strong following—for my Baltimore meetup, we had people take the train from DC and drive down from New Jersey. I would love to have a chance to meet my readers and to give them a chance to meet each other. Don’t be scared, I am exceptional at small talk and mingling.

In a few days, Ross will push out the event to his list, and there’s a chance it’ll fill up, so if you’re interested in coming, please RSVP—I will use the RSVP list to email people with more details, including the exact location of the event.

RSVP for San Francisco event

I am coming to New York too

The New York event will be at a bookstore, McNally Jackson Seaport. I’ll share more details as soon as they’re announced.

But for that event, I will be in conversation with Clare Frances, who runs the excellent —it’s kinda hard to describe her newsletter, but basically it is cultural and media criticism that is very smart, but isn’t trying to sound very smart. I cannot explain this distinction better than that, but if you follow this newsletter for a while, you’ll get it. The lowkey and unpretentious (while still very smart) approach is so great.

My book is coming out in five weeks

Hopefully by this point you’re aware that I’ve written a non-fiction book. Many of you (probably more than half) believe that this book has already been released. It has not been. It is coming out on Tuesday, May 19th, in exactly five weeks. For roughly the next ten weeks, I’ll be mentioning this book (What’s So Great About The Great Books?) a lot. Then, sometime around June 23rd, the book release cycle will be over, and I’ll never mention it again.

Although nobody will say it, I think the promotional strategy for my nonfiction book is this: every book-lover has some sort of pre-existing thoughts about the classics, and the purpose of my book is to give people the chance to discuss their pre-existing thoughts. Basically, you just read my book, look through my arguments for and against the classics, and then you’re like, “Oh no! These are not the right arguments! Kanakia did a bad job of making these arguments!” And then you write a post or make a Tiktok or do a tweet that explains your own thoughts.

This is basically what’s been happening over the last year with that W. David Marx book Blank Space, which is about cultural decline. Everyone has some thoughts about cultural decline, so in reviewing this book people can propound their own thoughts.

And what are my thoughts about the Great Books? Well, I think they’re very important thoughts that nobody has written about yet (other than me). I could summarize those thoughts here, but it would be impossible. To really understand them, you’d need to read the book, which you’ll be able to do in a mere five weeks.

You will be able to purchase a copy of this book at either of my events. You can also pre-order What’s So Great About The Great Books on Amazon and on Bookshop. I know many of you have already preordered. If you preorder a book and bring it to one of my events, I’ll happy to sign it there.

Correction

In last week’s round-up of the Samuel Richardson Award finalists I left off Eric Giroux’s Zodiac Pets. Our judge, Ani N, said:

Zodiac Pets shines because it is able to strike tricky balances: between moments of over the top craziness and moments of tender and care, between the characters expressing their totemic qualities and their human frailties, between the overbearing protagonist and the rich world. Above all, it is the rare piece of metafiction - (Hernan Diaz’s Trust comes to mind as another example) that uses the affordances of its format to their full potential.

Sorry for the oversight!

Elsewhere on the internet…

In last week’s paid post I took exception to a ten-year-old Yiyun Li interview that contained some baffling advice for aspiring writers:

If you spend any time around established literary writers, you’ll be subjected to baffling advice about how it’s important not to pursue publication. Don’t be anxious to get published, just work on your craft, and the book deal will come in time.

For instance, here is Yiyun Li complaining that her students care too much about publication:

I have this student—he’s in his twenties and he’s a strong writer for his age—and I was talking to him one time and he said, You just don’t understand me. At my age, I just really want to get published. And I said, Why? Writing is not a race. What’s the hurry? And he said, You don’t understand. Young people have ambition.

And I thought, That’s the wrong ambition. If you get there first, it doesn’t mean you’re the best.

This quote by Yiyun Li comes off as bafflingly tone-deaf because earlier in the same piece, she has already described her own path to publication.

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