This post will be the final page for the first year of the contest, so I hope you’ll forgive me for recapping the results so far.

The First Round

Our submission period ran from June 1st to July 30th. It was open to any book that had been self-published in the last five years. Our format was based on the format for long-running sci-fi and fantasy self-published novel contests, and the main rule was that your entry couldn’t have been submitted to those contests.

We divided the 67 entries between ten judges who each selected a single finalist. Eight of our judges wrote up reviews for their chosen picks (yes there was some judicial attrition along the way):

• Merritt Graves’s Drive A

• Michele Howarth’s Glitterballs

• Alexander Sorondo’s Cubafruit

• Will Caverly’s Here, The Bees Sting

• Colin Dodds’s Ms. Never

• Daniel Falatko’s The Wayback Machine

• Elizabeth Braithwaite’s A Flight of Saints

• Eric Giroux’s Zodiac Pets

• Eleanor Anstruther’s In Judgement of Others

• Brian Jordan’s Wild Walt and the Rock Creek Gang

Then, over the next six months, our remaining judges attacked the finalists and decided on their personal favorite:

• Moo Cat picked Drive A, which gave him a new appreciation for science fiction novels:

[The author] never tries to be too smart. Most of the characters are doped up with brain enhancers and fancy degrees from elite schools, but our protagonist is just like us: amazed, weary, and wary. The hyper-meritocracy of Graves’ world is never boring.

• T. Benjamin White picked Cubafruit, saying

…for the time I had the book open in front of me, I was living in Cubafruit. It was one of the most immersive literary experiences I’ve had in a long time.

• Lillian Wang Selonick picked The Wayback Machine, comparing it to a Philip K. Dick novel:

What is the essence of a PKD novel? Menacing darkness, deadpan humor, epistemological uncertainty, a malevolent and/or indifferent woman—the levels on the mixing board are set just so, and most attempts to replicate or remix the masters fail. My choice to win the contest has engineered a solution.

• Adam Fleming Petty also picked The Wayback Machine, despite his suspicion that he was too much the target audience for this book:

Yet though I began The Wayback Machine a skeptic, I finished it a convert. Turns out, I love being a target market! Take it from this white man: being pandered to is the best! But that is not the only reason I selected this book as my personal vote for the Samuel Richardson Prize. Yes, this idiosyncratic and personal book made me respond to it in an equally idiosyncratic and personal way.

• Abra McAndrew picked The Wayback Machine as well:

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.”

Phil Christmas also picked The Wayback Machine, which he had previously reviewed as his original finalist pick.

And, finally, I too picked The Wayback Machine:

Nathan loves this hipster era, and he shows that love by tearing it down, cheapening it, exposing all its compromises and lies. Which leaves both his interlocutors asking, “Was the hipster era actually good?”

Ultimately, the novel seems to say that when this era started, it was good. It was a way for ordinary kids from the suburbs to move to the city and quickly experience the kind of glamorous urban life they’d always dreamed about. But its goodness lay in its accessibility, and ultimately that accessibility is what destroyed it. The city became too accessible, too many people arrived, everything got too expensive, and all the signifiers of hipsterdom—the clothes, the concerts, the niche foods—got commodified, so now all you needed was money—you didn’t need any real cultural knowledge anymore.

The winner!

And that’s our winner! Dan Falatko’s The Wayback Machine, a novel about a former music journalist—the writer for thinly-veiled fictional analogues to Pitchfork and Vice—who gets out of prison and starts asking some serious questions about what happened to that early aughts world! Where did it all go!

I loved the book. It’s obviously the product of personal obsession and a deep love for the subject matter. It was self-published in February 2025, and now, a year later, it’s won an award and has received a fair amount of critical attention. Hopefully good things lie in wait for this book and this author.

Our three runner-up books were:

1. Alexander Sorondo’s Cubafruit

2. Merritt Graves’s Drive A

3. Will Caverly’s Here, The Bees Sting

I can recommend all of these books! Cubafruit has already gotten a lot of buzz on Substack—it’s a sprawling literary thriller about a biographer who is targeted by a dictator’s contract killer (it was reviewed by both T. Benjamin White and by Abra McAndrew). And Drive A was my original finalist pick—I wrote about it here, and so did Moo Cat.

And I really had a special place in my heart for Here, The Bees Sting, which I thought was a highly-accomplished novel. This book is amazing, it’s a mystery. There’s a bunch of people in a valley who are being terrorized by killer bees. And a bee inspector goes out to find what’s happening, what’s driving the bees insane. But then, the story is also told from the perspective of the queen of this bee hive, who is flailing and facing rebellion from her workers. The hive is suffering from some mysterious illness, and they’re blaming the queen for her poor leadership. The bee sections were top-notch, really well-done.

Final Thoughts

I started this contest because I have many online acquaintances who have self-published novels, and I wanted to be able to highlight work their work in a way that felt fair, and not just like I was praising whoever had the most online clout. To this end, I enlisted our wonderful judges and tried to create an impartial judging system for judging.

Hopefully, this decision feels somehow legit: I follow Dan Falatko online, but I would not say our relationship is particularly close, and I probably would not have read his book without this contest. There was another entrant, Peter Shull, who I felt much more positively about (so much so that I read his book on my own and wrote about it). Shull also entered this contest, but his judge didn’t select Why Teach? as a finalist so it was eliminated in the first round.

Personally, I am happy that I ran this contest. I am terrible at organizing things, so it was a bit stressful to be responsible for producing a result (I spent MUCH time wrangling with spreadsheets and Google Drives), but, as I’ve mentioned before, I found it to be a very emotional experience to look through these books. It was just clear to me that a lot of care had gone into the books, and that they were products of a profound passion.

I am in favor of self-publishing. It’s easy to be in favor of ‘gate-keeping’ in the abstract, but what happens when you’ve worked five years on a book and nobody wants to publish it? Yes, you can definitely take ‘no’ for an answer: I know many talented writers who’ve done that. In some cases, they’ve gone on to publish other books, but in most cases they’ve quit. Ultimately, I think each person needs to be their own gatekeeper. Yes, if the world is telling you that your work is no good, then it’s worth listening to that voice. But sometimes you go back to the book and re-read it, and you think, I just don’t agree.

Self-publishing is an author’s assertion that their work matters and that it deserves to be in the world. That’s not an easy statement to make.

With this contest, I hoped to honor these authors by taking their work seriously. Hopefully the authors got something out of it, but I would also completely understand if someone out there is shaking their fist saying Naomi has no taste! She is a horrible judge, a horrible reader! Luckily, I am not a gatekeeper. All the works that were entered into this contest—whether they were finalists or not—are free to purchase online, and I hope that they all manage to find the readers that they deserve.

Links and Acknowledgements

Thank you to all of our judges! They signed up for this very speculative venture, and I hope they got something out of it. They’re free to write about their judging experiences if they want. Our ten judges were: myself, , , , , , , , , and .

I do think there’ll be a second round, but not right away—probably in 2027. In the meantime, please check out The Wayback Machine and our other finalists (links are to the Amazon page for each book):

Winner:

• The Wayback Machine by Dan Falatko

Runners Up:

• Cubafruit by Alexander Sorondo

• Drive A by Merritt Graves

• Here, The Bees Sting by Will Caverly

Other Finalists:

• Glitterballs by Michele Howarth

• Ms. Never by Colin Dodds

• A Flight of Saints by Elizabeth Braithwaite

• Zodiac Pets by Eric Giroux

• In Judgement of Others by Eleanor Anstruther

• Wide Walt and the Rock Creek Gang by Brian Jordan

In these novels, the first-person protagonist (who is usually named Adam Gordon) wins awards, gets huge publishing contracts, goes to residencies, and sleeps with hot women—all while worrying that he’s an imposter or fraud, and that he’s really just pretending to be a guy who’s got an authentic relationship to art.

Over the course of one week, I read all four of these novels and loved them. They are so excellent! You might think, “Oh, of course Naomi would love them, because she too is a highly-acclaimed person of letters.” And you’d be partially correct. For me, there is a voyeuristic element to these novels. I do all the things that ‘Adam Gordon’ does, but at a much, much lower level. For instance, when I get a publishing contract, it is not for an unwritten novel, it is not for $500,000, and my agent does not take me to a restaurant where I consume a baby octopus that’s been massaged to death by the chef that morning.

This octopus meal happens in Lerner’s second novel, 10:04 (2014), where the author character is called ‘Ben’ so henceforward I will refer to the author stand-in as Ben/Adam.

Everything in the life of the Ben/Adam character is fancier than in my life, but not unachievably so. It’s like when you’re a teenager or a college student, and you’re reading, let’s say, Bridget Jones’s Diary or The Devil Wears Prada or some other escapist fiction where the main character has a fancy, aspirational job, but they’re also miserable, and you think, Hmm I bet I could be glamorously miserable in the metropole too!

It is the misery that makes it accessible.

The Ben protagonist isn’t miserable, but he’s definitely quite neurotic. In Lerner’s first novel, Leaving The Atocha Station (2011), Adam (not yet well-known) is doing a Fulbright in Madrid, and he mopes through town, going to trendy parties and sleeping with a hot local, but worrying that somehow he’s incapable of having an authentic experience of art. For much of the book, he’s hanging out with Teresa, who is translating Adam’s poetry into Spanish. And, late in the book, Adam discovers Teresa is an eminent artist in her own right, with a substantial local reputation. Afterwards, he tries to avoid appearing on a panel with her, because (he claims) he has nothing to say about literature.

She says:

“Adam, you are a wonderful poet, a serious poet. If I weren’t sure about that, why would I be translating you? When are you going to stop pretending that you’re only pretending to be a poet?” She said only my name in English.

This is great! It’s such naked wish-fulfillment, right? Adam goes around moping about how he’s really a fraud, and then everyone in the book is like, “But you’re actually great!”

The same sort of thing also happens in 10:04. In this book, he gets a huge book deal on the basis of a story he’s published in The New Yorker, and he’s anxious about his ability to expand it into a novel. He tells himself he’s only doing it to afford the money to help his friend with fertility treatments. This novel contains several scenes where ‘Ben’ tries to display his good politics, but then he feels bad about it, like oh maybe my politics are fake and I’m just doing this to seem like a good guy, and then the text somehow reassures him that no actually he’s a good dude.

In one of the best scenes in the book, he’s working at the Park Slope Food Co-Op. And he has these complicated feelings about belonging to the Co-Op (a Brooklyn institution where you get cheaper groceries in return for working one shift a month at the store), but he decides actually belonging to the Co-Op is good:

[for] most of the members…insulting the co-op was a mode of participation in its culture. Complaining indicated you weren’t foolish enough to believe that belonging to the co-op made you meaningfully less of a node in a capitalist network, that you understood the co-op’s population was largely made up of gentrifiers of one sort or another, and so on…

And yet, although I insulted it constantly, and although my cooking was at best inept, I didn’t think the co-op was morally trivial. I liked having the money I spent on food and household goods go to an institution that made labor shared and visible and that you could usually trust to carry products that weren’t the issue of openly evil conglomerates. The produce was largely free of poison. The co-op helped run a soup kitchen. When a homeless shelter in the neighborhood burned down, “we”—at orientation they taught you to utilize the first-person plural while talking about the co-op—donated the money to rebuild it.

After this, Ben connects on a profound emotional level with the woman he’s working with, who has this complicated history where she thought that she was Lebanese but actually her father turned out to be a white guy, and then Ben walks out into the night and thinks about how complex life is.

If there had been a way to say it without it sounding like presumptuous co-op nonsense, I would have wanted to tell her that discovering you are not identical with yourself even in the most disturbing and painful way still contains the glimmer, however refracted, of the world to come, where everything is the same but a little different because the past will be citable in all of its moments, including those that from our present present happened but never occurred.

This is the basic Ben/Adam move—feeling anxious you’re a fraud and then somehow exculpating yourself.

Personally, I enjoy this move. What I enjoy is that eventually Ben/Adam does get relief. I see no reason why Ben/Adam needs to feel bad! Why is he so hard on himself? What’s he done that’s particularly bad or wrong? His psychology seems very similar to the psychology of many people I know, who claim (at least publicly) that their role in the world is ultimately a negative one—that they are more a part of the problem than a part of the solution. This feeling has always seemed somewhat disingenuous to me (if you’re so bad, then you should live differently!) And it’s nice that in Ben/Adam we complete the circle and see him realize that actually he’s not so bad.

Ben/Adam doesn’t believe in art

One of the most baffling things about the Ben/Adam protagonist is his deep ambivalence about the power of art to touch people or to transform lives. This comes out most clearly in Leaving The Atocha Station, where he describes his relationship with poetry as being very labored:

I had long worried that I was incapable of having a profound experience of art and I had trouble believing that anyone had, at least anyone I knew. I was intensely suspicious of people who claimed a poem or painting or piece of music “changed their life,” especially since I had often known these people before and after their experience and could register no change… Insofar as I was interested in the arts, I was interested in the disconnect between my experience of actual artworks and the claims made on their behalf; the closest I’d come to having a profound experience of art was probably the experience of this distance, a profound experience of the absence of profundity.

There is some evidence that this is how Ben Lerner feels himself! For instance, in Ben’s nonfiction book, Hatred of Poetry (2016), he claims that the experience of wanting (and failing) to be touched by poetry is the essential poetic experience, because it’s impossible to actually be touched by a poem.

“Poetry” is a word for a kind of value no particular poem can realize… “Poetry” becomes a word for an outside that poems cannot bring about, but can make felt, albeit as an absence, albeit through embarrassment.

I find this sentiment so strange! Ben Lerner has devoted his life to poetry, but seemingly has never had an experience like I’ve had, where I just read a poem and am like, “Wow, that was really beautiful. I felt an emotional experience reading that.” This guy needs to sit down and read “Ozymandius” or “do not go gentle into that good light”. Ben Lerner is making stuff way too complicated!

The will to power

In Ben’s third novel, the Pulitzer-Prize nominated The Topeka School (2019), we get a glimpse of the teenage Adam Gordon. In this novel, the teenage Adam sections are written in the third-person, which allows the adult Adam to show a version of himself that’s a little less manufactured. Oh yes, I should mention that at least three of Ben Lerner’s books are actually written by the protagonist: in 10:04, The Topeka School, and his fourth novel, Transcription (2026), the conceit is you’re actually reading a text that was written by the Ben/Adam character.

Anyway, in The Topeka School, the main thing you learn about the teenage Adam is that this kid has an incredible will to power! He just wants to win. Apparently teenage Adam was a debate champion (a trait he shares with the teen Ben Lerner), and you learn all about his debate prep and his anxieties over debate. When adult Adam talks about his own writing, he often seems very hesitant, like he’s a fraud. But teenage Adam (at least as described by adult Adam) is much more confident. He knows that he is a great debater—he just wants to be the best debater. And he works very hard to achieve that goal.

Teenage Adam also really wants to be popular and to sleep with pretty girls, and he accomplishes those aims too. And then when he is sleeping with a girl, he worries about being the best at that, and (in adult Adam’s telling) he prides himself on being the best cunnilinguist amongst all the teenage boys in Topeka, Kansas:

He could hardly have been the only boy who “ate pussy” in Topeka, but he might have been the only kid in the class of ’97 who read up on techniques, consulted the famous sexpert when she passed through town, who solicited frank feedback from his partner in the act.

Of course, he also claims that he is ashamed of being so good at oral:

If all he knew was to listen and respond and hold steady through the shaking, that was more than enough—combined with straight fucking—to make Amber declare him by far the greatest of her many lovers. But while he hoped she publicized this ranking, he didn’t want her divulging the centrality of oral stimulation, which would put his reputation at risk among the types. Again his tongue was both his strength and weakness.

This kind of back-handed bragging is so typical of Ben/Adam! He knows that he should be proud of something, but somehow he’s not proud of it, which allows him to brag publicly about how he’s actually so ashamed of this achievement.

How real is Ben/Adam?

Basically, to enjoy Ben Lerner’s work, you need to be charmed by this sort of thing. I personally found him very likable and appealing, if (at times) a bit strange. Hidden beneath this self-effacing interior there is obviously an incredible will to power, it’s unclear whether Ben/Adam really believes he is the best poet and lover, but he definitely wants other people to think he is!

Now there is also a deeper question, which is…to what extent does this Ben/Adam character represent Ben Lerner himself? I think the answer depends in part on the degree to which you think a ‘self’ really exists.

My personal belief is that the ‘self’ can never truly communicated in full within a novel. The person, Ben Lerner, must contain multitudes, whereas the Ben/Adam character is actually a fairly simple and one-note portrayal. Ben/Adam really wants to be a good person, and he worries that he is not good. But it is precisely his worrying that demonstrates his goodness.

At times I wondered if there was something fake about this portrayal. Ben/Adam never does anything that would truly test my belief that he’s a good person. It’s not that I think Ben/Adam and Ben Lerner are the same, but if they were the same—if all of Ben/Adam and Lerner’s thoughts and actions were the same—it wouldn’t change my judgement of Lerner. I wouldn’t feel Lerner, the person, had anything to be ashamed of.

There’s something a bit remarkable about this. You have a fictional character that you’ve created. You have so much fun here if you want. Ben/Adam can cheat on his wife. He can get whisper catty comments to himself, where he calls out his peers as talentless hacks. He can cheat on his taxes, plagiarize assignments, or just do anything that you want. But…he doesn’t. His misbehavior is so mild that it’s hardly worth remarking upon. The worst thing he did in all four books was that at one point in 10:04 he gets blind drunk and hits on his best friend. I thought, “Oh yeah, this is the juice! She will get upset.” But she doesn’t get particularly upset—she just fends him off, and they begin a sexual relationship later, when he’s sober.

Just bad enough

Contrast this to Knausgaard, who also wrote a fictional portrayal of himself. But the Knausgaard character in My Struggle does all kinds of shameful things, including cheating on his girlfriends, getting extremely drunk, and (as we learn in the final volume) driving his wife to a mental breakdown through his writing (and then writing about the breakdown!)

Sometimes I wished that Ben Lerner could’ve pushed the envelope a bit more, revealed a bit more, and done more to mess with his good-guy image.

But, if he’d done that, then I might no longer think he was a good guy!

So it’s a paradox. If he’s anything like Ben/Adam, then Ben’s primary drive is to be seen as a good person. And right now, I do think Ben is a good person, because I equate him with Ben/Adam (who is a good person). But if Ben/Adam was any worse, then I would no longer think the Ben and Ben/Adam were the same, so I’d no longer be certain if Ben was good.

In these books, Ben is exploring how bad it’s possible for a man to be without losing his reputation for being a good person. The Ben/Adam character does plenty that’s discreditable, but it’s always just enough that he seems authentic, and yet not so much that we think “Wow, he went too far!”

Whatever comes after post-modernism

One thing I haven’t mentioned is that Ben Lerner is avant-garde. This man does not write normal novels, or what Benjamin Kunkel called ‘the perennial novel’. Instead, Lerner is writing in that other tradition of novel-writing, which Kunkel describes in the following way:

[T]here plainly exists, under whatever name, a culture of novel writing, formerly [called] modern and now postmodern, that does not take the form for granted, that does not behave simply as comes naturally, that instead finds in the artifice of the novelist’s art an occasion for debilitating self-consciousness or freedom from constraint.

Lerner’s novels do not feel like traditional novels. It’s hard to explain the way they they’re different from regular novels, but I will try. Basically, there are these new novel-writing techniques these days where you tell fictional stories in a purposefully aimless and meandering way, often sticking close to the details of your own life, in order to create the illusion of verisimilitude. The idea here is that real life doesn’t look much like a story: real life doesn’t have slowly-heightening tension or overt conflict.

The Sebaldian mode

The main influence here is W.G. Sebald, a German writer who also wrote in this casual, seeming-unstructured way. The conceit is that you use a style that outwardly resembles a memoir or reminiscence, and precisely because the story is so woolly and unstructured, it feels like these events actually happened.

For instance, if I was telling you about my day, and I said something like, “My student accused me of harassing them, but they’re lying—they have a grudge against me because I failed them” then that would sound like a story.

But if I said instead, “My student came in today and they were weirdly agitated, not making much sense, and after they left I sent an email about them to the counseling service” then that would sound more like real life.

And the incidents in Lerner’s novels are much more like the second incident (indeed, there is a scene with an agitated student just like this in 10:04). The books are full of strange one-off incidents—characters who creep into the narrative, take center stage, and then disappear, without us ever learning more about them.

The effect is really engaging, because it feels like you’re witnessing the kinds of quotidian moments that normally get left out of stories. And if you’re reading quickly, absorbed in the text, you don’t notice—or don’t allow yourself to notice—that you’re seeing a version of everyday life that’s subtly crafted engage your interest. It’s like reality, if reality was actually interesting.

The best Sebalds

I read a ton of W.G. Sebald a month ago, and that’s why I started reading Lerner. I read all of Sebald’s books, and the two I liked most were his middle novels, The Emigrants (1992) and The Rings of Saturn (1996).

Of these, The Emigrants is the best. This book is told in the first-person, and the conceit is that the narrator (who we assume is Sebald himself) is just relating the life-stories of four people he knows who emigrated from their home countries. In each case, he rounds out the story by describing how he found their notebooks or read their letters or tracked down their relatives, and he also intersperses the narrative with photos that he purports to be the person in question or their home. All fictional! But the text expends a massive amount of effort to create the effect of real reportage, and most people assume that the stories being related are about real people. Even knowing that the stories were fictional, they still felt very real to me.

There has been so much written about Sebald—he is one of the most important writers of the last thirty years and has been a huge influence on contemporary American literature. All of these contemporary books that mix fact and fiction in various ways—they’re often (though not always) using techniques lifted from Sebald. He is well worth reading!

The best was last

Ben’s latest novel, Transcription, came out just a few months ago and was the subject of a lot of discussion. The consensus seemed to be that Transcription, while good, wasn’t his best work.

I disagree! I felt like the book was his best novel yet. I really loved it.

Okay, so the conceit of this novel is that Adam Gordon is going to do an interview with his mentor, Thomas. But Adam drops his phone in the toilet and is unable to record the interview. Meanwhile Thomas has dementia and doesn’t realize Adam is not recording, so Thomas just starts the interview, and Adam lets him talk.

In the second part of novel, Adam travels for an event where he pays tribute on stage to Thomas, who is now deceased, and Adam reveals that part of Thomas’s final interview (i.e. the interview we just read) was reconstructed partly from memory. One of Adam’s friends is really mad at him about this, and she says that means the interview was basically fictional!

Then, in the third part, Adam goes and talks to Thomas’s son, Max (who is also Adam’s friend from college), and Max tells a long story about how his daughter has an eating disorder—it’s this new kind of eating disorder, ARFID, that afflicts prepubescent kids, where they just stop eating and won’t explain why. And Max describes how they eventually got this girl to eat by getting her to watch YouTube videos—unlimited screen time! And then while YouTubing she would unconsciously snack, and that’s how she got better.

The novel hinges upon the contrast between Thomas and his granddaughter, the girl with the eating disorder. Thomas hates smartphones, refuses to use one. But he’s also extremely disconnected and has little relationship with his son. In the interview, Thomas comes across as very avoidant—he just starts talking about random facts and reminiscences, skipping around, never touching on the topic at hand. He has devoted his life to art, and it felt him empty, unable to connect with people. His wife committed suicide. He sent his son off to boarding schools and hardly knows him.

Max describes how his dad always refused to talk about anything serious:

Adelle had a cancer scare at one point; I told him we were waiting to get the biopsy back, that I was terrified, that I was spinning out, imagining the worst, etc. ‘Ah, bios, opsis—what a beautiful combination. Life, sight. Did you know that it is al-Zahrawi in the eleventh century who first uses a needle to puncture and examine the material. He also, they say, invented lipstick, but this is disputed. He was born in what is now Spain, Andalusia. I have walked down the street named for him in Córdoba.’ He might throw in an ‘all will be well,’ but my whole life he would meet anything personal with some demonstration of arcane knowledge or lyrical improvisation. It was always this way, no doubt it was his defense mechanism.”

It’s funny because this type of rhetorical performance is exactly what we’ve witnessed in the first section! This is exactly how Thomas would act—it reframes the entire first section. Now we can see that it wasn’t necessarily an artist displaying his dazzling erudition, it could also be read as a vacuous windbag, spewing empty profundities.

So Thomas, the artist who hates screens, comes across as empty and lifeless, and meanwhile his granddaughter is literally restored to life by the screen, by YouTube. You see, in Max’s telling, how YouTube is so effortlessly absorbing, how it can give this girl everything that art cannot give the grandfather—that YouTube doesn’t need to explain itself, because it is so clearly, obviously compelling right from the get-go.

Transcription is a subtle performance. Unlike in Lerner’s previous novels, Lerner really leaves open his intentions and doesn’t say exactly what things mean. We know that the interview we’ve seen was fictionalized, and we are told, initially, that it’s a tribute. But after we hear Max’s description of his dad, we start to wonder if maybe the interview was a hit-job, an assassination. Maybe Adam, in writing down this rambling, free-associative interview (and publishing it after Thomas was dead and couldn’t respond) was taking his mentor to task and satirizing him.

To me, this novel felt like it replayed a lot of Lerner’s insecurities about the meaning and durability of art, but did so in a more ambiguous and much more powerful way. I loved it.

Which are the best Lerners?

One of the fun things people like to do with Ben Lerner is rank his various novels. My ranking, from best to worst is:

1. Transcription

2. The Topeka School

3. Leaving The Atocha Station

4. 10:04

Many people think 10:04 and Atocha are his best novels. I disagree. I think they’re both flawed, and for similar reasons. Atocha’s last third is marred by the Madrid train bombings, which add a lot of hustle and bustle to the book for no end—the terror attack feels random and out of place. And in 10:04, there’s a lot of cringe-inducing attempts to show how great a guy Adam is: he cooks dinner for an Occupy protester; he gives his best friend money to get pregnant; he mentors Roberto, the undocumented child. It’s just too much!

Nonetheless, all the books are good, and I feel like if you’re gonna read them, you should probably read them in order of publication (i.e. start w Atocha, then do 10:04, then Topeka, then Transcription).

Sometimes, with a writer like Ben Lerner, there is a temptation to say, “Who is this for? What is the market for these insular novels about the daily life of a writer?” But obviously the primary market is other writers. The world contains many writers and aspiring writers, and we tend to read lots of books. We like to read about ourselves, just like everyone else does.

Of course there are lots of books about the writing life. But most of them portray writers who are poor, envious, and resentful. Ben Lerner’s novels are different. His protagonist is full of self-doubt, but he’s also constantly being feted and praised. Moreover, we are purposefully led to belief that this protagonist’s life is reflective of the material reality of Ben’s own life. Reading about this beautiful, glossy writer lifestyle would be enjoyable even on its own. Even if these novels were nothing more than a peek into the life of a successful literary writer, that would be reason enough to read them.

But the great thing is that Ben Lerner’s novels are not mere escapism! No, he is a widely-praised avant-garde novelist who has been nominated for the Pulitzer and has received a MacArthur ‘genius’ award. So when we read Lerner, we’re not only getting an enjoyable glimpse into the life of highly successful writer, we are also expanding our taste by reading a set of novels that are purportedly at the cutting-edge of literary art.

The Age of Sebald

Last year, I read four F. Scott Fitzgerald story collections and re-read most of his novels, but I never wrote a post about him. I loved him too much! I just couldn’t think of what to say.

Now I’m in the same situation with W.G. Sebald. I’ve read his four novels and his major nonfiction book, On The Natural History of Destruction. I really loved his work, but what is there to say? He’s one of the most important novelists of the past forty years—he’s had a broad and far-ranging influence on literature in the U.S., Europe and Latin America. Many of the most-acclaimed contemporary Anglophone writers—Rachel Cusk, Teju Cole, Garth Greenwell, Ben Lerner—were inspired by Sebald.

So instead of letting Sebald hang over my head, I am declaring bankruptcy. I have nothing to say, other than that you should probably read him.

My favorite of his books, as I mentioned above, was The Emigrants. It is a series of four portraits of people who fled their home countries.

His third book is also good: The Rings of Saturn purports to be a description of a walking tour of Suffolk, a county in the east of England. The first-person narrator walks around a curiously barren landscape, relating stories about the places he encounters along the way (so many abandoned mansions and forts!) In addition to the techniques he uses to build verisimilitude, there is a gloomy, Romantic affect to Sebald that is quite compelling.

What makes Sebald work so well, in these two books, is that he’s telling the kinds of stories that you wouldn’t tell unless they were true. Like one of the stories in The Emigrants is about his former landlord, a doctor named Henry Selwyn. You learn that long ago, before WWI, Henry had a close relationship with an alpine tour guide (the implication is that they were lovers), but the relationship was cut short by the war. Then, some years after the narrator moves out of his apartment, he discovers that Henry has killed himself. And that’s it! That’s the story!

This is a fictional story! It never happened! But it’s so misshapen and woolly that it feels true, because if you were going to make up a story like this, you’d probably give it more of a plot.

In my opinion, Sebald’s final novel, Austerlitz, doesn’t work nearly as well as the two previous books, because it’s got too much shape—it feels too much like a novel.

Two of Sebald’s novels, The Emigrants and Austerlitz, concern the ways that the memory of the Holocaust has been repressed in the contemporary German psyche. His book-length essay, On The Natural History of Destruction, concerns the memory of another tragedy: the allied bombing of Germany during WWII, and the ways the memory of this calamity has also been repressed. I also found this book to be quite fascinating—it was interesting to see Sebald write in his own voice, rather than in that of his fictional alter-ego. His nonfiction voice is actually quite different, much more direct. I recommend it both for the contrast and as an interesting work in its own right.

My nonfiction book, What’s So Great About The Great Books? released this week in the UK. Do you have the Great Books in the UK? It feels like a very American concept to me. If you’re British, please read my book and tell me whether anything like the Great Books movement exists in your milieu.

Perhaps because of this release, The Wall Street Journal reviewed the book. Tara Isabella Burton had good things to say:

It is precisely in that moral vision—the integrity of which Ms. Kanakia so movingly writes—that we find a defense of the Great Books far more provocative, and far more original, than much of the right’s habit of treating them as antiwoke bulwark for the culture wars.

Pleased to see this coverage! Perhaps as a result, the book has shot up in the Amazon sales rank--so reviews do sometimes move copies.

Other coverage

Rich Horton writes:

I’ll mention a key element of the “Great Books” as Naomi would have it -- they deal with important moral issues, and they do so with respect for views on both sides of the issue -- and with a sense of, not perhaps ambiguity, but openness to the possibility that competing views to those of the author might be valid. And yet not nihilism -- a conviction that there is a moral center that we must seek. And this book is valuable on multiple terms -- the arguments for reading Great Books, the discussion of what makes Great Books great, and simply the pleasure of accompanying a reader on her journey.

Robert Minto writes:

From my fannish perspective, I think this book matters in Kanakia’s oeuvre because it fully exploits her strongest literary asset for the first time in print: I mean the seductive voice that was previously restricted to her internet writing. It’s a voice casual yet precise, unselfconsciously nerdy, simultaneously idealistic and cynical—and utterly singular.1 As for the book’s subject matter, apologetics for reading the classics, I have to admit I’m dubious about its persuasive power. Not because of any deficiencies in Kanakia’s reasoning or writing, but because I’m dubious about apologetics of any kind, in the service of any faith, art, or ideology.

I had no idea that Minto had read so much of my work! I agree that this book is the first time I’ve used my internet voice in print--my hope is that my forthcoming collection utilizes it more, but who knows.

Many such Bernhard takes…

For The Point’s substack, Jon Baskin wrote what he called ‘an addendum’ to my post on Thomas Bernhard. He too is a fan of Jordan Castro—Baskin writes:

The genius of Castro’s inheritance of Bernhard lies in its recognition of two differences between Bernhard’s era (and even the era in which I began reading Bernhard), and our own. The first is that “social life” now takes place predominantly online, rather than in person. The second, which flows from the first, is that this online experience has familiarized us all with the perennially resentful and castigating voice of Bernhard’s seemingly eccentric narrators, as well as with their (once seemingly extreme) habit of judging everything their contemporaries say, even when it purports to be an analysis of a work of art or a meditation on their lives, as an act of competitive posturing.

Baskin goes on to say that maybe even this experience of the internet, as an arena of online ranting and posturing, perhaps belongs primarily to the past, and that novels like Castro’s are really a time-capsule, a record of a text-based internet that has since given way to the internet of vertical video.

In the comment section for my original Bernhard piece, left a comment saying that he thought Bernhard’s voice was too easy to imitate, so much so that it formed a kind of dead-end, locking aspiring writers into a position from which it was difficult to innovate.

He expanded upon this comment:

…writing like Thomas Bernhard specifically is easier than writing like other writers, easier than choosing another narrative voice from amid literature’s panoply of narrative voices, not merely due to the distinct qualities of Thomas Bernhard’s narrative voice, the flowing sentences and italicized repetitions that lend his prose, which is now your prose, the unmistakable rhythm that leads every last commentator on Thomas Bernhard, every last one without fail, to note the musical quality of Thomas Bernhard’s narrative voice, and to reference Thomas Bernhard’s musical training in his youth, but also due to the patina of serious literature that this narrative voice endows upon your work, a seriousness stemming in turn from the demands that such a structure ipso facto places upon a reader, the lack of paragraph breaks that cause the text to assume upon the page an imposing heft, transforming before the reader’s watering eyes into a sustained scream, a mountain rearing vertiginously toward the heavens, a great oozing magma of words signaling to the reader that you, the Neo-Bernhardian writer, are a serious writer of serious literature, all because you can do a pretty credible job of writing like a writer whom a lot of other writers are currently trying to write like.

The whole post (which is thankfully not written in this same imitative voice) is very interesting and well-worth reading.

A Chekhov effort-post

Recently, I also really enjoyed (and was impressed by) Adhithya’s attempt to get to the root of an eternal question: What makes Chekhov’s stories so good? As Adhithya notes, this is a question that surprisingly few people attempt to answer, perhaps because the stories are so seemingly artless:

It’s that resistance to analysis that baffled me. Every great writer is great at multiple things, but they’re recognized for something. Tolstoy had this incredible talent for creating moral masterpieces that asked big questions, filled with nuanced characters and vivid set pieces. Turgenev mastered the character of the Russian peasant: he evoked admiration for their simple lives and a horror for the system that crushed them. Dostoevsky’s frenzied rants cut deep into the darkness of the psyche, and Gogol’s deranged idiosyncratic voice conjured a bizarre world. But Chekhov…

Chekov’s writing is like sea water that slips through clenched fingers. But it leaves the taste of salt on your palm. It’s the sound of a faint melody from a different room, a soft fragrance in the evening breeze. The after-effect of reading a Chekhov story lingers for ages, but it’s hard to verbalize or to communicate.

I think Adhithya does a pretty good job of getting to the heart of Chekhov. Well worth reading, and it’s a lesson to me that even when you’re writing about great authors, who’ve been analyzed to death, there’s value in an earnest and straightforward approach.

Take the little magazines survey!

Finally, I am trying to write a summary article about the ‘little magazine’ intellectual scene, and I’d love to get some reactions from the subscribers to these journals. I am particularly interested if you’re a subscriber to one of the following:

• N+1

• The Drift

• The Baffler

• The Point

• Liberties

• The Yale Review

• The Hedgehog Review

• The Believer

Initial results have been fascinating—I won’t say more, to avoid biasing the responses, but I think people will enjoy hearing why readers subscribe to these journals and what they believe about the role of these journals in our society.

To respond, just fill out this Google Form. Thanks so much for your time! The survey will close on August 15th.

Take The Little Magazine Survey

The moment I opened the magazine, I thought…where does the money come from? When I wrote about this online, a few respondents said, “What do you mean, The Baffler is a popular magazine! They get their money from their subscribers.” But believe me, I’ve looked at enough of these magazines’ financial disclosure forms to realize none of them are fully supported by their subscribers. Almost always, there’s some grant money or some charitable donations. But even with that, most of these magazines look worse than The Baffler, which makes me think the latter must have A LOT of money.

Indeed, when I looked up their 990 forms on CauseIQ, I saw they had a $2.5m budget, more thn twice what N+1 has (The Baffler also publishes five times per year, in comparison to N+1’s three, but The Baffler has shorter issues so maybe that’s a wash).

Opening The Baffler put me in a good mood, just because it’s such a beautiful magazine. It’s got these great illustrations, the font choices are nice, and there’s good contrast between text and paper, so it’s easy to read. You’d be surprised how many of these magazines don’t have good contrast, so my old eyes have to squint to read them.

(For more on The Baffler’s excellent design, you can look them up at Pentagram, the studio that redesigned the journal in 2016. This studio is also responsible for the beautiful design update for The Yale Review in 2021.)

Their specialty is reported pieces

I was a little skeptical of the content, because The Baffler seems to contain a lot of reported essays, and with these small magazines I always wonder if they have the budget to really do a good reported feature.

But the pieces were great! My favorite was “Stop The Presses,” which is about a long-running newspaper strike. Basically there’s a family-run paper in Pittsburgh that is run by some extremely stubborn people, and for three years they’ve been refusing to come to a deal with the striking journalists. As Tadhg Larabee puts it:

The fact that the strikers are still standing is the product of a once-in-a-generation collision between an exceptionally dedicated union and an eccentric family unwilling to accept anything short of the union’s dissolution.

It was a fascinating look into the ways that pride and personal feelings become a factor during strike negotiations.

The Baffler’s reported stories were unusually nuanced. Because it’s a leftist magazine, I always thought I knew the angle, going in, but then I’d read the article and discover that it was relatively fair to all the sides. Like, in this instance, this is a family-run paper, owned by a family with deep roots in Pittsburgh—a family that cares about Pittsburgh. At the same time, this family is basically a bunch of local rich people, right? They are local gentry! And the reason that the Block family is fighting the union, even though it would cost them only about $66,000 a year to settle, is that they’re offended on a personal level that a union would try to interfere in their business.

Similarly, there was a story in another issue (“Last Herd On Earth” by Lauren Markham) about how the National Parks Service kicked the cattle ranchers out of Point Reyes National Seashore, a federal park just north of me. Ostensibly, the ranchers were kicked out to make room for a herd of endangered Tule Elk, but when you read the story you see that things are complicated. It’s hard to say whether survival of these elk really depended on the departure of the ranchers. And it’s hard to know whether you ought to sympathize with the ranchers—who were paid $3m each by the government when it bought out their leases. The story is murky and complex, involving lots of different competing priorities.

I feel like The Baffler has a pretty good sense of when they’re able to do justice to a story, and they’re good at picking stories that other magazines might not be willing to attack at such length. I was impressed—they’re surely not paying writers more than 50 cents per word—but the results they’re getting are pretty good. Most of their best pieces, including the two I mentioned above, show evidence of original reporting: these writers didn’t just google and summarize other pieces, they went out and talked to people.

Other notable sections

Some issues have a forum, where a half-dozen writers attack the same topic. The best-received of their recent forums was the one about writers who have day jobs: The Profession That Does Not Exist. The best of the pieces in this forum was Phil Connors’ complaint that his editors expected him to prioritize writing over his day job (as a fire lookout), even though his day job was much more pleasant and the pay was a lot steadier.

Oh no, he said. You’re done being a fire lookout.

Excuse me? I said.

We’re paying you real money to be a writer, he said. We need you available for every marketing opportunity that comes along. What if CNN calls and wants a wildfire expert on short notice, and you’re out of pocket?

The fiction section was also quite good. I say this even though the stories tended towards the surreal and weren’t always to my taste. For instance there’s a very absurd story (“Interviews With Certain Vegetables” by Anelise Chen) about a woman who can talk to vegetables. I really didn’t get the story and didn’t enjoy it.

However, there was only one story per issue, and the stories were usually quite short, so I was always willing to give them a try—there wasn’t that same frustration I sometimes have with other journals, where they’re giving me four mediocre stories. Here I felt like the journal really stood behind each story and was making a good-faith attempt to sell me on its merits.

The one I liked best was “Detachment” by Lauren Rothery (about a pack of children who play at being wolves):

…when the children were asked rather innocently, “What is happening now in your game?” a child answered, coldly, “The alpha needs a new mate.” And when you pressed the child, when you said, perhaps, “Oh dear, what happened to his first mate? Is that his wife?” the child answered, suddenly energetic, “She died and only the alphas are allowed to breed because the gene pool must be kept pure and it is almost January and all the females will soon be in estrus.”

Criticism

The cultural coverage in The Baffler tends to have a showy quality. Every review feels like a display, like a statement. Sometimes this led to a certain tendentiousness: for instance, Gabriel Winslow-Yost’s piece on Disco Elysium (an incredible game) seemed to circle around and around the subject—including a long discussion of its politics and of a novel published by the game’s creator—without getting to the heart of what the game great.

But in other cases, I found the cultural coverage to be enlightening. I liked Nicolas Medina Mora’s piece about “The Nafta Novel,” Apparently there is a cohort of writers who were born in Mexico and write in Spanish, but who have immigrated to the U.S. and work at American universities. This is a phenomenon I was vaguely aware of, but it was interesting to learn more about it. Not having read any of the novels in question, I cannot say whether these novelists encode the logic of neoliberalism in their work, but it’s certainly plausible.

Adrian Nathan West is a frequent critic for The Baffler. As I mentioned in my Bernhard piece, I have a fondness for West’s takedowns. I am a takedown artist myself, so I admire others who are good at the game. What’s great about West’s work is that it is so sincere: he genuinely detests the work of the authors he takes down, and he has a strong desire to destroy their literary reputations. A takedown shouldn’t just be an exercise—it should be a crusade.

But in the issues that I read, he had a great non-takedown piece, “I Will Disrespect You”, about Philadelphia drill rap: a genre of music where you advertise the fact that you’re going to kill someone, or that you have indeed killed them. As West puts it, it’s not implausible that this musical genre has led to a number of murders:

I cannot prove that drill music incites violence in the same way that no one can prove anything, because causation is inductively observed and cannot be deductively verified; but if drill music celebrated real instances of child abuse or ethnic cleansing instead of the socially fraught issue of violence in poor communities, there would surely be less opposition to the notion that these people mean what they are saying.

Nate’s style is very maximalist. All his pieces have so many big words! Not all critics in The Baffler write the way he does, but it definitely feels like The Baffler would love if more of them did.

This is actually a magazine

The Baffler is different from the other magazines I’ve reviewed. Most of these ‘little’ magazines are primarily commentary—writers are giving their take. Sometimes that take is informed by a lot of expertise and research, but it often feels like a take. The Baffler, in contrast, feels more like magazine journalism. When you open this magazine, you can read the type of pieces that you might read in Harper’s or The Atlantic or The New Yorker.

Which does prompt the question: Why not just read Harper’s instead?

It is a valid point. If you subscribe to Harper’s, you get something essentially very similar to The Baffler (off-beat reported features), but where The Baffler only gets you 5 issues for $50, Harper’s will give you 12 issues for $25—an astonishing value.

If you’re an aspiring writer, the answer seems obvious: it’s probably a lot easier to write for The Baffler than it is for Harper’s. And, after reading four issues of The Baffler, I’ve gotten a pretty good idea for what kinds of pieces they like—they seem to have much clearer and more straightforward needs than most journals. If you are someone who is geographically adjacent to some under-reported story—something where you can go somewhere and take pictures and talk to people—then I think you have the beginnings of a good pitch for The Baffler. Anecdotally, they also just seem more open and less cliquey than some of the other little magazines—so aspiring writers should absolutely be reading this journal

However, I wonder whether the journal has anything to offer non-writers. This is honestly the case, for me, with many of these little magazines. Who are they for? Why do they exist?

With some journals, I get the strong sense that they’re filling some perceived void. For instance, Liberties is a journal very strongly dedicated to defending the Beltway political consensus and extolling 20th-century literature. That’s a combination that I can see many people wanting.

But with The Baffler, it feels like their commitment to nuance and good reporting gets in the way of their left-wing political commitments. When I read a Baffler article, I might learn a lot about this complex situation involving ranchers and preservationists, but is this really what little magazines are for? If what I wanted was high-minded fairness, I’d read The New Yorker. Whereas if I am reading an avowedly leftist magazine, then there’s a part of me that wants agitprop—a part that wants to be riled up—a part that wants to get angry at someone. And that’s a pleasure that The Baffler, to its credit, steadfastly refuses to indulge.

What I am realizing is that these little magazines tend to rise or fall on the basis of their ability to deliver red meat. Unless a magazine is capable of getting people angry, it’s hard for it to make an impact in this space.

But of course it’s bad to make people angry, so you need to veil that desire in various complex ways. As I learned from reading the early N+1, there’s a whole technique to getting people riled up while pretending you’re not trying to do that. But it’s only the rare magazine that can really master this style of polemical writing.

The early Baffler

The Baffler has a long history. It was founded in 1988 by Thomas Frank and Keith White, and it was initially headquartered in Chicago. Between 1988 and 2000, it put out thirteen issues. Then between 2000 and 2010, it put out only five. I didn’t go to the early issues in any systematic way, but when I glanced at them, my impression was that the magazine had a Gen-X vibe that was very much against corporate bullshit of all sorts.

Take, for instance, this piece from 1993 on musical acts signing with a major label (“The Problem With Music” by Steve Albini). The piece begins:

Whenever I talk to a band who are about to sign with a major label, I always end up thinking of them in a particular context. I imagine a trench, about four feet wide and five feet deep, maybe sixty yards long, filled with runny, decaying shit. I imagine these people, some of them good friends, some of them barely acquaintances, at one end of this trench. I also imagine a faceless industry lackey at the other end, holding a fountain pen and a contract waiting to be signed.

This is a lot more strident and exciting than anything I’ve read in the more recent Baffler. I imagine the situation is very similar to N+1, where you’ve got a scrappy upstart journal that made a splash during its heyday, and then it was taken over by other people, and now it’s settled into a respectable middle age.

The source of their money

But with N+1 there was a lot of continuity between the founding teams and the current management, and the hand-off was relatively slow. In The Baffler’s case, I think the transition was rockier. After publishing only intermittently in the 2000s, the magazine was relaunched in 2010 by Thomas Frank and moved to Cambridge, where it had a deal with MIT Press, who promised to provide $500k a year over five years (this deal wasn’t renewed and this MIT Press relationship no longer exists). Then, in 2011, the founding editor, Frank, left the magazine.

In 2015, The Baffler named Noah McCormack as its publisher. Noah’s father, Win, is an heir and has funded lots of literary projects: he owns The New Republic and used to own Tin House. Starting in 2015, Win became a major benefactor to The Baffler, a relationship that continues to this day—in 2024 he gave $1.3m to the magazine.1

Win McCormack has recently suffered some highly-publicized money troubles after his chauffeur stole $34 million from him—a reversal that may have been the impetus behind his sale of Tin House to Zando. However, his financial support for The Baffler is probably more robust, because the magazine is run by his son.

Verdict: Undecided

It is hard for me to criticize a magazine if the product is consistently good. In this case, the magazine is beautiful, and the articles are high quality. The criticism and fiction sections have a distinctive style.

On the nonfiction side, the reported pieces were the stand-outs, however even the pieces without original reporting tended to be well-written and informative. For instance, I enjoyed Jasper Craven’s article on Pete Hegseth’s vendetta against women serving in the military and Corey Pein’s piece on Saudi Arabia’s acquisition of EA games. I almost never got to the end of a piece and thought it was a waste of time.

The down side was that the nonfiction could feel generic—many pieces felt like they could’ve been equally at home in a different magazine. But they were usually important stories that were well-reported, so it’s hard to fault the magazine for not putting more of a distinctive spin on them.

I don’t know. I’m still not entirely certain what I think of The Baffler. The ambitions of the magazine seem quite limited. They want to do reported pieces, but they don’t necessarily have the ambition to expose wide-ranging injustices that nobody else is talking about. I never read a piece in The Baffler where I thought, “Oh my god! The world needed to know about this!” Instead, I always thought, “Hmm, that’s interesting.”

They do have some desire to cause a stir. In the issues I read, there was a polemic by the publisher, Noah McCormack, called “We Used To Read Things In This Country”. This piece framed ‘the literacy crisis’ as a class struggle. In McCormack’s telling, it’s the middle-class that prided itself on its literacy, and now literacy is decreasing because the upper-class has decided to make war on the middle class:

Of the American elite who see continuing value in literate thought, they are, for the most part, happy to create a society where a small “cognitive elite” dominate the rest. Poor kids spend an extra two hours on the black mirror every day, while rich people send their kids to private schools where no electronic devices are allowed

It was an interesting take! I wished there was more stuff like this in The Baffler, and that the journal had a better sense, more generally, of whom it was against.

But I don’t want to give the impression that I am taking down the magazine. They’re making precisely the magazine they want to make, and they’re doing an excellent job—who am I to say that their aims are overly modest? For my part, I am happy to be a subscriber and will continue to read them with interest.

Help me understand!

After two months spent reading ‘the little magazines’, I still have some lingering questions about this intellectual scene. Namely: who are these journals for?

What I understand completely is that these magazines are a good credit for writers—they professionalize many writers, teach them how to pitch pieces and provide them with legible credits that’ll be impressive (perhaps) to agents, editors, and to bigger journals. From a writer’s perspective, it makes a lot of sense to pitch these journals.

But I keep being told that it’s not about careerism. In fact, many of these journals are adamantly against careerism. Supposedly you write for these journals not to benefit your career, you do it to reach a small-but-sophisticated audience.

In theory, I understand this, because I also write for a small-but-sophisticated audience. However, when it comes to these journals, it feels like there’s an incredible outlay of money (The Baffler has a two and a half million dollar budget!), but I almost never hear anyone talk about the pieces. This makes me wonder who’s actually reading and what they’re getting out of them.

So if you are a regular reader of one of the following journals, I’d love to get your thoughts:

• N+1

• The Drift

• The Baffler

• The Point

• Liberties

• The Yale Review

• The Hedgehog Review

• The Believer

If you’re interested in educating me, I made a Google Form. Thanks so much for your time! The survey will close on August 15th.

Take The Little Magazine Survey

I have several friends looking for agents right now. Sometimes they ask me for advice, and I don’t know if my advice is particularly helpful. Finding an agent is so difficult, because it’s a matter of being picked. You don’t choose—they choose. Basically, when you’re looking for agents, you ask your friends, “Who is good?” And they give you some names. You pick one name at each agency, and you send them an email. Generally my friends are querying for literary fiction, and I usually give them the following names:

Read more

Back when I was young and unmarried, I’d read affair novels and think that I understood them, but I really had no idea. Now that I am happily married, I knowthat even a happy marriage is a trap. You don’t want to leave, but you also can’t. The affair novel is a peculiar form of entertainment, designed for married people, that calls attention to our predicament whilst subtly satirizing and downplaying it.

Anyway, for the last week I have been on vacation with my family, so I decided to investigate what’s going on with the 21st-century affair novel.

I was recommended The Ten-Year Affair (2025), by Erin Somers. This is more of a device than a novel, but it’s such a good device. The book opens with a pair of refugees from New York who buy a house in Hudson. He’s an editor at a big publishing company; she writes a newsletter for a marketing firm (or something like that—I was very vague on her job). She’s on maternity leave after the birth of her second child—she meets a local dad who’s also on paternity leave, and she has a flirtation with him. They exchange a kiss, but the dad pulls back when she propositions him. Rude!

Then, for the next seven years—two thirds of the book—these two people DO NOT SLEEP WITH EACH OTHER.

The book is called The Ten-Year Affair. This is a lie. She imagines an affair with him, but even the imaginary affair is quite sketchy—it’s just there to convince you, the reader, that at any point she would be happy to sleep with this other dad, if he was willing.

This woman’s life is so bland and so boring. None of the characters in this town are remotely sketched out. It is truly a triumph to create a life just good enough that the characters don’t take action to end things, either by divorcing, having an affair, or just killing themselves. And then it’s an even bigger triumph to convince the reader to sit through year after year after year of this horrible life, just on the off chance that these two characters—neither of whom have any personality—might sleep together.

The book gave me a renewed appreciation for Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection (2022), which was also about a bland millennial couple, because at least Tom and Anna (the characters in Perfection) always hoped that their life would get better. They always had some scheme on the horizon, whether it was going to sex clubs or scoring a big new design contract, to transform their lives. They didn’t see the emptiness of their own existence, but that was also their triumph. They successfully avoided staring into the abyss, and if they could tolerate themselves then good for them.

The characters in The Ten-Year Affair can see the abyss. They can see their lives are empty, but because these characters are not acutely miserable (they are distracted by child-rearing, if nothing else), they somehow muddle along. I guess there is a charm to that as well.

In my own life, I am much more Perfection than The Ten-Year Affair. I always feel like the next project will somehow change everything. And then I pursue the next project, but it doesn’t really change everything, and I just grow older. It is really the passing of time that changes things, and my life would change regardless of what I did. But I enjoy the illusion of control—the illusion of being self-created.

It might sound like I am saying The Ten-Year Affair is bad. I am not saying that! It’s a very good book. I liked the book quite a bit, because it allowed me to feel very superior to the lifeless couple at its center. I kept thinking, “wow, I also lead a bourgeois millennial existence, but I’m much happier than these miserable people!”

Lombardo

And I really do think the lifelessness was a selling point, because later I tried to read an affair novel that was much more life-like, and I didn’t enjoy it.

This second book was Claire Lombardo’s Same As It Ever Was (2024). Lombardo is apparently very popular, her first book came out in 2019 when she was only thirty. That book was a Reese’s pick and a bestseller. The author herself has an MFA from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and is represented by Ellen Levine (Marilynne Robinson’s agent) and the book was acquired by Lee Boudreaux (Percival Everett’s editor), so it’s not that the book wasn’t ‘literary’ or ‘sophisticated’ enough, I think it’s just that this book tried too hard to make me sympathize for the unhappy woman and…I really didn’t want to do that.

The Lombardo novel is about a young mother who leads a bland suburban existence. She is depressed, and she starts an affair with a friend’s son. This book does a lot of work that Erin Somers didn’t do—it portrays a good relationship between the wife and her husband. It gives a lot of texture to their life and to their various friendships. And yet…somehow the result was more bland than Erin Somers’ novel. In the Somers’ novel, the characters felt like types, but in the Lombardo novel, the characters also felt like types, but with a lot more details added.

I think, for me, I just want something more than likeable characters placed in a difficult circumstance—I want a story that cuts closer to the bone. It’s not about being more realistic—there’s actually something very unrealistic about the emptiness of the characters in The Ten-Year Affair. Like, in The Ten-Year Affair, the protagonist has these two children, but the kids really seem like placeholders and are barely discussed—they don’t have the real, living presence of the children in the Lombardo novel. But still…I think the bleakness of The Ten-Year Affair carries a deeper sense of reality, and it gets closer to depicting the sense of tedium that actually drives people to blow up their lives.

Martin

I abandoned the Lombardo and moved on to Andrew Martin’s Early Work (2019) and Down Time (2024). Early Work was the best of these two: it was about an aspiring novelist, Peter, who lives with his long-time girlfriend, a med student, in Richmond, VA. In the first scenes, Pete meets Leslie, an exciting and high-strung fellow writer, and they begin an affair. Both Pete and Leslie are a mess. Pete is obviously an alcoholic; Leslie (she has her own viewpoint sections) has gotten into several intense, substance-fueled relationships that culminated in drama and broken hearts. Basically, it’s just a very classic affair novel. Pete is bored by the thought of a lifetime spent walking the dog and watching TV with his doctor girlfriend. So…he just doesn’t do that, and instead he embarks upon this ill-advised affair.

This novel had much more distinct characters than the Somers or Lombardo books. Martin said that he was very inspired by Raymond Carver and John Cheever, and Pete is a character who, in a mid-century novel, would’ve had a more lower-middle-class background. But the book is set in the 2010s, so he’s a Columbia grad and has left early from a PhD program in English. The characters have some amount of privilege—they’re educated and possess social capital and Pete doesn’t worry about money, because he leads a charmed life, but he’s still a loser. It’s a very interesting portrait, because he is obviously bad news, but if you met Pete in real life, you’d probably still like him and be attracted to him, because he is simultaneously empathetic and self-absorbed. He mostly cares about himself, but he’s willing to include you, at least for a while, within his circle of care. Because of this type of maneuver, egotistical guys like Pete tend to do really well with women, at least for a while—something that this book accurately reflects.

Martin’s second novel, Down Time, is more sprawling, has more characters, but is less confident. It has two writers—Aaron and Malcolm—and two boring relationships that are stifling them. In this case, only one of them has an affair and breaks up his relationship, while Malcolm stays (mostly) faithful and gets married to his boring doctor girlfriend (Andrew Martin is married to a doctor himself—make of this what you will!) My interest in Down Time faded after a while, and I needed to force myself to finish.

Smallwood

In one of his interviews, Martin recommended Christine Smallwood, so next I read Smallwood’s Life of The Mind (2021). Not an affair novel, but it still felt like one, because the main character was so pathetic.

Dorothy has an English PhD and is an adjunct professor at (I assume) Columbia University. The scene opens with her miscarrying a pregnancy, and over the next few months she expels blood and clots and other fetal material. The novel is told in six chapters. Each chapter is self-contained and takes place over the course of one day, so it feels like a series of short stories. Some are stronger than others. My favorite chapter is the one where she goes to a conference in Vegas and has conversations with an academic rival and with her former advisor. The conversations take on a very stylized, surreal quality—her rival tells her a long story about sleeping with the twin brother of the boyfriend of another academic that they know.

She also has a long conversation in Vegas with her former academic advisor, who is such a beautiful monster. Judith is from that first generation of woman professors who were unleashed, by Betty Friedan, and allowed to truly be awful. These women released books, wrote essays, and terrorized English departments for decades. If you’re a grad student, you tend to idolize these women, but they hold you in contempt, because they know you are weak:

Judith, Dorothy knew, was one of those unusual people whose charisma and power to terrify are rooted in their unpredictability. Her majesty had a multiplying effect. Whereas some people govern by force of personality, she ruled by a kaleidoscope of personalities. And yet knowing this did not make Dorothy any more prepared to respond. Because even if Judith might do anything or be anyone, Dorothy was still just Dorothy.

The gist of the book is that Dorothy feels stuck in adjunct hell. She’s having no luck on the job market. She has no passion for her work. She feels very mediocre, and she’s wasted her life, essentially. Her youth—the period when she could’ve been doing something—she spent in graduate school, where everyone (including her advisor) realized she wasn’t really going to make it as an academic, but somehow Dorothy didn’t get the memo and now she’s only just finding out, and she’s bitter and hates herself.

The Best Butler

My final foray into this mini-genre (millennials who realize their lives are empty and meaningless) was another Andrew Martin recommendation: Halle Butler’s The New Me (2019). What a fantastic book! I could not believe how excellent this novel was. It was so effortless. This book reminded me of what it’s like to read a book when you’re not a literary critic. You just sit down, read the book, really enjoy it, and then at the end you think, “Wow that book was so good!” and you’re thankful that such good books exist.

The novel is about a woman, Millie, who is placed by a temp agency in a new office. And she would really like to be hired on permanently by this office, even though she hates everyone who works there and can’t stop mentally judging them. Millie has a terrible personality—She radiates judgement and has an edgy, off-putting energy, as demonstrated by my favorite paragraph of the book.

Anyway, you know from the beginning that she’s not going to get this job, because her supervisor, Karen, has some viewpoint sections that narrate her attempts to fire Millie. Eventually you realize Karen is not that different from Millie—she’s a low-level employee who feels insecure and is on a power trip. So you’re reading the book, waiting for the hammer to fall.

But Millie is also not going to be left destitute! Her parents already pay her rent, which allows her to live alone in her own apartment, and she has no student loans. Late in the novel, she visits her home-town and stays with her parents for a bit—they’re a little frustrated by their daughter, but it’s clear they’re nowhere near the end of their rope when it comes to supporting her financially.

So then why did I read this whole novel? Nothing happens, and you know nothing is going to happen. I don’t know…it is inexplicable. That’s where the art is. The point of view is just very fun, and it has a very cunning way of shifting viewpoints, so you can see, from the outside, that Millie is actually exactly as awful as she originally seems (but so is everyone else—there are no good people here). Millie is a classic anti-hero. She is bad, but not weak. She has an unrepentant quality that I really adored. And the book has, by far, the most perfect ending of any of the books I’ve discussed here—something you don’t see coming, but which seems obvious once it happens.

Other Butlers

This was Butler’s second novel. I also read Halle Butler’s third novel, Banal Nightmare (2024), about an aspiring artist who moves back to her hometown after a breakup. This book was intermittently interesting but ultimately less good, because it’s about five characters, Moddie, Nina, Bethany, Kimberly, and Pam, who know each other in this small town—Nina and Moddie and Pam are all childhood friends, and all five of these people are somehow involved with the local university. And it’s just very hard to keep them straight. Nina, Bethany, Kimberly, and Pam all seem to have boyfriends who are bad in different-but-similar ways. Many of these women have artistic aspirations. It’s a confusing and messy novel, on a page-by-page level.

However, Butler’s first novel, Jillian (2015)—I read this book last—was much better. It’s about two people, Megan and Jillian, who work together at a doctor’s office. Jillian is thirty-five and has a child. She’s simple-minded and full of absurd schemes that’ll never bear fruit. Megan is twenty-four absolutely cannot stand Jillian and complains about him constantly to her boyfriend. It differs from The New Me in that the characters in Jillian are just so abject—you genuinely worry about them. Jillian, in particular, feels like she’s headed for a jail cell at some point, because she loses her drivers’ license, gets into debt, and becomes addicted painkillers. And this woman has a child!

Jillian’s sections made me increasingly anxious, in a way that eventually stopped being enjoyable. I appreciated that in her future novels, Butler stopped portraying people who were quite so down-and-out. If your worldview doesn’t allow for catharsis or redemption or political action, you shouldn’t portray people with genuinely hopeless lives—you should stick to privileged self-absorbed losers.

I was so enthused by Halle Butler that I started looking into her! I couldn’t believe I had never heard of such an accomplished writer before. She is definitely not unknown. She grew up in Bloomington, Illinois, and did her undergrad at an art school in Chicago. Her first novel came out from a small press, Curbside Splendor (that later collapsed, as many small presses do, after it got lax about paying royalties to its authors). This novel, which came out when the author was thirty, became an unexpected success and led to her being selected by Granta as a Best Young Novelist in 2017. She got a fancy agent, Claudia Ballard at WME, and her second book came out from Viking. The New Me was a breakout success, selling hundreds of thousands of copies, and led to her third book selling for much more money to Random House (odd to switch imprints like this—there’s probably some story involving editorial disputes with the Viking editor).

Until the success of The New Me, Butler worked a series of odd jobs, often in placements by temp agencies—a background that informs the setting of her first two novels. She has a very edgy affect in her interviews, and is outspokenly against literary careerism, as she demonstrates in this profile by The Cut:

“Careerism and consumerism are not necessarily great bedfellows with art,” she tells me, understating a point that she later makes more starkly: “I would never write for money. Because that’s gross. Because I hate money!”…

Over tea in her snug Alphabet City apartment, she brings up the phrase “you sold your book,” which she finds repulsive, a naked embrace of commerce.

Normally I find this kind of rhetoric to be a bit stale. So many writers will say they’re ‘against careerism’, but then I look into their careers and realize they have top agents and work with big corporate publishers. So what, in practice, does it mean to not be careerist? However, when a writer is truly good, everything they say becomes a charming quirk, so in this case I was happy to interpret Butler’s words as an uncompromising statement of principle. Obviously, the path to making real art is to truly believe, with all your heart, that you’re not a careerist.

(But it helps if you then also get a high-profile agent and sell your book to Viking, who can give it good marketing and an attractive cover, which allows people like me to eventually hear about it.)

Most of you, my readers, have never even heard of N+1, so you must find it strange that I have a circle of friends who all have a strong opinion about this journal you’ve never heard of. And, moreover, this opinion is always the same.

I was telling one of these friends, “People feel oppressed by the existence of N+1. They want it to be bad, so they can justify avoiding it.”

That’s because this small, Brooklyn-based socialist periodical strikes terror into the hearts of millennial writers. Whatever this magazine achieved, it’s something that a lot of us would also like to achieve, but we haven’t yet managed it.

The journal was founded in 2004 by a group of people who (I am told) all knew each other from doing undergrad at Harvard. During the next twenty years, it published some amount of writing. I occasionally read those pieces when they went viral online: I definitely remember reading “The Feminist” by Tony Tulathimutte. In other cases, I can’t actually remember if I read the pieces when they happened, or if I was only linked to them in the following years.

What I vividly recall was that during the 2010s, you’d see periodic eruptions onto the literary scene of some bright talent: Elif Batuman, Andrea Long Chu, Wesley Yang. They would make such a splash, suddenly everyone was talking about them. And I’d become vaguely aware that they had gotten their start publishing in N+1.

N+1 doesn’t launch star talent anymore. It’s unclear why. It would be very difficult for me to explain why suddenly N+1 no longer has ‘it’. Why people talk about the magazine like a silent film star left unemployed by the arrival of the talkies. “Oh she isn’t what she was!” they said. “You shoulda seen her when she was young.”

Personally I quite enjoyed N+1. What I am realizing is that with these journals there are two issues: a) the performance itself; and b) how much I personally enjoy that performance.

In this case, the performance is superb, and I have to think that if my politics were more aligned with the journal, I would’ve loved it much more.

The first-person essay

On a physical level, N+1 is defined by its comparison to The Drift. N+1 looks and feels cheaper. The cover is glossy, not matte, and the paper feels thinner, more pulpy. I did not enjoy the physical feel of the magazine as much, and I wished that it felt a little more like The Drift—according to its 990 forms, N+1 has twice as much money as The Drift, so I have no idea why the magazine feels cheaper.

(It’s hard not to compare N+1 and The Drift because the magazines have a similar readership, format, tone, and political orientation. The Drift is the younger magazine, it was founded in 2020—also by Harvard grads—in an attempt to emulate and supersede N+1.)

N+1 begins with an editorial entitled The Intellectual Situation, where the magazine speaks in its own voice, summing up the times. Then comes Politics, a set of short briefs on current events. The bulk of the journal is given over to fiction and essays. And then there’s a Reviews section.

I read the four latest issues of the journal, and the format of the essays was quite distinctive. Almost all of them were first-person, and they were usually about people with leftist beliefs who were narrating something about their work or their lives.

The standout piece in these four issues was Hannah Zeavin’s “Struggle, Unity, Struggle”, narrating her time as a teenager in a far-left cult, RevCom, centered around a figure (who I had never heard of) named Robert Avakian. She did an incredible job describing what made this group appealing, and how she spent one spring of her life assisting in their efforts to organize a large protest against the 2004 Republican National Convention.

What’s striking about this piece is that it leaves open the question of whether and to what extent the group was actually preying on her. It didn’t seem like the group wanted to exploit her sexually, but it did want and expect her to devote her life to meaningless revolutionary struggle. And what made the piece so good was that she tried to narrate what exactly made this group feel pointless.

Energy was dwindling. The war we wanted would never arrive, and we were stuck with the war we hated…

[We had lost] the contest for revolution, but why? RevCom self-critiques tend to go as follows: We failed to generate a mass party because of our petit bourgeois individualism — our fears of struggle, our allergy to commitment, and our aversion to the masses we wanted to join. Or, relatedly, we failed because we didn’t want it badly enough, didn’t work hard enough, weren’t in the struggle enough. But I was the very picture of devotion, and so were my coms. If we didn’t win, I knew it wasn’t because we didn’t want it enough. It had to be something else. (And it was — it was history.)

In her subsequent life, she didn’t abandon these principles, but she realized that if she devoted herself solely to revolutionary struggle then…well…then she would just waste her life without bringing the revolution one iota closer.

This was one of the first long pieces I read in N+1, and I texted all my friends to be like, “Wait why is this journal supposed to be bad?”

None of the other pieces in these four issues of N+1 quite matched the heights of the Zeavin piece, but at least one other was very good. I really respected Lily Scherlis’s piece on group therapy. You might recall that Scherlis wrote an article about DBT for The Drift that I really didn’t enjoy. The Drift seems quite hostile to first-person essays (they state in their guidelines that they’re not interested in ‘personal essays’), which I am realizing now is a way of purposefully distinguishing themselves from N+1. As a result, The Drift’s DBT piece is written in a very polemical voice, in which a certain hostility to the practice emanated from the writing itself—an affect that I found mystifying.

In the N+1 essay, Scherlis participates in a very high-intensity form of group therapy, at the Tavistock Institute for Human Relations, in Britain. And because the piece is in the first-person, she’s able to make it clear that she’s participating both as part of the research for her dissertation and because she’s trying to process her experiences in the student encampments that protested the Gaza war.

I found this piece just as mystifying as The Drift piece, but in a much more productive way. In this case, I did not really understand why anyone would undergo the form of group therapy that Scherlis is describing. It feels quite involved, very high-intensity, and doesn’t seem to have any clear therapeutic benefits. Essentially, a group of participants just talks to each other, endlessly, for two weeks, during which time they’re encouraged to comment upon the various group dynamics that they notice between themselves, in this very tiny group. Scherlis describes a sample interaction:

“I feel defensive of Carl,” says Patty. “It is extremely difficult to be a white man right now.”

“I feel annoyed,” I say.

We will go on like this for two weeks, some of us losing our minds through sheer proximity to other people. The conversation eventually devolves into a kind of libidinal dodgeball; we pelt each other with hurtful mischaracterizations and pleas for connection.

The piece is anchored by the fact that it really happened. Scherlis really did choose to go through this experience for some reason. It is a bizarre thing to do, but the first-person voice is a good anchor to hold bizarre experiences.

I understood now why so many people had built reputations writing for the journal. Many journals force their writers into a very constrained style that doesn’t allow them to showcase their literary talents. These first-person N+1 essays had more variation in voice and structure, so it always felt like the writer was developing their own vision. Thus, if a piece was good, it felt like it was good because the writer was talented.

(As an aside, in my run through these journals I’ve noticed that they vary in how tightly they throttle the writer’s individual style. Liberties is another journal where more individuality shows through.)

The “So What?” Factor

The failure state for these first-person essays was the “So What?” factor. Not infrequently, I’d be deep into reading about someone’s experience, which they portrayed with a great deal of care and craft, and then I’d wonder if there was really any larger story here. Sometimes I wanted more analysis—I wanted the piece to justify itself more.

The worst offender was Emily Callaci’s “In The Wages For The Housework Archive”, which was a ten thousand word article about a very internecine dispute between two 1970s feminists who both claimed they had authored an important and very seminal article. Callaci’s account was very aimless and never cohered: it sounds incredible to say it, but I read ten thousand words about this article from the 1970s—“Women and the Subversion of Community”—and never gained any understanding of what was actually in this particular article and why it was important. All I got was that feminist writers can sometimes squabble over credit.

In this case, Callaci is a professor who is writing a book about this group, Wages For Housework, and it feels like she contorted her research to fit this first-person format. So she narrates her time chasing down the truth of this authorship question, without considering whether it really matters to the reader.

Elias Rodriguez’s “Lifetime Achievement” falls into a similar trap. It’s nine thousand words about an art exhibition that was canceled due to fears of Trump administration retribution. The piece doubles as a profile of the artist, Andil Gosine, but it’s too focused on the narrative of this man’s life and what happened to his exhibition, and there’s no broader discussion of significance. Yes, it is obviously bad to be censored by the Trump administration, but this piece doesn’t make a forceful case that the exhibition had any particular aesthetic merit.

Iman Mersal’s “Our Butterfly Effect” is told as a series of diary entries, and I sometimes found myself a bit confused. I gathered that the author’s son was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and eventually this broke up her family, with her son perhaps having to live elsewhere. Eventually he ends up in an institution—I understood that much—but some of the intervening story (which takes place on three continents) was unclear. It was a hauntingly sad tale, but quite difficult to parse. The piece was translated from Arabic, so I assume the magazine had no ability to ask for edits.

With these three pieces, you see the downside of the freedom the journal gives its contributors. If the individual vision isn’t there, then the pieces can feel very self-indulgent and aimless.

Sometimes these first-person pieces weren’t bad, they just didn’t reach the heights of the Zeavin piece. Some pieces were not that ambitious: Sarah Miller’s “Pirates of the Ayuahuasca” (about an ayuahuasca lodge in Peru) or Mina Tavakoli’s “Wish You Were Here” (about a cruise for celebrity-impersonators) aimed to serve up a series of amusing grotesques, and they succeeded admirably in that aim.

The rest of the magazine

The first section, The Intellectual Situation, was usually superb. In this section, the editors would comment, in the first-person plural, on some current cultural or political preoccupation. They had a kind of genius for picking problems that are of approximately the right scope. For instance, in “Sinophobic Sinophilia” they comment on America’s love/hate relationship with China. We fear them in direct proportion to the way we envy them:

The questions feel as inescapable as they do unanswerable — so we must keep asking them. What political vocabulary can we use to understand this contradictory, globally unparalleled system of Leninist-inflected state capitalism: a repressive government that is also the main counterpower to US empire, an economy that has eradicated poverty by proletarianizing most of its population, a state that disciplines capital without democratizing it, a country that both builds more electric vehicles and burns more coal than any other?

The review section was also consistently great. It felt like they really allowed individual reviewers the right amount of leeway to write about the individual preoccupations, but still didn’t allow them to lose sight of the book in question. For instance, in “The Martian Ideology”, Matthew Porges writes about several books (including Samantha Harvey’s Booker Prize-winning Orbital) that deal with space exploration. Porges is a space enthusiast, loves the idea of space travel, but allows himself some skepticism towards the idea that ‘mankind’ as a whole can triumph over space:

At least since the start of the cold war, space has functioned in part to launder earthly political commitments through humanist universalism. It is a de-ideologizing dream.

As for the other sections, they were less consistently good.

The Politics dispatches were best when they had some element of reporting, as with this anonymous dispatch from a career fair expo, where the reporter talked to people who were considering taking a job with ICE. The pieces were less good when they attempted genuine political commentary, as in this obituary for Dick Cheney. Yeah, of course N+1 is going to say that Dick Cheney sucks. They are absolutely correct that he was a bad person, but it’s not particularly interesting to watch them go through the motions of demonstrating it.

The fiction was fiction. I did not recognize any prevailing aesthetic, which made it less interesting to me. It felt like I could just as easily be reading the fiction in The Paris Review. There were a few stories that I enjoyed reading, but the enjoyment wasn’t nearly as consistent as with The Drift. The magazine publishes far too many stories, sometimes as many as four in an issue, and they felt like filler.

The glory years

This review could’ve ended right here. It would’ve been short and sweet. I could’ve said, “They have this one product, the first-person essay that mixes narrative and explanation. When that product is good, then it’s really good, and it feels like you’re witnessing a new talent being birthed. And that’s what N+1 is! If they’re not as successful as they used to be, then so what—they’re still pretty decent.”

But then I had this lingering thought, “Why don’t I actually go and read some past issues of N+1 to see for myself.” So I decided to be scientific. I would pick one random year from early in their run and read the first issue they published that year. I picked 2006.

They only published one issue that year: issue four. Their fourth issue.

And the moment I opened the issue, I frowned, because it had one essay that I recognized: an Elif Batuman piece where she takes down the contemporary American short story. Shit, that was an iconic essay. Nothing in the recent four issues of N+1 could really match it.

But I kept reading, and then my job got harder and harder. Because this issue of N+1 was incredibly good. Essentially, it was a symposium on the state of American letters. They had:

• Elif Batuman on the short story

• Stephanie Burt on poetry

• Caleb Crain on criticism

• Rodrigo Fresan on how American writing is received abroad

• Keith Gessen on money

• Gerald Howard on publishing

• Benjamin Kunkel on the novel

And that wasn’t all. They had some other good stuff too. They had Mark Greif on how, in our culture, child-like attributes are sexy and, at the same time, the worst thing you can possibly do is have sex with children (“Afternoon of the Sex Children”). Mark Greif also had a polemic on how nobody should ever earn more than $100,000 per year (“Gut-Level Redistribution…”)

The best was Kunkel’s piece on the novel, which begins with a description of what he calls the perennial novel—the main type of novel, which hasn’t changed in 150 years.

Most novelists work in a formal tradition so conservative as to feel like second nature, and fiction as practiced as an art form over the almost two centuries since Austen and Stendhal has altered strikingly little in comparison with painting and sculpture, popular as well as classical music, poetry and even the theater, not to mention the young arts of photography and film. Considered as a form, the novel is not very accommodating to the new, and probably the most recent book to change the practice of novelists in general was Madame Bovary; it begins with Flaubert that today most writers suppress direct authorial commentary and avail themselves on occasion of free indirect discourse.

It is so good! I loved this piece so much. It was provocative, and yet as the piece developed, it just seemed unmistakably true. And this piece is also a perfect example of the high style that characterizes these N+1 polemics. Somehow they all have this supercilious galaxy-brained consciousness that situates itself far above immediate temporal concerns. In reality, the pieces are meant to be provocative and to needle people, but they affect a stance that somehow this isn’t what they intend, and they are merely pointing out a few simple facts about the world.

They’re so po-faced. They play it so straight. I both hated them and loved them. What a fantastic reading experience.

I read issue #4, and then I decided to read another random issue from early in their run, Issue #7. It wasn’t quite as fun, but it contained two iconic pieces: Keith Gessen’s interview with an anonymous hedge fund manager who purported to walk us through the reasons behind the 2007 recession (I had actually read this interview when it was republished in book form a few years later) and Elif Batuman’s “Summer in Samarkand”, which I likewise read when it was collected in her book, The Possessed. So two iconic, unforgettable pieces right there. Then it also had this fun takedown of the idea of healthy eating (by Mark Greif) and a takedown of Roberto Bolano. And it had a good piece in what I now recognize as N+1’s classic first-person narrative style—the type they still use—a piece by Jace Clayton about being a DJ at raves. All in all, this issue, #7, was also much better than the four recent issues I read.

What changed?

You know, I have really been procrastinating on writing this review, because I wanted to come up with some narrative about why N+1 got worse. Don’t get me wrong, it is still very good and worth reading, but these two early issues were really electrifying in a way that the current run cannot match.

What made the early N+1 so enjoyable was that you had these polemical pieces which were all written in essentially one voice. I am not saying that the various writers weren’t distinctive, but they all tended to have this same shabby-genteel sensibility, like they’re aristocrats who’ve lost all their money and are now forced to write for magazines, and they pretend like they’re writing for a readership of other aristocrats but secretly they know they’re not.

There is something shockingly unrestrained about this early N+1. For instance, in his article about money, Keith Gessen talks about how he really doesn’t think many writers can make it by working odd jobs:

Odd jobs—usually copyediting, tutoring, PowerPoint, graphic design; I don’t know any writers who wait tables but probably some exist—seem like a better idea in terms of one’s intellectual independence. But these can lead to a kind of desperation. What if your writing doesn’t make it? How long can you keep this up? You have no social position outside the artistic community; you have limited funds; you call yourself a writer but your name does not appear anywhere in print. Worst of all, for every one of you, there are five or ten or fifteen others, also working on novels, who are just total fakers—they have to be, statistically speaking. Journalism at least binds you to the world of publishing in some palpable way; the odd jobs leave you indefinitely in exile. It would take a great deal of strength not to grow bitter under these circumstances, and demoralized. Your success, if it comes, might still come too late.

I think he’s being very smart here. He’s saying that if you’re a journalist, at least there is some public recognition that you’re a good writer. But if you’re just a waiter who writes novels, then it’s really hard to keep up hope.

When I posted this on Notes, several people harrumphed and said, “I have known many writers who wait tables.” Great, good for you. The point is: Keith Gessen didn’t, and he was unafraid to say that he didn’t. He probably knew this line would get a rise out of people, but so what—he wasn’t afraid of getting a rise. It’s a beautiful performance. And most of the articles are like this, they’re full of insight, but they also needle the reader and dare them to be uncool and say, “That’s not how it really is!” Well okay, screw you then, start your own magazine.

Now…how did the editors of N+1 get together so many talented people, convince them to write in this same voice, and produce such consistently amazing and subtly annoying work? I have no idea. It is incredible. The story really needs to be told. Someone should do a book, someone should do a magazine piece. How did it happen! My impression is that all these people basically knew each other from Harvard, and they were in a subculture that really admired The Partisan Review—a mid-century little magazine—and they decided to get together and do the same thing, just do another Partisan Review. And…it worked.

Now…why did it stop working? Well…it had this group of original editors—Mark Greif, Benjamin Kunkel, Allison Lorentzen, Marco Roth, Keith Gessen, and Chad Harbach—and somewhere between 2013 and 2015, all the original editors left, and some new people took over, Mark Krotov and Dayna Tortorici. These people have been running it ever since. And now it’s a nonprofit, it gets grant-funding (it has a budget of over a million dollars a year), and it probably can’t afford to be as annoying and piss off as many people as it used to. It also doesn’t help that N+1 increased its frequency from one to three issues per year—it’s hard to maintain quality and increase production at the same time.

But that’s just another way of saying the obvious: good things get worse. It’s called regression to the mean. No organization can perform at a high level for long. The year after a team wins the championship, they’ll probably do well, but they won’t win everything. Ten years later, they won’t even be contenders. A company that posts record-breaking growth one decade probably won’t break records in the second decade. I am extremely tall (99% percentile), my daughter is only 95% percentile. Her daughter will probably be even shorter. That’s how life works. Good things get worse.

But what a joy to have experienced the good thing! Truly I am so happy that I went back and read these two earlier issues of N+1. I highly encourage you all to read at least Issue Four, if you can.

As to whether N+1 is still worth reading in the present day…I dunno. I am torn. Now that I’ve seen what it can be, I kind of miss the annoying polemical style. That’s exactly what’s missing from contemporary N+1. All of that polemical energy has been taken over by The Drift, which has the same mission—the same desire to be annoying in a galaxy-brained, elitist way.

However, The Drift is missing these bravura first-person essays that N+1 did really well. The Drift doesn’t quite have a format, yet, that can showcase a writer’s individual talent. As a result, The Drift doesn’t launch new superstars in the same way that N+1 did. Right now, both journals possess something the other journal lacks, and surely they know it! These are journals that’ve clearly studied each other closely—one of them ought to get over its pride, imitate the other’s strengths, and annihilate the opposition.

Like most writers, I ignored this advice, and I submitted quite frequently to journals that I’d never read.

In my defense, when I started submitting, I was writing science fiction short stories, and I was quite familiar with the field. I had been reading year’s-best anthologies for years. I usually read the prize-winning stories. I often bought breakout story collections. I had read slush for a magazine (Strange Horizons), and I’d participated in various workshops. So I had a sense of what the field wanted.

But it was still a mistake to not regularly read any of the sci-fi journals. It’s not that I didn’t try to read them. I’d often get up a head of steam and say, “I am going to start reading [such and such journal] every month.” But then I’d read a few stories, and I wouldn’t like them, so I’d give up.

However, that’s no excuse, since I could’ve just skipped the stories I didn’t like. But, at the time, I felt even the best stories in these journals were unlikely to be better than the greatest stories of the past. In fact, I thought that even the current year’s prize-winning stories usually weren’t as good as the greatest stories of the past.

I did allow that some living writers were truly great—Ted Chiang, Maureen McHugh, Karen Joy Fowler, Nancy Kress, Robert Reed, Greg Egan, and a few others—but these were all writers from the generation above me. I did not attempt to see potential greatness in my peers.

Clearly, I was protecting my self-image. I wanted to be a great writer, and if I’d allowed myself to see that other people were doing something worthwhile, then I would’ve been assailed by a lot of doubts about my own abilities.

And it’s true that most of my contemporaries were not very good. And most of the stories in the magazines weren’t very good. So I would’ve needed to try very hard to find something good.

At the time, I honestly imagined I’d be a breakout era-defining writer, and that I’d somehow stand alone, and I’d have no peers. Which is absurd! Ted Chiang started publishing around the same time as Kelly Link did, and in some of the same journals. They are certainly peers (to each other). Even if I’d been my generation’s Ted Chiang, I would’ve had a peer.

And I did have a peer group of writers who broke into the top journals at roughly the same time as me: Vylar Kaftan, Aliette de Bodard, Tina Conolly, Caroline Yoachim, Leah Cypess, and a few dozen others. I encountered these writers in various fora, and I connected with them on Facebook, and I met them sometimes at conventions. We were certainly friendly, and I still have fond memories of most of these writers.

But I never went the extra step and attempted to evaluate their work to figure out which of them I truly respected as writers. And that’s something I regret now, because if there had been a writer in this group that I really admired, then it would’ve been very easy to tell them so, easy to start emailing them, and easy to learn from them.

As a writer, I often felt like I was trying to enter various clubs that didn’t want me. But at any given time, there’s always a club that you don’t need to enter: a club that you already belong to. The club composed of your peers—the people who are publishing in the same journals that you’re publishing in. Amongst that group, there ought to be a few people whom you respect. If there’s not, then it means you’re publishing in journals that are bad, and you should really start submitting to different journals.

Which journals should you read?

In the sci-fi world, there’s a fairly broad agreement about which journals are good. Right now, there’s four that are the best: Lightspeed, Uncanny, Reactor, and Clarkesworld. And then there’s another six that are pretty good: Asimov’s, Analog, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Strange Horizons, Apex, and Nightmare. The scifi world is somewhat complicated, because many of the journals (these days) are closed to submissions most of the time: Lightspeed, Nightmare, Uncanny, Reactor, and Strange Horizons are almost always closed. So your best chance of getting published is to submit to the other journals.

In the literary-fiction world, the situation is even more complex, because the literary world has many more journals. And some of these journals are generally considered quite good: The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, The Paris Review, Granta, N+1, and The Drift. But....it’s the same situation. Although these journals have open submissions in theory, in practice...I don’t know...it’s quite hard to place a story through the slush pile. In reality, I think The Drift has the most open slush pile (at least for fiction), which is why they’re such a great credit.

So you’re left with the other journals. Which ones are good? And here it’s difficult to say, because there’s a whole slew of journals that have a high reputation and are relatively accessible through their online submissions portal: I know many people who’ve sold stories through cold submissions to The Kenyon Review, The Georgia Review, Agni, The Missouri Review, etc. And these journals are certainly a very good credit, and if you’re querying an agent you’re probably more likely to get a manuscript request if you publish in these places.

But...are these literary journals actually good?

I don’t know. I have my doubts. It just seems like many of these journals, despite their high reputation, don’t have a lot of life. Most of these journals are university-backed, and they’re continuing mostly through inertia. The journal has no real audience, and as a result it feels no need to differentiate itself from other journals. So...I just don’t see how it can be good. Like, there might be some abstract level on which the stories are well-wrought, but if they don’t actually serve the needs of any real, actually-existing reader, then those stories have no real reason for existing.

I think it’s fine to write for a small audience, but that small audience ought to be very excited about your work. With these university-backed journals, the excitement isn’t there, and I don’t think it’s a good thing for young writers to be taught that the best they can hope for is a formal, bloodless respect (“What you have produced is a good example of the kind of thing that this university is paying us to publish”).

In contrast, there are other journals that don’t really have as high of a reputation: The Metropolitan Review, Republic of Letters, Souvenir, Magazine Non Grata, Futurist Letters, Forever, Heavy Traffic—sceney magazines. And these journals sometimes draw a lot of derision, because they’re run by avid self-promoters, who often make strong claims for the journal.

But these smaller journals are animated by a sense of passion, which makes me think maybe there is some life in them.

These are the magazines that, if you’re an aspiring literary writer, you should read. If there’s any magazine you’ve heard about, that people talk about, then it’s worth reading that journal just to see if it’s actually good.

Then, if you like the journal, you can email the people who’ve published stories in it, and you can tell them their stories are good. You can also try and write the sort of stories that would fit in that journal. And maybe something good will happen.

But of course it’s complicated, because the journal might not want you. That’s one reason I often had trouble, as a young writer, reading some of these journals. It was because I had this history of rejection. I used to love Strange Horizons. It was a journal that I really liked and appreciated. I even read submissions for the journal, so I had a fairly good idea of what the magazine liked. But they still rejected me, tirelessly, for years. So if you invest time in learning about a journal, that time won’t necessarily be rewarded.

However, I think that if a journal is publishing you, then you should probably read it. I regularly read Lightspeed, because that’s the journal which takes most of my sci-fi stories. I don’t read everything they publish—probably not even a majority of things—but I keep current with their work. I am going to be in the upcoming Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, and it really behooves me to read that as well. If I don’t read it, that’ll be a huge mistake on my part.

Learning from your peers

So when it comes to submitting fiction, I’d say that you don’t necessarily have to read the journals that you’re submitting to. But...you should really be reading something, and, more importantly, you should be making an effort to find out which of your peers are worthy of your respect. Because those are people you can learn from.

Obviously, you don’t learn primarily from your peers. You learn primarily from the great writers of the past. But...these historical writers cannot teach you what it’s like to write in contemporary times. You can’t even learn that from writers of the previous generation. When you read the great writers of the past, you gain a sense of integrity—a sense of what kind of work is worth doing. But this sense of integrity can manifest in many forms. If you read Anna Karenina, you learn what it’s like to write work that’s full of moral conviction. But if you write with moral conviction in 2026, you’re probably not writing a book that outwardly resembles Anna Karenina.

What I’ve learned is that whatever you’re trying to do, someone else is probably trying to do it too. That’s one reason, when I read all these Neo-Bernhardian imitations, I felt so strongly that there was probably some juice in this style of fiction. If so many people are attempting it, then it probably responds in some authentic way to modern conditions.

It’s the same thing with my tales. When I started writing in this form, I definitely perceived the tales as being sui generis, but I’ve realized there is a style of sweeping story, often related with a rather cold affect, that is a clear influence on my tale style. I’m thinking of Ted Chiang’s “Hell Is The Absence of God”, Maureen McHugh’s “After The Apocalypse”, and Tony Tulathimutte’s “The Feminist”. In fact, I think one reason I was drawn to the New Yorker story was that many of the stories in that magazine were also written in a cold, unadorned style that’s similar to my tales.

But it’s good to know that I’m not unique, because that means I can think about whether there’s anything to learn from these influences. For instance, I’ve lately been thinking about an excellent story by in The Baffler. “The List” is about an awkward guy who moves to Boston, struggles to make friends, and eventually finds community at a synagogue. In the wake of Oct 7, he joins the IDF, fights in Gaza, and transforms into a sexually-confident lady’s man.

(I was impressed that The Baffler—a left-wing journal—was willing to print a story with such a politically-ambiguous ending, but I guess they correctly assumed nobody would read that far.)

As with my tales, the story is fast-paced, spans considerable time and space, and is told with sufficient narrative distance that you’re never sure how much you’re meant to empathize with the protagonist. In reading this story, I noticed that, like Tulathimutte’s “The Feminist”, it’s in the present-tense. I never write in the present tense, because it traps you into a rigidly-chronological progression and can feel artificial, but perhaps the form has more flexibility than I thought.

What’s great about writing is that you can just steal. Like, you shouldn’t plagiarize, which is the term for stealing other peoples’ work in an illegal or unethical way. But if I do believe that if you ever spot some technique you really admire, you can just try out that thing and see if you can make it work. For instance, I admire that Robbie’s story is firmly situated in a certain time and place, and it has more density of detail than my tales. It’s something I aspire to, but I often get bored by the work of saying where people live and what they do in their spare time, etc. Maybe writing in the present tense would force me to fill out some of those details. Who knows! It is worth a try. On my own, I would never attempt a present-tense story—I would’ve only gotten this idea by paying attention to a talented peer.

The nonfiction side

If you’re pitching nonfiction pieces, you must read the journals you’re submitting to. There is really no getting around it! Now that I am reading all these small journals, I am seeing that they each have quite a unique style. You could pitch the same idea to many of these journals, but it would need to be written differently for each. Like for N+1, it would probably need a first-person element, while for The Baffler, you’d have to include some original reporting, and for The Drift it would need a more polemical tone.

Moreover, each of these journals has some smaller sections that it’s probably much easier to write for. For instance, N+1 has these politics briefs at the beginning that are the weakest section of the journal. It is hard to come up with a fresh political take, and I think ideally they want somebody who has first-person on-the-ground experience with some political thing that’s happening—if you have some direct, geographical connection to an ongoing political event, that’s probably a good way into the journal.

So yes, if you want to be published in these journals, you have to read them. But...do you even want to be published in them?

When it comes to fiction, you usually write the story on spec, and then you look for the right home for your work. But with nonfiction it’s different. You write the piece for the journal. So if you’re writing for a journal, that means you’re allowing their sensibility to shape your talents. Oftentimes, the piece has no life beyond this journal: in the week or month of publication, it’ll be read by some particular set of readers, and then it’ll never again be seen. So it’s worth thinking about whether it’s really worth your time to write for some journal.

Yes, you get paid money, and you get experience working with editors, and you hope that the byline will mean something down the line. But even with all that...it’s a lot of work to produce a nonfiction piece for a journal.

Now that I’ve been reading so many of these little magazines, I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s no point in writing for a journal that’s not good.

And by ‘good’, I don’t mean ‘has a high reputation’. I mean...when you read the journal, the experience should be good. That doesn’t mean every piece ought to be good. But the journal ought to feel honest, like it’s doing work that the editors feel really needs to be done. And they ought to be doing that work in an effective way.

‘Honesty’ means different things for different journals. For Liberties, it means eschewing the internet, while for another journal it might mean purposefully pursuing some internet virality strategy as a way of building subscriber growth. But I think, at the most basic level, it means that there should be some vision underpinning the journal. When it comes to quality, some journals opt for a high-risk / high-return strategy, where most pieces are self-indulgent and overwritten, but some are truly excellent. Others opt for a more heavily-edited style, so that pieces have less individual personality but more consistency. But if it’s a high-risk/high-return journal, then the journal does need to have some breakout pieces. And if it’s a more heavily-edited journal, then it does need to be of consistently high quality. If the journal doesn’t seem like it’s trying to maximize the potential of its format, then I don’t think it’s a good journal.

Anyway, if you’re trying to decide whether a magazine is worth investing in, you don’t need to justify your own opinion. You should just read the journal and then ask yourself if you feel excited by the idea of working with the people who are putting it together. You should feel excited by learning from them and being part of their vision. If that excitement isn’t there, then they’re not worth pitching.

Elsewhere on the internet…

• had a great piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education about how the Great Books movement drew inspiration from WWI-era military education programs. I’d seen bits of this on his Substack over the past year, but it was fascinating to see it all pulled together.

• Reviews continue to come in for nonfiction book, What’s So Great About The Great Books?. Here is one from Goodreads that emphasizes what I’ve been telling you guys, which is that there is zero duplication between this book and my blog.

  

  Here are some links to purchase What’s So Great About The Great Books on Amazon and on Bookshop.

This Dubno novel had many fascinating stylistic quirks. It was written in one long paragraph. It also had this weird habit of italicizing certain words or phrases, giving them a sort of hissing sound. And there’d often be a pattern of repetition, where the narration would circle around some motif for several pages, chewing on it, before moving on.

I was all set to write a great review of this recently-released novel by a talented young writer, but then I figured that I ought to read Thomas Bernhard’s Woodcutters (1984) since this book apparently inspired the Dubno book.

And that’s when I got a surprise, because this Austrian novel, Woodcutters, was remarkably similar to Dubno’s book. Look, I understand the concept of doing a remake or a retelling, but usually the remake is in a different style: Percival Everett’s James is a retelling of Huckleberry Finn, but it’s not written in the same voice as Huck Finn.

Dubno’s retelling was different. Its style was closer to the original than any retelling I’d ever seen.

Moreover, the story was very similar too. Virtually every character in Woodcutters had an analogue in Happiness and Love, and the latter book moved dutifully through the exact same story beats as Woodcutters.

It’s true that the Dubno novel had updated the action, so it took place in contemporary New York instead of 1980s Vienna. And a few of the themes were different. The narrator of Woodcutters excoriates his old friends for taking government money (i.e. selling out their youthful ideals), while in Happiness and Love the fakes get excoriated for making art that’s enabled by their nepotistic connections and inherited wealth.

But I wondered whether this level of close imitation was actually a good thing to do.

The Bernhard Cult

When I wrote online about the similarity of these two novels, someone said, “Oh yes, this is a thing! It’s very common for contemporary writers to copy Thomas Bernhard.”

And my respondents pointed me to several books by Geoff Dyer, Mark Haber, Sebastian Castillo, and Emily Hall, and to several articles that discussed this trend of Neo-Bernhardian imitations.

I was a bit astonished!

Thomas Bernhard writes in an extremely distinctive style. His most famous novels contain only a single paragraph, and the books are often composed of looping, vituperative rants where a thwarted artist castigates other people for their deficiencies.

Moreover, Thomas Bernhard is not that well-known. I read one of his novels fifteen years ago, The Loser, and it didn’t really make a strong impression on me. Certainly I had no idea that he was the central figure in such a strong literary cult. He’s a well-respected author, but, as Gideon Lewis-Krauss noted for N+1, German and Austrian people are often surprised by his reputation amongst a subset of the American literati.

Against ‘traditional realism’

When I looked deeper into the Neo-Bernhardians, I learned that these writers love to talk trash about contemporary American literary fiction.

For instance, Sebastian Castillo criticized literary fiction’s obsession with craft, with lyricism, and banal middle-class concerns (“It’s like this beautifully written story about a guy who’s divorced who goes on a cruise for a weekend”). He said when you read literature in translation, “there’s a lot more playfulness,”

Mark Haber said a “literary-type NYC novel” is unlikely to last ten years because “those books are only speaking to the author and their inner circle.” He also said: “this idea that a person who wants to be a writer [will] naturally attend grad school or an MFA program has always seemed sort of safe and sanitized to me, even self-defeating. Creating literature is not something that can be taught—I don’t believe that. It’s a fire.”

Here’s Mauro Javier Cardenas, another author who is stylistically indebted to Bernhard:

I’ve been mocking traditional realism for so long that it feels too easy to continue to put on that variety show. For instance: hey you’re replicating the same narrative conventions that companies have repurposed so you’ll purchase their cures for your corns. Or: so you wrote another poetic pantomime of your suffering, eh? Or: how come your style is tied to the tenure requirements of the University of Southern Corn? And so on.

Lee Klein imagines that Thomas Bernhard, if he posted on Twitter, would spend his time excoriating the pretensions of contemporary writers. Lee says Bernhard would call out the:

excrescence of a literary culture consisting of promotion and cronyism and tired bougie considerateness and/or mild condescension at most, all of which combines to smell like the sweat of something essentially human degraded thanks to overexposure to the scent of its own stink.

I could go on. There are so many quotes like this.

Given this iconoclastic rhetoric, it is quite fascinating that these authors have made a career (including, in Dubno’s case, what was probably a six-figure advance from Scribner, a large publisher) from imitating another writer’s style.

Diving into Bernhard

I decided to read all of Thomas Bernhard’s novels, so I could understand the hype. As a result, I read Frost, Gargoyles, The Lime Works, Correction, Yes, Concrete, Wittgenstein’s Nephew, The Loser, Woodcutters, Old Masters, and Extinction. I also read three of his plays, Minetti, Eve of Retirement and Heldenplatz, and his volume of memoirs, Gathering Evidence.

It was fascinating to see the evolution of his style over time. The first four novels (Frost, Gargoyles, The Lime Works, Correction) show a strong debt to Kafka’s The Castle. They take place in the countryside, and three of them feature protagonists haunted by decaying homes or castles. Frost (1963) is traditionally paragraphed, and I found it so dull that I won’t bother to describe it—this was, by far, the worst of his novels.

However, I really enjoyed Bernhard’s second novel, Gargoyles (1967), which was about a son accompanying his father, a doctor, on his rounds around the Austrian countryside. It’s full of grotesques, like a woman who is keeping her brother (a dwarf) in a cage in her house because she thinks he is violent. The ending of the book is a hundred-page single-paragraph monologue by a Prince who is wandering around a castle (we are told the Prince is insane, but he does not seem particularly insane to me) ranting about how his son will someday tear down this castle when he inherits it, and how maybe tearing down the castle is good, and it should happen.

The next two novels, The Lime Works (1970) and Correction (1975) are both told in walls of unparagraphed text. They’re both about men who are keeping women penned up in bizarre, Gothic constructions (in one case, a man has his wife trapped in a Lime Works that is painted all in black and, in another case, a man is building a giant Cone in the middle of the forest to trap his sister). And they both end in the deaths of those women.

In his third novel, The Lime Works, we see the signature Bernhard style come together. It has a few paragraph breaks at the beginning, but the bulk of the novel consists of a single 150-page paragraph. The novel is told at one remove from the action, by a narrator who is relating a story about another man. You are told, right at the beginning of the novel, exactly what happened—a local man, Konrad, murdered his wife. This man’s words, often reported third-hand through several intermediaries, are looping, obsessive and angry, and he dwells on certain italicized preoccupations:

....Konrad is supposed to have said, I serve no public function, I serve no function whatsoever, certainly not a public function, he even hated the word function, there was nothing he hated more bitterly than the word functionary, a word it nauseated him even to hear, because nowadays everybody was a functionary, all of them were functionaries now, they all functioned, there are no human beings left, Wieser, nothing but functionaries... (trans. Sophie Wilkins, 1973)

The novel has a loose structure. For its first third, it dwells on the physical layout of the titular Lime Works, where Konrad lives. Then it describes his work, his family life, his relationship with his wife—it’ll focus for a few pages on one part of his life, talking without a lot of specificity, but with a lot of energy and emotion, and then it’ll move on.

These early books are definitely accomplished: I am impressed that each book held my attention for its entire length. The one-paragraph style, with its unending block of text, is essential to the functioning of the book, because there’s no way to stop, no way to quit reading, no clear break between sections. It’s just one stream of experience, and the experience is so intense that you, as the reader, are pushed through the book until it’s over.

This one-paragraph technique, which Thalia Vacha called ‘the Extremely Long Paragraph’, is a core part of Bernhard’s style. All of his novels, from this point on, contain single paragraphs that often span more than a hundred pages. In some cases, entire novels consisted of just a single paragraph. Bernhard did not invent this technique, he probably drew it from the first section of Samuel Beckett’s Molloy (1951), but Bernhard was the first 20th-century writer to repeatedly employ the Extremely Long Paragraph technique.

However, despite their energy and readability, these early novels felt insubstantial. They were about such baroque, outrageous situations—these bizarre Gothic buildings and these madman protagonists—that it was hard to take them seriously.

And I have to think that the world generally agreed with me. Bernhard’s first novel, Frost, was his most conventional. This book sold the best and got the most attention; each subsequent novel sold correspondingly fewer copies. And Bernhard didn’t want that. He didn’t want to write these constrained one-paragraph novels that were gently ignored.

He wanted something more.

Bernhard explores realism

These first four novels came out from 1963 to 1975. After that year, Bernhard veered left into realism, when he began publishing his memoir, Gathering Evidence, which came out in five volumes between 1975 and 1982.

Bernhard’s grandfather, Johannes Freumblicher, was from a bourgeois family, but instead of making money, he devoted himself to writing novels and to socialist agitation. In 1904, the grandfather ran off with another man’s wife, and they had children out of wedlock. The grandfather’s wife and daughter went to work (as a midwife and a maid, respectively) to support Freumblicher’s artistic efforts. The daughter, Bernhard’s mother, was raped (many believe) by Bernhard’s father, a petty criminal, which led to Thomas Bernhard’s birth in 1931. Bernhard never met his father (the man died by suicide in 1940) and was never adopted by his stepfather, the man his mother married, who always referred to himself as merely Bernhard’s ‘guardian’.

Bernhard had difficulties in school. His memoirs recount his experience wetting the bed at a Nazi summer camp, and his later experiences at a Nazi boarding school. He left school at age fifteen (”one day...I decided not to go to the grammar school, but to the labor exchange instead”), an experience he describes as being extremely freeing.

However his apprenticeship at a grocery store was interrupted by a lung complaint, for which he spent three years in various sanitaria. At the end of this period, when he was 19, he met an older woman, Hedwig Stavianicek, thirty-four years his senior, who became his (probably non-sexual) companion and, to some extent, supported him financially. They were together until her death in 1984—it’s hard not to see her as the inspiration for the frail wife whose existence oppresses Konrad in The Lime Works.

After leaving the sanitarium, he studied acting and then worked for a few years as a reporter. His literary career began with the publication of his first novel in 1963, when Bernhard was thirty-two years old.

He starts acting out

As I said, his first novel, Frost, was fairly successful and was well-received.

But when this novel won the Austrian State Prize, in 1967, he delivered a very angry acceptance speech, the first in a series of awards-ceremony tirades against the literary world.

What is striking about these speeches (and a lot of Thomas Bernhard’s work) is that they’re very vacuous. As with all of Bernhard’s rants, there is what he says, and then why he says it. In this case, his actual speech is a vague diatribe (“We’re Austrian, we’re apathetic, our lives evince the base disinterest in life”).

But a decade later, he wrote that in reality he was upset because he’d won the so-called Small Prize (for an individual work) instead of the Big Prize (for lifetime achievement): He claimed when he spoke to people about the award, they “assumed I had naturally been awarded the Big Prize, and I had to explain the one in question was the Small Prize, which every scribbling asshole had won already.”

The same pettiness is on display in his much-repeated description of being awarded the Grillparzer Prize in 1972. On this occasion, he got angry because nobody greeted him when he showed up for the ceremony.

He related this incident later in Wittgenstein’s Nephew, an autobiographical work:

…I actually thought it likely that I would be received outside the building, as seemed appropriate, and with the appropriate respect. But there was no one there to receive me. I waited in the entrance hall for a good quarter of an hour with my friends, but no one recognized me, let alone received me, even though my friends and I spent the whole time looking around. No one took the slightest notice of us as hordes of people streamed in and took their seats in the crowded assembly room.

He goes on like this, perseverating on this incident for pages and pages. He feels like it’s somewhat empty to give someone a prize, when you don’t actually know what that person looks like.

An academy that gives me a prize and doesn’t know me from Adam…deserves to be treated with even greater contempt, I thought.

That makes sense, but it still seems very toxic to continually call out people whose only crime is giving you an award. The level of vitriol is deranged.

These hateful acceptance speeches really outraged the Austrian media, causing lots of tumult. In one case his threat to deliver an angry speech resulted in the outright cancellation of the awards ceremony—they quietly mailed him the prize check instead.

Bernhard learns how to really annoy people

In the 1970s, he discovered the theater. He began to write plays: nineteen of which would be staged over the next two decades.

And the controversy surrounding these plays was a major part of Bernhard’s public image. Nowadays, this controversy gets reduced to two plays, Eve of Retirement (1979) and Heldenplatz (1988). In both of these plays, characters state, outright, that most Austrians are still Nazis. As one crypto-Nazi puts it in the former play:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

The majority thinks like us and must do so secretly
Even if they insist on the contrary
they still are National Socialists all of them (trans. Gitta Honegger)

The controversy here seems straightforward. But with Bernhard’s plays there’s always another layer—some shade of meaning that the audience would understand, but which is lost to us today. In this case, one character, a judge with a Nazi past, is based on a West German politician, Hans Karl Filbinger, who’d been a judge in the Nazi regime. And Filbinger responded to the provocation, saying the play’s producer, Claus Peymann, was a supporter of terrorism.

Most of Bernhard’s plays were not as direct in referencing the Nazi past, but he employed a variety of other subtle provocations that, honestly, are too complicated to explain right now. Some of them involved casting actors that had Nazi pasts and employing them in roles that subtly highlighted that past. Other provocations took advantage of the fact that many of these plays were staged in Stuttgart, which also had a prison that, at this point (in the mid-70s) was housing members of a notorious left-wing terrorist group, the Red Army Faction.

There were many levels on which Bernhard’s plays were divisive. Yes, some people were offended by his characters’ sentiments. But many people just...didn’t think the plays were very good. As Bernhard’s biographer, Gitta Honegger put it:

Producing his plays was always a risk. None of them was a popular success. Opinions remained deeply divided. If they were not crowd pleasers, Peymann’s productions nonetheless gained much attention, thanks to his exquisite directorial imagination and his knack for producing the cultural drama around the theatrical event.

Personally, I found his plays to be quite boring. Very stilted and lifeless. And from what I can tell they are rarely staged today. Honegger says they don’t translate well, and that they’re in a dialect only Austrians can appreciate (i.e. even Germans can’t really ‘get’ these plays), but the more likely explanation is that they weren’t really intended to entertain people, they were intended to provoke them and create a lot of free press.

Basically, Austrians are very proud of their theater scene. And they’re particularly proud of the Burgtheater, the venerable institution that staged many of these plays. So they were highly offended that the Burgtheater played host to so many of these horrible and (often subtly-offensive) plays.

As Honegger put it:

When people walk out of shows, it’s not a public relations disaster (theaters are generously subsidized [by the state] anyway). Their responses validate the play’s view of them. And the show goes on in one way or another.

Bernhard wanted attention

This seems like the most simple and obvious fact about Thomas Bernhard. This was a man who craved attention. That’s why he constantly did all these outrageous things designed to provoke people and make them angry: he wanted their attention.

Of course he also feared attention. He spent a lot of his time building and inhabiting a series of houses in the countryside. He was reluctant to give interviews. And, as I mentioned, he made a big show of not wanted these prizes (that he kept receiving anyway). He claimed to dislike all of that literary careerist apparatus (“If you accept a prize from someone then you are allowing them to piss on you”).

But that was basically the performance. Like, that’s how it worked. He did and wrote outrageous things in order to provoke comment, and then he claimed: Actually I don’t want this attention.

It is so wildly transparent. I am impressed that Austria put up with it.

But that was Bernhard’s genius. He understood that Austria had this guilt about the Nazi past. They had committed genocide. Vienna was full of folks who were living in other peoples’ apartments—the apartments of people who had died in concentration camps. This country was full of people who had cheered for Anschluss.

And he understood that these people wanted to be castigated for their past. But you had to do it in a careful way. What made him palatable was that he was not a leftist. He did not pair his critiques with any sort of actionable program. He did not critique Austrians because they were Nazis, instead he said that Austria was a horrible place, and the Nazi regime was just one manifestation of Austria’s badness. Because his critique was so all-encompassing, it felt curiously safe. If all Austrians were Nazis, then there was really no solution, because you can’t punish everyone.

The Established Outsider

Although Thomas Bernhard was controversial, the Austrian establishment saw a lot of value in publicly supporting him. As Dagmar Lorenz puts it, “[E]ven though frequently declared a nuisance, [Bernhard’s ouevre] could clearly serve an alibi function…Bernhard was proof that righteousness and soul-searching went on amongst Austrians.” Lorenz called Bernhard, “the Established Outsider” and noted that, despite his provocations, he never lost the patronage of the Burgtheater and “was one of the most prominent and successful authors of his generation.”

This becomes more understandable if you realize that Bernhard was not the only Austrian writer who critiqued the country’s past. There were other writers who made similar point, but they often made them in a much more far-reaching and politically-destabilizing way.

For instance, Elfriede Jelinek was an Austrian dramatist (and, later, Nobel Prize winner) who wrote a play called Burgtheater. This play also called out Austrians for being Nazis, but it called out a specific family of Austrians performers who had prospered under the Nazis and continued to be prominent after the war. Her play also led to controversy, and it led to her being labeled as a Nestbeschmutzerin, a defiler of the homeland (a similar term was also often applied to Thomas Bernhard).

But when her play premiered in Germany in 1985, it harmed her career in a material way. She said: “That was the beginning of my decline in Austria as an author.” Her play wasn’t staged in Austria until 2005.

Bernhard suffered no such consequences. Despite any amount of controversy, he continued to be staged at Austria’s Burgtheater. Why? I think it’s because Elfriede Jelinek had a vision of complicity that was personal: she felt there were specific people who had benefited from the Nazi regime and who ought to be punished (she was from a Jewish background, which added another uncomfortable layer to her critique). If you listened to Jelinek, then it meant some people might lose their jobs. Listening to Bernhard entailed no such suffering.

How he handled ‘Austria’s Nazi legacy’

When you read about Bernhard, you are likely to hear him discussed as a writer who called Austria to account for its Nazi past. For instance, Ruth Franklin wrote in The New Yorker that “he spent his career alternately mocking and mourning Austria’s Nazi legacy.”

But these statements are a bit confusing, because Bernhard is most famous (today) for his novels, and there is almost nothing about Nazis in any of these books aside from his final one, Extinction (even in this book, references to Nazism are much more glancing than its reviews would lead you to believe). His direct references to the Nazi regime, at least in the works I read, were in his memoirs and his plays—works that are rarely-praised and rarely-staged.

Nonetheless I believe that his success comes from his references to the Nazi regime. I believe that his literary reputation derives from the fact that he successfully called Austria to account for its complicity.

But think about what it means to say ‘Bernhard was known for calling out Austria’s Nazi past.’ It means this was a country that felt so guilty and ashamed that even some glancing references to Nazism, in some plays that nobody saw, were enough to drive an entire literary reputation!

Personally, I do not think Bernhard himself actually cared specifically about Nazism or the Holocaust. I think he was just a very angry man. He felt like there was something the world hadn’t given him. It’s right there in his tirade about that awards committee that hadn’t greeted him at the door. They hadn’t recognized him. He wanted something that nobody could give him. He wanted to have had a happier childhood. To have been less tormented at school. To have been less lonely. To have been recognized more for his talents.

But he couldn’t say that, because it would sound pathetic, so he concocted this performance designed to give him the kind of attention that he wanted.

The middle-period books don’t quite work

As Bernhard’s spiteful, embittered public performance grew larger and larger, his prose grew softer and softer. During his middle-period, which began with the publication of the first volume of his memoirs, in 1975, he began to root his work more firmly in the real world. In his memoirs, and in his middle-period novels Yes (1978) and The Cheap-Eaters (1980), he wrote about people and places that felt more real, as if they could actually exist.

These middle-period works tend to have less of that signature Bernhard perseverating style. Unlike his early-period books, these middle-period books have more images, more events, more descriptions, more narrative progression.

For instance, his memoir begin with his long solo bicycle ride, at age eight, to visit his aunt in a nearby town. They proceed through his experiences at school, at a Nazi summer camp, at a Nazi boarding school, and the horror of living in Salzburg during the Allied bombing in WWII. There’s a density of detail in these memoirs that seems a lot closer to what you’d expect from a work of realism.

However, as I read through his memoir, I got a little exhausted. When combined with the one-paragraph style, the relentless profusion of details and events was hard to take. What was nice about his early-period books was that they were so singular in their purpose: the narrator was angry and wanted you to feel angry. With the middle-period, there was a slackening of that anger, but it wasn’t necessarily replaced by story, just by passages like one from his memoir Gathering Evidence:

Sometimes she would sit by my bed reading a book while I read another. These were the most enjoyable of my mother’s visits. She told me about her childhood and youth, which had been no less difficult than mine, and she talked about her parents, my grandparents, telling me many things I did not know about... (trans. David McLintock)

It’s nice to see a Bernhard narrator who isn’t as venomous and resentful, but...it still doesn’t quite work somehow. The realistic passages feel too inert.

(On a sidenote, the best of these middle-period books is Wittgenstein’s Nephew [1982], a reminiscence about Bernhard’s friendship with Paul Wittgenstein, the philosopher’s nephew. Wittgenstein is charming, but criminally insane and a danger to society—he periodically threatens to kill or strangle his relatives. Nonetheless, Bernhard is touchingly fond of him, which comes through clearly in the book. I highly recommend this work.)

Forget about all those books

However, none of these preceding books or plays are a major part of Thomas Bernhard’s literary reputation today in the United States. He is not known for any of them. Instead, he’s known three novels—Concrete (1982), The Loser (1983), and Woodcutters (1984)—that seem to find a middle-ground between the absurdity of The Lime Works and the realism of Wittgenstein’s Nephew

The best of these novels, and certainly the one that got the most attention and sold the best during his life, was Woodcutters. In this book, the narrator sits at a corner during a dinner party, and he broods endlessly on how the other guests at this party are such huge posers and fakes.

It’s a scathing portrait of a group of formerly-radical artists who’ve risen into middle-age and become tools of the state. For instance, speaking about two attendees at the party, the un-named narrator says:

At an early stage...[they] applied themselves instead to the loathsome art of exploiting literature as a means of ingratiating themselves with the state; all three applied themselves with the same abhorrent zeal to the cultivation of various city councillors, ministers, and other officials concerned with cultural affairs, so that as far as I was concerned they suddenly died overnight in the early sixties of their innate feebleness of character and became precisely the kind of sickening, revolting figures they had always accused others of being and spoken of with such supreme contempt. (trans. David McLintock)

Bernhard’s lucky break was that one real-life composer, Gerhard Lampersberg, saw himself in the composer, Auersberer, who was the host of this dinner party. Lampersberg sued for libel, resulting in all of the copies of this book being taken off the shelf in Austria. As a result, people went over to neighboring Germany, where it was still available, to buy it and see what the fuss was about. Within six weeks, the book had sold 60,000 copies, more than doubling the sales of Bernhard’s previous best-seller (his long-ago first novel, Frost).

Woodcutters was the most astringent of Bernhard’s late-period novels—the one that feels most directly like an attack on contemporary society—but it’s actually a much lighter read than The Lime Works and Correction—the novels of his earlier period. Those earlier books were also about spiteful, embittered mediocrities, but the heroes of those novels had a kind of Gothic grandeur. They tormented their loved ones—Konrad actually murdered his wife, and the hero of Correction built a colossal Cone whose terrifying ambiance causes his sister to drop dead. These are very powerful men.

The narrators of his later novels aren’t like that. These characters are quite powerless. The hero of Woodcutters never speaks or acts. The hero of Concrete sputters impotently at his sister, who keeps interrupting him while he’s on the verge of beginning his masterwork, his long-awaited essay on a composer, Mendolssohn Bartholdy. As a result, these novels have a humorous quality that is not present to the same degree in Bernhard’s earlier work.

There’s also a hint of perspective. For instance, in Concrete, the narrator, Rudolph, gets so mad at his sister that he flounces off to Mallorca. While there, he recalls the time he met a German woman, Anna Härdtl, whose husband had died mysteriously (possibly from suicide). Remembering this woman’s plight, he’s awakened, briefly, from his self-absorption, and the novel closes on a softer note:

And instead of starting work on Mendelssohn, as I had been fully determined to do, having believed at half past three that I had in fact suddenly got the ideal conditions, all I could think of when I woke was Anna Härdtl (trans. David McLintock)

Woodcutters has a similar ending, where the narrator raises his head and awakes briefly from his reveries. The narrator hears a speech from an actor who’s in attendance at the party. This actor makes a philosophical point about fate (he essentially says he wishes that his fate was to be a woodcutter, left alone in the forest, but unfortunately his fate was to be an actor.) And the narrator is so struck by this statement that he’s filled with warmer feelings towards the party guests:

I hated them, yet found them somehow touching—I hated Vienna, yet found it somehow touching—I cursed these people, yet could not help loving them—I hated Vienna yet could not help loving it (trans. David McLintock)

The unbearable lightness of Thomas Bernhard

Because of these works, people often say there is a lightness and a joy in Bernhard (Mark Haber said, “There are dark ideas in Bernhard, but his writing is energetic and life-affirming. It comes from a place of deep affection”).

But at the same time Bernhard was writing and publishing these ‘life-affirming’ works, he was also staging these very provocative plays that subtly called out Austria for its Nazi past (in ways that infuriated the establishment). And he was giving these awards speeches that were so biting and caustic.

In his final years, he delivered two of his finest provocations. First, he was asked to write a play to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the Burgtheater, and he delivered a work about a Jewish man in contemporary Austria, who unloads on the country, talking about how terrible it is (”a nation of 6.5 million idiots living in a country that is rotting away, falling apart, run by the political parties in an unholy alliance with the Catholic Church”).

Even before this play, Heldenplatz, was staged, it became very controversial. There were protests, and many called for the show to be canceled. The provocation was perfect, because the characters are Jewish, so what are you going to do? Are you really going to ban them from the stage? (The remaining Jewish community of Austria was apparently somewhat offended by the play, because the last thing they wanted was to be portrayed as essentially anti-Austrian).

Bernhard was supposedly hurt by this reaction, which is perhaps one reason that when he died, a year later, his will said that none of his plays could be staged and none of his books republished in Austria for the duration of the copyright:

I emphasize expressly that I do not want to have anything to do with the Austrian state and that I reject in perpetuity not only all interference but any overtures in this regard by this Austrian state concerning my person or my work. After my death, not a word shall be published from my papers, wherever such may exist, including letters and scraps of paper (trans. Gita Honegger).

Another incredible provocation! When he wrote this, Bernhard was already dying, so he knew this intention would be carried out shortly. This is so insane! I have never heard of another author doing something like this. Most authors are terrified that their published work will be forgotten: Bernhard did something that, theoretically, would ensure that his work would be forgotten.

In reality, Austria is neighbored by Germany, a much larger country where people speak the same language, and in this much-larger country, his books would still be available and his plays still staged (by some accounts, Bernhard was more popular in Germany than Austria). But still...it is a pretty outrageous thing to do, to snub your home country. This guy (who was obsessed with wills—they feature in many of his stories) must have loved composing this document. It is such an amazing move.

This deathbed snub is a testament to the fact that Thomas Bernhard wasn’t motivated by a desire for anything that anyone could actually give him. He was just angry. He was furious. He wanted to get back at the world. And he realized that the largest group of people that he could effectively bedevil was his home country, Austria, so he set forth to infuriate as large a percentage of its inhabitants as he possibly could.

I have joined the cult of Bernhard

What a genius! It is truly awe-inspiring. I mean that sincerely. I have learned so much from this engagement with Bernhard’s life and his work. What was most fascinating was seeing how his purposes were most effectively served through very subtle provocations. Like, that book, Gargoyles, which had the sister keeping her brother in a cage—nobody was offended by that. Nobody was offended by the husband murdering his wife in The Lime Works. These early works often feature broadsides against Austria (for instance, in The Lime Works, a character says “here in Austria...every genius has frittered himself away, everything extraordinary has ended in self-destruction.”) But nobody got upset by these sentiments, because the novels were so Gothic and unrealistic that you couldn’t take them seriously.

He learned, over time, to increase the sting. In his memoirs, he started mentioning Nazi stuff. In his plays, he threw in some Nazi stuff too. But he also tried many other provocations. He hit at socialists, at Catholics, at museums, at art critics, even at fire marshals. He learned what got a rise out of people. And he learned that you couldn’t go too far, get too specific, get too political, and yoke your complaints to any actionable policy, or people would stop listening.

Instead, his gripes were so nonspecific. He just wanted people to feel bad and to suffer. And people read his books precisely because these people agreed that they should suffer, because of the horrible crimes their country had committed—crimes he only infrequently alluded to. If he had done more, they would’ve suffered too much, and they would’ve stopped listening, the way they stopped listening to Jelinek. But he did just enough.

And it was such a multi-pronged attack too. He published these novels that were outwardly fairly light—didn’t mention Nazism at all—but in his plays he did a little bit more, and the plays really attached an emotional charge both to his name and to his novels.

Not really novels of the first-rank

Thomas Bernhard is a writer who’s had a far-ranging impact on European literature, and he will always be important because of that impact. But even his best novels feel somewhat slight. There is a singularity of purpose to his books—they’re so relentlessly driven by anger and pique—that although I read them and enjoyed them, I was often left wondering, “Is this it?”

Woodcutters is a perfect example. I do not understand what made the people at the dinner party so bad. I understand that the narrator thought they were bad, and that they were sell-outs for taking government money. But this didn’t feel like the true source of the narrator’s anger. Instead, the narrator’s complaint felt somewhat personal—the narrator had fallen out with them some time ago, in his twenties (just as Bernhard fell out in real-life with Lampersberg, the guy who sued him), and this personal vendetta is the true fuel for the rant.

So I was left observing the character’s anger, without really sharing it—something of a perplexing experience. But I am wise enough to know that if Bernhard’s narrator had stated, outright, that he hated these people because of some sexual imbroglio (Honegger says that in the 1950s both Lampersberg and his wife were in love with Thomas Bernhard) then it would’ve lessened the impact of the book and made it easier to dismiss.

Honestly, I think Bernhard learned something from publishing his memoirs. I think he hoped his memoirs would make a huge splash, but he discovered that people tended to ignore these books, because his difficult, painful childhood made his anger seem too explicable, too easy to dismiss—oh yes, this guy was a failure in school so obviously he hates school.

What makes his later novels work, to the extent they do, is that they never bother to explain why the narrator is so angry.

Bernhard’s whole life was a testament to precisely the kind of ambivalent anger that he documented in his books. He really wanted the attention and respect of these cultured Austrian people, but then no amount of respect they gave him was ever enough. It’s not enough to get the award, now it’s also insulting that they didn’t stand up and say hello when you walked in the door. There was always some obscure way that they were doing exactly the wrong thing. Because...he really had an absence in him, some lack, that could never be filled.

But he turned that absence into art. He turned it into boring plays that I don’t recommend reading. He turned it into excellent, if somewhat-light, novels that I do recommend. He turned it into a very touching reminiscence, Wittgenstein’s Nephew, that surely nobody would read if he wasn’t famous for his other work. Mostly, though, he turned his inner emptiness into an incredible life that I feel highly amused by and that I really, really appreciate. Thank you, Thomas Bernhard, for all you did. Especially for your will, which is incredible (his heirs broke it ten years after he died, and now his plays can be staged again in Austria, though surely nobody actually wants to.)

2. The Neo-Bernhardians

Okay, but what about Zoe Dubno. What about Happiness and Love?

Now that I have read Woodcutters and spent three months learning all about Thomas Bernhard, I have to say that on a purely experiential level, I enjoyed Happiness and Love much more than I enjoyed Woodcutters.

That’s because Dubno has more awareness of traditional embodied storytelling. She cares more about describing things, and she places her characters in a web of signifiers: you know what things look like, how people live, how they’re sitting—all kinds of specifics that Bernhard isn’t particularly interested in, at least in his late-period novels.

For instance, compare the openings of the two novels. Dubno begins:

While everyone was waiting for the actress to arrive from her premiere, I sat in the corner seat of the white linen sofa at Eugene’s with my legs crossed, watching the rest of the party and regretting my decision to attend.

White Bernhard begins:

While everyone was waiting for the actor, who had promised to join the dinner party in the Gentzgasse after the premiere of The Wild Duck, I observed the Auersbergers carefully from the same wing chair I had sat in nearly every day during the fifties, reflecting that it had been a grave mistake to accept their invitation.

Dubno has done an MFA. She’s been schooled in how to write domestic literary fiction, and she’s gonna give you a few visual details. The narrator is on the corner seat. The sofa is white linen. Her legs are crossed.

It sounds small, but every sentence has a few visual gestures like this, and it really adds up, creating a world that’s much easier to visualize and understand.

Moreover, I understand the relationships much better in Happiness and Love. The dinner party in Dubno’s novel is hosted by two artists who are very rich. There’s a photographer, Eugene, who’s the ‘talent’, and his wife, who inherited some money, and is known as a collector. They’re very empty and have no true taste, but they use money in various complex ways to create the appearance of being talented.

However, even with all their money, they’re still somewhat on the outside, which is why they’re waiting all night for this C-list Netflix actress to come over (she’s the one who delivers the final call-out, in this version of the book).

This was much more comprehensible to me than the relationships in Woodcutters. That’s probably, in part, because I just don’t understand 1980s Vienna as well as I understand downtown New York in 2025. But still...it doesn’t change the fact that I found Happiness and Love to be easier and more enjoyable to read.

However, in praising this book, it is hard to ignore that ninety percent of its value belongs to Bernhard. The degree of similarity is very striking. There is a one-to-one concordance between the characters. For instance, the odious ex-boyfriend Alex in Dubno’s novel is the equivalent of Jeannie Billroth in Bernhard’s novel.

The two books also move through the same story beats in roughly the same order. The novel is also written in a very distinctive voice, full of italicized words and hissing repetitions, that is just like how Bernhard wrote Woodcutters.

It does feel like stealing.

Not in a legally actionable way: I assume it’s not legally actionable plagiarism. But still...it’s really close.

And the degree of resemblance makes Dubno’s book very hard to praise.

You know, I thought that I wasn’t hung up on the concept of originality. I don’t care about who did something first. That doesn’t matter to me at all. I think it took a lot of talent to create such an impressive transposition of Woodcutters to America. It really captures what made the original great, without losing much. Yes, there are minor differences in worldview between the two books—ultimately, because of the way the climax is handled a little differently, Dubno’s book feels less fatalistic than Bernhard’s, much more accepting of the idea that there is honor in making art, even mediocre art, that people actually enjoy. But I personally enjoyed this change.

Still...the book is very hard to praise.

I was all set to write a post, three months ago, saying Dubno’s book was incredible. And then when I read Woodcutters, I really felt disillusioned. I felt lied-to. And it didn’t feel good. I just think if I’d written that post, where I praised Dubno’s novel without reservations, and then later read Woodcutters, I would’ve felt like...like I don’t know...I would’ve felt like such a fool.

What’s funny is that last year, the same year Dubno’s book came out, there was a breakout novel, Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection, which is also an uncanny imitation of a mid-century European novel, Georges Perec’s Things. Latronico’s novel is a very close imitation, in just the same way as Dubno’s novel is a close imitation of Woodcutters. One reviewer, Adrian Nathan West, commented on this, and he tried to excuse it. He liked Latronico’s novel, but didn’t like Dubno’s, and he spun a lot of verbiage about why Latronico’s remake was homage, while Dubno’s was empty imitation. This engendered a brief controversy (as documented by Jasmine Vojdani for Book Gossip), because the review felt sexist: why is he excusing in a man what he’ll criticize in a woman.

But West was right. It does feel different, and I think it’s because...Perec’s Things is not a well-known book in America. I had heard of the author before, but I had never heard of that book. Woodcutters is different. It is Bernhard’s most famous book. It is a well-known book in America. I had definitely already heard of it, even if I hadn’t read it.

If I am at a party, telling everyone about this great novel I just read, the likelihood that they will say, “Oh but isn’t that just an imitation of Things” is basically zero. But the likelihood they will say “Oh that’s just an imitation of Woodcutters” is not zero. Plenty of people have read Woodcutters. Not many, but enough people that if you’re going to rip off this book, you need to try harder to make it transformative.

I can’t explain why that is, but there is definitely a threshold, and Woodcutters is beyond it. Like, in the critical economy, as it exists in America, I think critics are going to be reluctant to praise a book when it’s such a close imitation of a relatively well-known book.

And that’s why this book hasn’t really broken out the way its author surely hoped. It got a big advance and there was a lot of press for the book. But success didn’t quite arrive for this book. Some of that is bad luck—most books don’t arrive. But in this case, the book deserved to fail. It is just not good to trick people.

This is not Dubno’s fault: if I was in my twenties and just learning to write a novel, I could imagine trying to imitate a book that I loved. And if you can get the imitation published, then great, good for you.

But...something about this book just doesn’t feel good. Like, it feels cynical. As if the publishers thought: somehow critics aren’t going to know, aren’t going to check. They thought we were just going to praise this book without reading the original, when the original is a well-known book that we’ve all heard about. It shows a lack of respect for us, for the type of reader that you need to convince if you’re going to make this sort of book into a big release.

Dubno is very talented, and it’s genuinely an impressive feat to retain the angry feeling of Woodcutters but situate those feelings in something that more closely resembles a domestic realist novel. I do think if Dubno continues in this vein and produces a book that feels more distinct, more fictionalized, then she could someday be the best of the Bernhardians. But this book isn’t it.

What it comes down to is that, yes, Americans might enjoy reading Happiness and Love more than they would enjoy Woodcutters, but if you read Woodcutters, then you’re reading a famous book, which has inspired many people, and which is connected to a man who had a really fascinating, weird life (and left a crazy will). If people want some version of this ‘angry person at a party full of posers’ experience, then they should probably just go ahead and read Woodcutters. And then, having read Woodcutters, if people want to experience the same thing again, but slightly better, they can choose to read Happiness and Love.

The literary movement with no name

But what about the milieu that gave rise to Zoe Dubno. After all, she is simply the most noteworthy manifestation of this recent plague of people producing imitations of Thomas Bernhard’s novels! What is going on there?

Well, the answer is that for the last fifty years there has existed a certain literary phenomenon in America. And this phenomenon doesn’t really have a name. Federico Perelmutter called it ‘brodernism’ in an essay last year for LARB, but the word is so pejorative that even though it’s a really useful term, I hesitate to use it for this piece.

The other potential term for this phenomenon is ‘world literature’. Basically, after World War II, America (and the English language) became the critical hub in the flow of literature around the world. If a non-Anglophone writer is going to achieve a world reputation, then usually what needs to happen is that they get translated into English and find an American publisher. This signals to the rest of the world that they’ve hit it big, and that there’s money in Italo Calvino or Yasunari Kawabata or whoever we’re thinking of. Then this author get translated into lots of other languages and proliferates across the globe.

Fifteen years ago, the editors of N+1 noted that contemporary ‘world literature’ has a certain shared sensibility. They wrote:

Much of the postwar European fiction, some of it very good, that we might read as World Literature — Perec, Bernhard, Nádas, Nooteboom, Jelinek, Marías, Sebald, now Knausgård — is extremely psychological in character and only vestigially social and geographical. Typically the narrator is a monologist, resembling the author, who tells of personal turmoil amid social stasis. He recognizes himself, with snobbish self-approbation, as a part of a stable polyglot pan-European elite; most other inhabitants of his country, as of the neighboring ones, are unthreatening idiots who turn on the TV after returning from work.

The editors of N+1 felt there was something sad about world literature’s pretensions. That it was just a recycling of the same gestures, but clothed in different cultures and languages.

Federico Perelmutter went even further. He said that the market for world literature was grounded by the figure of the ‘brodernist’: his name for a certain sort of American reader who didn’t actually care about what was unique or distinctive in various international literatures. Instead, they only cared about the appearance of difficulty, which they equated with ‘foreignness’.

....brodernist criticism interprets foreignness itself as “difficult.” The brodernist measures of “challenging” literature are a constrained series of attributes: winding sentences, explicit references to entropy and math and classical music, metanarration, anti-realism, lonely and existential male protagonists, brick-length tomes, cringey and misogynistic sex scenes, the stench of once having read Nietzsche, the words “psychedelic” and “oneiric,” half-hearted genre-play. Kafka, poor guy, gets thrown around a lot. The problem, to be clear, is not these traits—honest-to-God masterpieces compose much of the brodernist corpus—but their reduction into a series of attributes to be repeated as kitsch. Not the literature of exhaustion but an exhausting, at times exhausted, literature. A zombie avant-garde.

I do think we can see from the quotes I gave at the beginning of this piece—where various Neo-Bernhardians explicitly situated Bernhard against ‘traditional realism’ or ‘MFA fiction’—that there is an element of truth to Perelmutter’s critique. In America, there is an audience of readers that is hungry for an alternative to the prevailing literary culture in this country. And they tend to go looking for that alternative in a certain type of literature that’s largely been exported here from Europe.

Both Perelmutter and N+1 say that brodernism collapses or ignores the true cultural context that drove the reputations of many of these authors. In the case of Bernhard, this feels true. I believe his initial success was driven by shades of meaning that were very specific to Austria and Germany, and that we lose a lot of these shades of meaning when we read him in English translation.

Perelmutter would say that much of what people see in Bernhard—the overt difficulty and iconoclasm—is an illusion. And I would agree, to some extent. People in America read Bernhard and take him on face value when he says that he doesn’t want prizes, doesn’t want attention, doesn’t care about institutions or literary fame. But people in Austria understood that this was not totally correct. He was a writer who took plenty of money from institutions (right up until his death, his plays continued to be staged by Austria’s state-funded Burgtheater). He was not a writer with strong principles: he was someone who wanted to provoke people, wanted attention—Austrians tended to understand this, and it’s one reason he was so divisive.

So I do think there’s a degree to which contemporary Neo-Bernhardians are failing to understand a core part of Thomas Bernhard’s context, and I think it’s not unfair to say they’re attracted to Bernhard for fundamentally mistaken reasons.

What do I mean by ‘Neo-Bernhardians’?

It’s difficult to define the boundaries of this ‘Neo-Bernhardian’ group, because the influence of Bernhard has been incredibly far-reaching in ways that are often unacknowledged by the Neo-Bernhardian community.

For instance, Neo-Bernhardians almost never talk about Garth Greenwell. This contemporary novelist is quite avowedly influenced by Bernhard, and he writes in a style (including extremely long paragraphs) very reminiscent of Bernhard, but nobody ever mentions Greenwell when talking about Bernhard’s influence.

Bernhard was also a big influence on W.G. Sebald, who is an era-defining writer that has shaped the last fifteen years of American literature, and even besides that, Bernhard has influenced other writers in a number of ways. His book Wittgenstein’s Nephew was an influence on Ben Lerner, who writes his autofiction in a very similar register, with a similar level of pathos and a similar shaggy feeling, as if this story is a real story. And Bernhard had a collection, The Voice Imitator—I haven’t even talked about these very short stories, which are so excellent—that has had a long and far-ranging influence of its own, most notably on the fiction of Lydia Davis.

Some of the reason why Greenwell isn’t considered a Bernhardian (by this neo-Bernhardian crew) is that he’s too successful. He’s published by FSG (a big press), and he teaches at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, and he publishes essays in The New Yorker, and he is generally considered a big talent. So there’s a kind of discomfort, because this group of people really defines themselves by being against careerism and against the MFA and against the literary establishment, but actually Greenwell has proven that these influences are very easily assimilable to the establishment.

However I think mostly the reason Greenwell isn’t considered a Bernhardian (by this group) is that he’s too sincere. He doesn’t have that spleen, that rage, that they most value in Bernhard.

And that anger, that anti-establishment vibe, is really what mostly seems to unite the neo-Bernhardians. So when I write about the neo-Bernhardians I really mean ‘writers whose anti-institutional stance seems inspired by the work of Thomas Bernhard.’

What did the Neo-Bernhardians actually write?

For this post, I read nine Neo-Bernhardian books:

• Sebastian Castillo, Fresh Green Life (2025)

• Jordan Castro, The Novelist (2022) and Muscle Man (2025)

• Jen Craig, The Wall (2023)

• Zoe Dubno, Happiness and Love (2025)

• Geoff Dyer, Out of Sheer Rage (1997)

• Mark Haber, St. Sebastian’s Abyss (2022) and Lesser Ruins (2024)

• Emily Hall, The Longcut (2022)

There is a certain ecosystem that publishes and praises books like this. Castillo and Castro are published by Soft Skull, a small press (owned by heiress Elizabeth Koch). Haber and Hall are published by Coffee House and by Dalkey Archive—nonprofit presses. Both Coffee House and Dalkey are well known for publishing difficult, avant-garde writers like Karen Tei Yamashita and William Gaddis (respectively). Soft Skull is a bit more commercial, but they still publish books that are intended for a small, cult audience.

And these books tend to get reviewed by a small set of magazines and websites that see themselves as only covering the best and most interesting books: Brooklyn Rail, The Chicago Review of Books, The Cleveland Review of Books, Bomb Magazine.

Neo-Bernhardians love this one novel

In reading these books, I was fascinated to find that four of them are heavily inspired by the same Bernhard novel, Concrete. This is his 1982 novel about a guy who has spent many years preparing to write an essay about a composer, Mendolssohn Bartholdy, but hasn’t yet written the first sentence. Bernhard’s novel begins:

From March to December, writes Rudolf…I assembled every possible book and article written by or about Mendelssohn Bartholdy…It had been my intention to devote the most careful study to all these books and articles and only then, having studied them with all the thoroughness the subject deserved, to begin.

Now here are four other books that contain opening lines that are, to varying degrees, an explicit throwback to Concrete.

(A fifth neo-Bernhardian book, Castro’s The Novelist, is also about a writer who is failing to make progress on his novel but Castro claims he hadn’t read Concrete when he began.)

These books differ in various ways. Geoff Dyer’s book is the most traditional, it’s told in conventional paragraphing, without much Bernhardian repetition. Jen Craig and Emily Hall’s books have very long paragraphs and are repetitive and deeply-interior, but aren’t single-paragraph books. Only Mark Haber’s novel is a one-paragraph novel.

Out of these, I’d say Haber’s Lesser Ruins held my attention the best, because it’s both the funniest and the warmest. It’s about an essentially-comic situation (writer’s block), and Haber doesn’t expect us to feel any sympathy for his narrator’s ineptitude. He’s also upfront about the fact that more is going on here: the narrator’s wife has recently died, after a long illness, and he’s got strained relations with his son. His son, even more comically, can only talk about electronic dance music. The son appears periodically to deliver long, hilarious voicemails about electronic dance music that leave the protagonist flummoxed and confused and, yet, oddly touched.

Marcel’s voicemails are extraordinary, some lasting well over ten minutes where Marcel, accompanied by the distant clamor of his roommates, dispenses muddled soliloquies on the culture of dance music and turntablism as well as the vibrant tenacity of dub.

Haber’s book is a very close imitation of Concrete, but it’s different enough. There is no exact analogue between the characters in Lesser Ruins and those in Concrete. What I am saying is that Haber did the work that Dubno didn’t do, to make the book different enough, but still similar. I appreciated the effort.

Looking into Haber, I realized...this is just a guy who’s found the thing he likes. It’s very, very hard to write a novel. Haber was having a lot of difficulty writing traditional novels. He said, “All the planning and plotting I tried in my twenties and thirties never worked very well” But then one day it occurred to him to just do the one-paragraph thing and something clicked:

...by putting this style (unbroken text) upon myself it actually freed me and allowed me to express myself, go all over the place, forward, backward, everywhere, which, of course had its own separate challenges, but honestly, giving myself that formal guideline was the most freeing thing I’d ever done.

Mark Haber’s books are funny and propulsive. As a result of these great qualities, Haber also has the best career that a Neo-Bernhardian can expect. He gets interviewed by The Believer and by Bomb Magazine. He gets reviewed respectfully by people who care about experimental literature, including Becca Rothfeld in The Washington Post. And he’s published by an avant-garde press that has a seemingly endless appetite to put out his books (his fourth, Ada, will appear in a month)

Yes, he sometimes says the kind of stuff the other neo-Bernhardians say, about how MFA programs are passe (he doesn’t have an MFA) and how domestic realism is tired, but...it seems to lack conviction. There’s a good-natured quality to Haber. He’s just a guy who’s found his thing, and he’s happy with that.

If you criticize brodernism or devotees of ‘world literature’ or the ‘zombie avant-garde,’ then you’re essentially criticizing Mark Haber. But why would you ever do that? To say ‘Mark Haber is a bad writer’ would just be an obviously incorrect statement.

Piggybacking on Bernhard’s genius

The closest anyone’s come to taking down Mark Haber is Oscar Dorr, writing for House House, who wrote about the neo-Bernhardian phenomenon in general:

...directly aping a great writer in hopes of piggybacking on their genius is simply ineffective, a waste of talent. It makes for a bad read.

I thought a long time about whether I agree with this statement, and I have to say...I do not think so. I believe what the Neo-Bernhardians are doing is good and praiseworthy, and is no different from what Bernhard himself—or any great author throughout history—has done.

When I look at Bernhard, I see an author who is heavily indebted to those who have come before. His three early novels—Gargoyles, The Lime Works, and Correction—take the feel and setting of Kafka’s The Castle and combine it with the looping, deeply-interior style of Beckett’s novels. Bernhard was basically just a guy who found his thing—he found a style, a mix of influences, that really worked for him. And then he spent his life refining that style.

And I think if you are an aspiring writer, and you really respond to the work of some famous author from the past, then you should imitate them, and then, over time, you should see if you can improve upon their work.

What Dorr failed to see is that many Neo-Bernhardians are attempting to improve upon Bernhard. I’ve already talked about how Zoe Dubno moved Bernhard a fractional inch closer to domestic realism.

There’s another neo-Bernhardian, Jordan Castro, who uses a different method of bringing Bernhard closer to the domestic realist novel. Castro’s two books, The Novelist and Muscle Man, both take place over short spans of time, two hours and one day (respectively), and he guides us carefully through the protagonist’s day, with plenty of attention to setting and the characters’ movement through space. So the characters still rant and perseverate, but they’re also rooted in a certain body and a certain place.

In both Dubno and Castro’s cases, there’s something they like about Bernhard, but there’s also something they think can be improved. And that is precisely the process that Bernhard himself used. He had this basic one-paragraph technique that he got from Beckett, but he tried many different variations, which really varied in their approach to realism, until he hit this middle-register that he used with Woodcutters, where the story felt somewhat anchored to reality, but still had a hazy, nonspecific quality. And that was really the version that stuck.

I see no reason to think that, when we look back at Dubno or Castro or Haber, we won’t see some similar evolution. It’s totally possible that they’ll find some version of this style that really clicks, and then they’ll just suddenly break out and be everywhere.

Brodernism is good

I’ve now been exposed to so much verbiage over the relative merits of different types of novels. On the one hand, you’ve got the neo-Bernhardians, who say there’s something called ‘traditional realism’ that is played out, boring.

On the other hand, you’ve got a group of critics who talk about ‘brodernism’ or ‘world literature’ and say it’s a bunch of empty gestures, that are played out, boring—a ‘zombie avant garde.’

Who is right?

And...I would say...after thinking about it for a very long time...that my sympathies are with the Neo-Bernhardians. Because they have something that they love, which they are really excited about.

Whereas other people, who are against ‘brodernism’, against ‘world literature’, against ‘the zombie avant garde’, against ‘aping a great writer’s style’, these people really have nothing to offer. Oftentimes these critics of the Neo-Bernhardians are just people who think that everything written today is bad, and that we are in civilizational decline. Oscar Dorr, in this House House article, says it openly:

Now, we concern ourselves with the re-generation and re-production of signifiers until they no longer signify anything at all, and then, bored without meaning, we move quickly onto whatever’s next. It would seem that contemporary culture moves too fast for literature to keep pace.

The question that remains for would-be writers is how (why?) does one write a novel for the age of algorithm-culture?

That’s fine. I know many people who think literature is in terminal decline, and there’s no point in writing novels anymore. It’s certainly a very defensible perspective. Even the Neo-Bernhardians believe some version of this. They think most types of novels are pointless, and now the only kind of novel you can write is the kind that’s about how it’s impossible to write a book.

But at least that’s something!

As Geoff Dyer put it, in his book-length work about a failure to write a study of D.H. Lawrence:

...the alternatives to giving in and giving up are never as simple as they seem....Give up one thing and you’re immediately obliged to do something else.

Dyer closes by saying:

One way or another we all have to write our studies of D. H. Lawrence. Even if they will never be published, even if we will never complete them, even if all we are left with after years and years of effort is an unfinished, unfinishable record of how we failed to live up to our own earlier ambitions, still we all have to try to make some progress with our books about D. H. Lawrence.

That is smart and wise. All these books are written by people who, for whatever reason, feel compelled to write novels, but who also think there is no point in writing a book. Somehow, by copying Thomas Bernhard, they have found a way to successfully write a novel-shaped thing. So...they have solved a very real problem.

Now, why should anybody else care?

I am positive that after ten thousand words, you, my reader, have absolutely zero desire to read any of these Neo-Bernhardian novels.

And it does seem to me that there’s an issue here. Basically, the neo-Bernhardian novel is a genre. It’s just like, say, domestic thrillers (i.e. the genre composed of Gone Girl ripoffs). But the difference is that there’s a big market for mediocre Gone Girl ripoffs. If you tell me a novel is just like Gone Girl but only half as good, I’m like...okay, I am still excited to read that.

But there’s no similar market for mediocre Bernhard pastiches. That’s because these books are a subgenre of experimental or avant-garde fiction, and the core myth of this style of fiction is that it’s doing something new—something I haven’t seen before. That I’ll open up this novel and be really excited because I’m seeing something completely different from anything else.

This avant-garde genre has basically been the same for the last hundred years. Its aim is to upset the reader’s expectations. Those expectations tend to be drawn from regular novels (what Benjamin Kunkel called ‘the perennial novel’). So avant-garde fiction does the opposite of regular fiction: it has minimal characterization, no plot, surreal situations, characters who behave in absurd or seemingly motiveless ways—these avant-garde novels contain strange and surprising gestures that you don’t typically find in regular novels.

And, for the last hundred years, there’s been a small pool of people who are very excited about these gestures. They are connoisseurs of these avant-garde gestures, and they believe something radically new will come from their corner of the literary world.

But they’re stymied by the much larger pool of people who are suspicious of these gestures. This pool is composed of upper-middlebrow people like me, who’ve read Ulysses, but feel like…once was enough. We like regular stories. We like regular novels. We like reading about fictional people and their quotidian problems.

The challenge, for the avant-garde, is always the same: in order for an avant-garde novel to really succeed and really gain traction, then it needs to win over some percentage of people like me, New Yorker readers. People who think we have taste, but who are not gonna waste our time reading a bunch of these avant-garde books. We just want to read one of these books every five years and satisfy ourselves that we read the best and most interesting of the recent avant-garde.

But because we are relatively sophisticated, it is difficult (and perhaps increasingly difficult) to convince us that any given avant-garde book is sufficiently better than all the other ones.

That’s what it means when critics talk about avant-garde literature feeling played out. They’re describing the suspicion that people like me feel towards this genre.

The avant-garde is finished

My personal opinion is that nothing is new, and nothing has ever been new, and the notion of the avant-garde is bankrupt.

There was a book called Blank Space (2025) in which a critic, W. David Marx, diagnosed the world as suffering from cultural stagnation, caused, in part, by ‘retro-mania’ (the tendency of artists to mine the past for influences instead of doing something new).

And I think Marx is accurately describing the fact that it’s hard for anything nowadays to seem new. That’s because we now have unprecedented access to the literature of the past—in five minutes, I could download all of Thomas Bernhard’s books to my Kindle—and as a result I am able to directly compare Bernhard to his imitators. Because of this, I can also compare Bernhard’s own work to Beckett’s Molloy. And I know that Molloy was in turn inspired by the final chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses. And Joyce was likely inspired by his deep learning, which had exposed him to many works throughout history, like Richard Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) that contain very long paragraphs. (And if you go back even further, to the Augustan era in Ancient Rome, there was no blank space on the page at all, not even between words. Every text was just a mass of closely-spaced letters.)

Culture hasn’t stagnated. What’s happened is that now we can accurately perceive that it’s very difficult to for anything to be truly new. That’s because every author throughout history has iterated upon what’s come before. They didn’t invent anything de novo. In many cases, their formal achievement only appears singular, because we are not familiar with their influences (oftentimes those influences have been lost or simply aren’t read).

So, to me, the avant-garde just means you’re writing stories using a bunch of techniques that’re intended to interfere with the pleasures I normally get from a novel. And I know the promise is that these techniques will give me some higher and better enjoyment, but I oftentimes have a lot of trouble believing in that promise. And, because of readers like me, the Neo-Bernhardians tend to have a lot of trouble in reaching any audience that’s larger than the two thousand people who buy a typical Mark Haber book.

However, this problem has a simple solution.

More imitation!

And the solution isn’t to imitate Bernhard less. Instead they should imitate Bernhard more. And, to be exact, they should imitate the aspect of Bernhard that is captured least well by his novels—his overweening desire for attention.

Many Neo-Bernhardians already imitate the affect of Bernhard. They openly disdain institutions, especially universities and MFA programs.

In this, they’re only parroting Bernhard, who constantly claimed he disdained attention, disdained prizes, disdained the literary world. But somehow, despite this rhetoric, Bernhard seemed to get attention anyway! As Dagmar Lorenz noted, he was the ‘established outsider’ who got lots of state support even though many people hated him.

Now a lot of people (myself included!) are very inspired by his example. What an amazing trick, to get so much attention precisely by claiming you didn’t want it!

Because that’s the thing. It’s obvious that all these neo-Bernhardian writers actually do want to receive prizes and want to be acclaimed as talents. They want recognition. That’s why they’re always talking about how this Neo-Bernhardian style is the only thing that’s alive and really working in contemporary American literature.

When Bernhard made these claims, he secretly wanted recognition too. And he actually got it! But somehow the same trick doesn’t work for Bernhard’s imitators.

And the reason is that Bernhard’s success didn’t lay in his writing. It lay in his life. At one point in his life, he really tried to channel his anger directly into his writing, and that didn’t work, because it resulted in these very dark, gloomy, Gothic novels that are readable, but hard to truly love.

Then he started allowing that anger to seep into other parts of his public life. He let it manifest in his prize speeches and in these stage plays. And that seemed really fertile for him, because it took the pressure off his novels, freed those books to be lighter and more joyful.

His angry public persona supported his novels. They were a perfect fit. The novels weren’t quite as angry as he was, but, because of that, they were more widely-read, more effective, and (in the case of Woodcutters) ultimately more wounding.

The most important thing you can learn from Bernhard is just that if you really want attention, then you can get it by probing relentlessly for weak points until you figure out something that your readers are secretly ashamed of. And then you push on that weak spot just enough to release some steam, but not so much that you get scalded.

Bernhard didn’t just strike at Nazis. He also hated on socialists, Catholics, aristocrats, proletarians, the bourgeois, artists, art critics, rural people, the Viennese, the Swiss, Salzburgers, and all kinds of other groups. And sometimes he drew blood unexpectedly. For instance, in one of his books, Old Masters, he went on a tirade against museums, and the Minister for Culture, Herbert Moritz, said Bernhard was a case for science, not literary studies.

Whenever Bernhard got a response, he knew that he’d hit a weak point. In Austria, one of their weak points was their worship of their own culture. And whenever you worship something, you secretly suspect it’s no good. So by insinuating that Austrian art was bad, he really got people upset—that’s why he was constantly denigrating Austrian artists, musicians, writers, and actors. These sorts of attacks got him just as much delicious attention as his attacks on Nazism.

Seen in this light, the real problem with Dubno’s Happiness and Love was its lack of desire to truly wound anyone. It attacked these vapid born-rich downtown artists that everyone already hates. This was amusing, but not enough to cause real scandal. If it’d hit out at someone bigger, some previously unskewered sacred cow, then I wouldn’t have gone into the book expecting genius, I would’ve just been looking for the sight of blood.

Bernhard’s true heir

Out of the current crop of Neo-Bernhardians, the person who understands Bernhard the best is Jordan Castro.

Castro’s writing style isn’t very similar to Bernhard’s, but I think Castro has learned most deeply from the master. He’s the only person who seems to understand this relationship between public persona and the work, and the ways in which being really annoying, and being annoying in a very particular way, can get you the attention you secretly desire.

To understand Castro, you need to know that many people absolutely despise his affect.

For example, there is a critic named Adrian Nathan West who always pops up when I google Neo-Bernhardian authors. He has something of a Neo-Bernhardian vibe himself: he seems thwarted and angry, and he writes takedowns in The Baffler of all these writers. (I appreciate the effort. I enjoy reading the takedowns.) In his review of Castro’s latest novel, West wrote:

To the person who takes a book like Muscle Man seriously, and objects to it because it is unserious, the stock response…has been that it is irony, and it’s your fault if you don’t get the cascades of meta-ness that sustain it....This question is doubly acute in the case of Castro, whose earnest expressions of his philosophy and opinions, say in his word salad denunciation of cynicism in the online journal Praxis (“a home for the brave, who strive for virtue and wisdom”), are nearly identical to the kvetching, pontificating, and bluster that crowd his novels. Castro himself affirmed that The Novelist was “unironically” written in the “lineage” of Shakespeare and Dostoevsky, so I suspect there is no recondite mirror-play here, and this is actually what he thinks good writing is.

Jordan Castro has written two novels, The Novelist and Muscle Man, about angry men who feel they’re better than other people. I found these novels intriguing—I think that I enjoyed reading them—but I also questioned many of his narrative decisions. However, I wondered if maybe that questioning was the point. Like in The Novelist, the protagonist takes a shit and then dwells upon taking a shit, and I thought hmm, maybe I am just a prude, because I don’t like this! Maybe this taking-a-shit scene is how you stick it to the bourgeois in 2026. It felt like the novel was daring me to say that it was gross and unpleasant to have a scene where you take a shit.

(I know in Ulysses a character takes a shit, and I didn’t enjoy it there either.)

Castro is a veteran of several alt-lit intellectual circles and scenes that I know nothing about, and he relentlessly calls back and hearkens to these scenes.

As West put it:

His ratio of performance to production is quite high, with the articles, interviews, profiles, and podcast appearances lying heavier in the scale than the writing itself, and in all of them, he consciously sculpts the Jordan Castro persona: ex-junkie from Ohio, friend and protégé of author Tao Lin (“Tao is like Gucci Mane, and I’m Waka Flocka Flame,” he told the Wall Street Journal), friend and protégé of deceased independent publisher Giancarlo DiTrapano, lover of Jesus, husband of novelist Nicolette Polek, guy who can quarter-squat four plates, and so on . . .

Castro’s latest book, Muscle Man, is also full of potentially-reactionary sentiments. The main character is a university professor who lifts weights and is obsessed with getting big and strong. He is very dismissive of both his fellow professors and his students. For instance, the protagonist thinks:

...most literary types did not act or reflect but rather brutalized and evaded: their action was inaction and their reflection was avoidance. There was no risk, and no reward.

This protagonist feels disgust for his fellow professors. He thinks they are unmanly and incoherent. But, as with Bernhard, there’s no political ideology or worldview. He’s not a Republican or MAGA or even anti-woke. He’s just a hapless guy who hates his job.

Harold himself is so cowardly and annoying that it’s hard to say how seriously we’re meant to take him. As Adam Wilson put it for Bookforum:

Castro has cleverly engineered Muscle Man to let him have it both ways: an impassioned jeremiad against contemporary mores contained within a send-up of itself. Readers may find Harold repulsive, but this too is by design.

It feels, to me, like this ambiguity is working. We all know these books are good, but somehow feel reluctant to praise them, because there is something unsettling about the author.

The funniest review of a Jordan Castro novel was by Sam Kriss in The Point. He wrote:

I liked The Novelist. It’s genuinely funny; it plays around with the self rather than breathlessly insisting on it....But while The Novelist accurately diagnoses the problem with trying to produce fiction in the internet age, it doesn’t really offer up any new alternatives.

I didn’t really understand the review. If you liked the book, then it is a good book! Many reviews of Jordan Castro are the same. They say...there’s something here, but...it’s not a work of genius. He isn’t really reinventing the novel. He’s just doing what other avant-garde writers have done before.

However, that’s the beauty of provocation. Nothing succeeds like success. These avant-garde techniques are purposefully alienating to the average reader, which means if you’re able to write a book using those techniques and sell that book to fifty thousand people, and if those people are able to derive some enjoyment from the book, then, well, almost by default, that means you’re better than all the other avant-garde writers.

Now, maybe it’s the case—in fact it probably is the case—that these avant-garde techniques are actually good and are capable of providing genuine entertainment (certainly, I have been surprised how powerful and propulsive these one-paragraph novels are). So maybe your only accomplishment is that you somehow overcame the reflexive suspicions of upper-middlebrow people. But…that’s still a major accomplishment.

And if you can get fifty thousand people to read an avant-garde novel, then eventually some corporation will invest some money into marketing you, to the public, as a genius.

Bernhard was an industry plant

Thomas Bernhard was never a best-selling novelist, but slowly, over time, he learned how to really piss people off. And these provocations kept him in the public eye for long enough that eventually his backlist was brought over to America by an editor at Knopf, Carol Brown Janeway, who made a big bet on Bernhard and kept many of his novels in print for decades.

Then, here in America, divorced from a lot of this Austrian context, there were a bunch of young people in their twenties who were aspiring writers. These kids were bored by traditional realism, and they were looking for an alternative. Thomas Bernhard’s work was easily accessible, because it was published by a large press, Knopf. So they bought his books and were immediately struck both by the different typography (the extremely long paragraphs) and by the anti-institutional affect. Both things seemed to go together. Here was a writer who hated the literary world and who expressed that hatred by writing in a style completely different from traditional realism.

Why didn’t these young writers glom onto Beckett instead? Well...because Beckett’s novels never really broke out and found the readership that Woodcutters did, so there was no reason for any corporation to think that putting money into him would lead to good results. As a result, Beckett’s novels are published, in America, by Grove, a small press, with less distribution, less publicity.

There’s an element of luck that’s at play too. Over the years, Carol Brown Janeway had risen at Knopf and became their director of international rights. Due to her influence, Knopf reinvigorated the Bernhard backlist by re-issuing ten Bernhard books as paperbacks in the Vintage International line, between 2006 and 2011, giving them very eye-catching covers. This re-release effort led to a burst of Bernhard coverage, including the Ruth Franklin piece in The New Yorker that I linked to earlier. And it was during this 2006 to 2011 period that Bernhard came to the attention of most of the Neo-Bernhardians.

After a ten-year gestation, during which these writers assimilated this influence, they began releasing their own Neo-Bernhardian imitations between 2020 and 2025 (for similar reasons, I think we’ll see a spate of Osamu Dazai imitations in 2035).

These American readers were drawn to Bernhard, in part, because his work was such a strong contrast to ‘traditional realism’, but the reason he was available to read in America was because his provocations had created such a stir and won him an international reputation, which led to an editor at a large corporation taking an interest in him. Bernhard’s own reputation as an iconoclastic author is a constructed reputation—the result of a large corporation investing heavily in reissuing and promoting his work to an unusual degree.

(Elfriede Jelinek, the communist Nobel Prize laureate who also critiqued Austria’s Nazi past, is barely available in America, and only from small presses and university presses).

It can happen here

And, just like happened with Bernhard, I think it’s very likely that someday one of these Neo-Bernhardians will reach escape velocity and achieve some readership outside the avant-garde literature community.

All you need is for one of these weirdly-written Neo-Bernhardian imitations to piss off a lot of people. Then this will create a lot of free publicity. As a result of this publicity, fifty thousand people will read the book. These people will not care about Bernhard. They won’t be concerned at all about the avant-garde aspect. They’ll just be reading it for the controversy: “This book is insane! I never thought I’d enjoy a book where an unnamed writer shits on the chest of a thinly-fictionalized version of America’s most-beloved living President.”

Then this surprise-hit Jordan Castro novel, Commander in Briefs, will get republished in India, where some publishing house will get really into Jordan Castro and keep him relentlessly in print for decades. So now you’ve got kids in India who assume Jordan Castro is a major writer in America. These kids are tired of Arundhati Roy or whoever they’ve been told to like—Roy is done, she’s old news. So instead they start writing these highly-compressed one-day novels, with faintly-ridiculous, pathetic narrators who have sex with famous people, in the style of that great genius, Jordan Castro.

But something isn’t working. For some reason, none of these Neo-Castro novels is really catching fire with the reading public. And now these writers find themselves lambasted by critics, who tell them:

“You won’t get anywhere by aping a great writer’s style. Castro’s techniques were perfectly adapted to the internet era, but in these times we need something radically new, something radically different from these hackneyed gestures, this zombie literature, full of dead gestures, that’s a betrayal of the true originality and fearless institutional critique that was exemplified by the work of Jordan Castro.

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

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