Although the internet-driven “alt lit” scene that sprang up in the US in the 00s never really caught on in the UK – its best-known figure is Tao Lin (Taipei, Shoplifting from American Apparel) – it quickly accrued a certain kind of insurgent glamour, its unkempt aesthetic thrillingly indifferent to prim metrics of poetry and empathy. Many of the scene’s canonical titles – Marie Calloway’s what purpose did i serve in your life?, Megan Boyle’s Liveblog – came courtesy of the taste-making US indie publisher Tyrant, whose founder, Giancarlo DiTrapano, died in 2021 just as he was about to publish a new breed of punky proteges, among them Sean Thor Conroe (Fuccboi), Gabriel Smith and Honor Levy, who caught DiTrapano’s eye – the story goes – when she tweeted that she was writing a book for him; she wasn’t.
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