Publishing
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Millennial Malaise May 21, 2025
During the height of the pandemic, the Spanish priest Julian Carron published a book posing the simple yet loaded question: “Is there hope?” “The pandemic,” he posited, offered “a propitious opportunity for the verification” of the answer to this que...
The Publishers Who Don't Run Away May 21, 2025
I’m posting here a slightly different version of my February essay from the Chronicle of Higher Education, just in the interest of helping the piece continue to circulate in forms that are easily shared. Big thanks to the Chronicle for their support!...
Newspapers Are Recommending AI-Hallucinated Novels May 21, 2025
Over the weekend, the Chicago Sun-Times—a storied and award-winning newspaper and longtime home of Roger Ebert—published a summer reading list. Almost all the books were fake. There is no Nightshade Market by Min Jin Lee, Boiling Point by Rebecca Mak...
He Was a Dandy, Alright May 21, 2025
If you happened to have toiled in the rarefied world of New York magazine publishing at the turn of this century—a world of fax machines, cosmopolitans, iPods, and $700 rents—you could not possibly have escaped the name Graydon Carter. For 25 years, ...
An MFA Nightmare May 20, 2025
When someone dreams of obtaining an MFA in Creative Writing, they likely imagine two to three idyllic years in which they attend a program where they can find time to write, use it to make a career or life pivot, and make new friends. Some may also d...
A Guide to the Biography of William F. Buckley Jr. May 15, 2025
I first heard about this book in the late Nineties. Yes, that would have been in the previous century. After one of Patsy Buckley’s fabulous dinners at the New York maisonette — great conversation, great food, bargain wine — WFB signaled a few of us ...
Judgement Day May 15, 2025
The first time you publish a review, once the temporary excitement of the byline wears off, you are forced to confront an age-old question: What’s the point? You might get a pat on the back, a passing sense that you belong to a Republic of Letters, b...
The Decline of Ye West May 14, 2025
In Munich, in the fractured aftermath of the First World War, an impoverished writer published what would become one of the most famous works of cultural analysis of the 20th century. Oswald Spengler’s two-volume Decline of the West drew on the sensi...
Kill the Editor May 13, 2025
Twelve years ago, editors at The Paris Review held an open Q&A session on Reddit. One user asked how many unsolicited submissions the magazine receives on average in a period. The editors said around 15,000 a year. In response to a related question, ...
Is Jeff Bezos Selling Out the Washington Post? May 13, 2025
On a cold evening in March, a month and a half into the second Trump Administration, a crowd gathered in the Terrace Theatre at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, in Washington, D.C. Warren Buffett, the billionaire C.E.O. of Berkshir...
On 'The Harmattan Winds' May 12, 2025
“We played the fool talking with long-legged words so as to mock the bastards who feed off human sorrow.” This is the mantra of Hugues and Habéké, the child heroes of Sylvain Trudel’s The Harmattan Winds, translated into English by Donald Winkler. Tr...
Is the Great American Novel On Substack? May 12, 2025
This past October, subscribers to Woman of Letters, the Substack newsletter of the writer Naomi Kanakia, received an e-mail titled “Why I am publishing a novella on Substack.” This novella, Kanakia wrote, was fifteen thousand words long. She was prou...
The Battling Memoirs of The New Yorker May 09, 2025
In the beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth. Before doing so, however, he sat around with the boys in the bar and thrashed out what exactly he meant to create. The same is true, pretty much, of Harold Wallace Ross, who begat The New Yorker....
The Sleepers May 08, 2025
Akari was on the couch, scrolling Instagram.Her body was small, but she was very toned and lean from yoga and pilates classes, so she appeared longer than she was. And though her eyes were cast down, she was aware that Dan was staring at her, studyin...
Are We Living in a Time of Cultural Collapse? May 08, 2025
Many articles have been written about me over the years. But I’ve never been hit with an opening sentence like the one published on Monday by The Atlantic.Last year, I visited the music historian Ted Gioia to talk about the death of civilization.Whoa...
Trying to Find Small Press Books May 07, 2025
In December, we wrote an essay about how small presses still fight the good fight for risky literary fiction, even as the conglomerated Big Five publishers abandon it. In a time when companies like Meta steal books to build generative AI, then claim ...
Review: “The Sleepers” by Matthew Gasda May 06, 2025
On the one hand: haven't we had enough?Do we really need to hear about the empty lives and unsatisfying relationships of the Brooklyn cold-brew class ever again?8/10ths of all books produced by and for this class, forever beamed out to the hinterland...
Books and Baseball May 02, 2025
Several weeks ago, in sync with the start of Major League Baseball’s 2025 season, the University of Nebraska Press published David Krell’s 1978: Baseball and America in the Disco Era. It is the third such volume Krell has done, following 1962: Baseba...
Men and Women Still Don't Get Each Other May 02, 2025
Some of you may have heard that I have recently started a new dream gig: for the next six months, I’m working with Playboy as Senior Editor. We’re working toward publishing a massive print issue in the fall, as well as revitalizing our digital cadenc...
Joan Didion, Conservative It Girl May 02, 2025
Let’s assume that writers maintain diaries and correspondences with a spirit of exhibitionism, attuned to the possibility that these texts might eventually inform their biographies or even get published. Notes to John, published by Knopf under the di...
The Great American Novel Will Not Be Substacked May 02, 2025
There’s been a recent trend of writers, mostly men, asserting the need for a new kind of fiction writing that will supposedly fix the publishing industry and draw in new readers. I am sympathetic to this movement, which I have been informally labelin...
Because We Care May 01, 2025
TO SOMEONE LIKE Constance Debré, we’re still more trapped in tradition than we realize. Abolish families, the French writer suggests. Abolish childhood. Abolish names. Abolish anything that restrains. “If I were a terrorist, I would begin with the bo...
The Unofficial Poet Laureate of Trump’s America May 01, 2025
Joseph Massey says he tries to avoid politics in his poetry. But politics has found him, whether he likes it or not.Massey, 46, has just released his fourth self-published poetry collection, America Is the Poem, and it is blowing up on Amazon: Earlie...
Meghan Daum Is Having A Moment May 01, 2025
I reviewed Meghan Daum’s new book, The Catastrophe Hour, for Air Mail.When I told her about this she said, “Are you even allowed to do that?”“I’m not hiding anything,” I said. “I put the conflict of interest right at the top.”I had published her firs...
Inside Didion and Dunne’s Private Archive March 27, 2025
I like to think about a book as an iceberg,” Julie Golia was saying. “The published thing is just that little tip that sticks out.” This was on a Zoom call early in March to discuss the Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne Archive at the New York Publi...
