Writing Life
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Why I Hate Substack February 17, 2025
Earlier this week, the online magazine Current announced it will be shuttering in April. A small magazine run by a dedicated team of editors volunteering their time, Current was a lovely diamond in a whole mess of internet rough. I was only able to p...
A Conversation with Novelist Andrew Lipstein February 14, 2025
Something I’m looking forward to doing more of in 2025 is showing love to books and authors making their way out into the world this year. One way I plan on doing that is to run some Q&A’s with authors whose work I appreciate.Andrew Lipstein is one o...
Writer's Diary February 10, 2025
It's harder to communicate now that people don’t read. One way to look at books is as shorthand—summarizing vast swaths of human experience. Reading a great book is like memorizing all the moves of chess grandmasters, like memorizing Fischer versus B...
Lou Mathews Knows a Tale or Two About ‘Hollywoodski’ January 27, 2025
Lou Mathews is unequivocal in his devotion to Los Angeles and its environs. “I love it — and I don’t understand people who don’t,” says the welcoming, white-bearded Mathews, 78, during a recent interview at his longtime Beachwood Canyon home conducte...
Writing as Transformation January 07, 2025
It seems to me that I have wanted to write for the whole of my life. The intensity of this insistence, despite its implausibility, suggests an emotional, rather than literal, accuracy. I think my life didn’t seem my life until I started to write....
Read Me, Find Me, Save Me December 19, 2024
It was Christmas Eve 2016. I’d just moved to NYC in September and by December, I could be honest with myself about how things didn’t seem to be going to plan. Case in point: there I was, on Christmas Eve, nowhere to go and nothing to do except buy a ...
The Place to Be December 18, 2024
George Hirsch knew it wasn’t going to end well with Clay Felker. Though New York, the magazine they co-founded in 1968, had been a huge success, working with the gifted but temperamental editor had become intolerable. Hirsch, who’d given up a promisi...
On Taking Things Slow December 05, 2024
I would describe your book, The Champ Is Here, as a series of loosely linked anecdotes about life in a small town. I’m curious about how you conceptualize it—do you see it as a novel, prose poetry, a short story collection? Do those labels even matte...
The New Status Anxiety December 02, 2024
In the 2000s, there were many blogs. They were both popular and snickered at. Some of this was due to the name itself—nothing called a “blog” could carry much gravity—and some of it was a matter of money, or lack thereof. Most bloggers wrote for free...
Remembering Julian Mazor November 27, 2024
When I was 14 and was suspended from school, my father gave me a book that changed my life. Washington and Baltimore is a collection of short stories by Julian Mazor (1929-2018). Mazor wrote several short stories that appeared in The New Yorker in th...
A Conversation with Caleb Caudell November 22, 2024
One of the more exciting aspects of 2024, for me personally, was discovering the bounty of new, unheralded writing out there. Ten years ago, perhaps, there was an argument to made that the largest publishers were still elevating the best novelists in...
Here Comes the Champ November 08, 2024
Shadow-selves abound in Dragon’s debut story collection, The Champ is Here. As a regular contributor to the minimalist-aligned annual NOON, and taking cues from Jean-Philippe Toussaint and Charles Simic, the author specializes in prose miniatures wit...
Emailing With Matthew Davis November 08, 2024
Matthew Davis released his debut novel Let Me Try Again in August. Formerly a computer scientist for the multinational hedge firm Citadel, he has become a fixture of the New York alt-lit scene. He introduced himself to me via Instagram DM, a networki...
“Agita”: Talking with Alexander Sammartino November 08, 2024
Alexander Sammartino’s debut novel, Last Acts, is a tragicomedy in two acts. The first is set in an antediluvian 2014. David Rizzo, the owner of a faltering gun shop at the tumbleweedish edge of Phoenix, brings on board his son, Nick, a recovering he...
On Writing Advice and the People Who Give It October 28, 2024
The Canadian writer Sam Shelstad’s third book, The Cobra and the Key, is a funny and charming satire of writing advice and the people who give it....
Jeff VanderMeer’s Nightmare Fuel October 22, 2024
“It’s not going to attack you,” Jeff VanderMeer promises when an alligator creeps past us just after dawn. I’ve never seen one in the wild before. It smells like a leather-bound book that’s been sitting at the bottom of a bog for thirty years. By the...
How Should Debut Novelists Measure Success? October 18, 2024
Earlier this May, an Esquire article by Kate Dwyer called “Why Are Debut Novels Failing to Launch?” channeled the fear of debut novelists everywhere: What happens if no one buys my book?...
The Living-Room M.F.A. October 15, 2024
The Crown Heights apartment of Tony Tulathimutte, whose second novel, Rejection, was published last month, recently underwent a transformation. “I bought a table,” he tells me.His 2016 debut novel, Private Citizens, earned him a Whiting Award, a blur...
On the Remarkable Legacy of Lewis Lapham October 08, 2024
You only meet a few people in your life who, like stars, exert a pull so strong that they alter its trajectory completely. I was lucky enough to enter the orbit of the legendary editor and essayist Lewis Lapham. A week ago, I attended his memorial se...
Recovering from Heroin and Fiction September 23, 2024
Simone de Beauvoir wrote that novels are compelling to the degree that the characters in them actually seem free. Novels in which the reader has a sense that the characters have agency, make decisions, and aren’t mere instantiations of ideologies or ...
Scenes From The Literary Blacklist September 16, 2024
In 2022, we were the fiction co-editors for Crab Creek Review, a long-standing, independent literary magazine. Crab Creek Review is the kind of small publication where writers get their first break and, hopefully, go on to literary stardom and a book...
At the Center of Things September 16, 2024
Over the last year, I have noticed that, absent a few publications at a very particular moment, my writing on Substack will go further. I don’t measure this in terms of page views or “likes” or anything like that; my assessment is more anecdotal and,...
All the Audiences You’ll Find September 13, 2024
On Sunday, I took a break from being a dad to spend a couple of hours at the apartment of a woman who read my debut novel and reached out to me on Instagram. She invited me to attend an in-person meeting of her book club in Miami. It’s a modest club ...
8 Questions for Andrew Boryga August 28, 2024
Andrew Boryga is a Bronx, New York born and raised writer who now lives in sunny Miami, Florida with his wife, two little kids, and cute dog. His debut novel Victim (Doubleday March 2024), a satire of virtue signalling and tear-jerking trauma plots, ...
