PILCROW is Substack’s first serialized novel competition. Each quarter we will present excerpts from the unpublished novels of three rigorously selected finalists and invite our subscribers to vote on one to be fully serialized on our Substack. Quarterly winners will receive $1,000 and both finalists $500. Our first contest deadline is October 22nd, 2025. To learn more about this project and our submission guidelines, visit us at pilcrowmag.com, that’s P-I-L-C-R-O-W-M-A-G, or search for us on Substack.
Today we’re joined by Naomi Kanakia. She is the author of four novels and a nonfiction book about the classics, What’s So Great About the Great Books, that will appear in 2026 from Princeton University Press. She also writes a popular literary newsletter called Woman of Letters that’s been mentioned by The New Yorker, New York Magazine, and Vox.
PILCROW: Welcome, Naomi.
NAOMI: Hi, nice to be here.
PILCROW: I wondered if it might just suit the format to get a little bit of background and bio on you. Specifically, something that I’m interested in is that you really have straddled the genre and literary worlds. And this shows up, obviously, in your writing on Substack. And the perspective that you bring to that has always been interesting to me. And we could talk about your novel The Default World and maybe later the novella Money Matters and how it was mentioned in The New Yorker. Just the broad strokes, like how did your sort of orientation to these two parts of the literary world kind of inform what you’ve done as a writer and also maybe the move to Substack?
NAOMI: Yeah, well, growing up, I mostly read science fiction novels. I only read science fiction novels, I would say. And I really wanted to be a science fiction writer. I started submitting to, you know, the science fiction world has its own magazine ecosystem, its own awards for short fiction, etc. So I really wanted to be published in, like, Asimov’s magazine and win a Nebula Award. And so when I was 18 or 19 years old, I started writing and submitting these short stories to those journals. But then this was also the time, when was it, I graduated college in 2008, and that was also a time when a lot of genre writers were doing MFA programs, getting literary credentials. Kelly Link, who I took a class with at Clarion, which is a program for science fiction writers, she had gotten an MFA at Greensboro. And, you know, Rachel Swirsky, who won a lot of Nebulas, and gone to Iowa. So I was like, I’m going to get an MFA, mostly, I mean, partially for the money because I was what, like 24 and wanted someone to pay me money. And then also, you know, for the prestige, like I really wanted…science fiction writers don’t get mentioned, at least at that time, science fiction writers didn’t get mentioned in The New Yorker or get profiled in the New York Times. Like, I wanted prestige. I wanted something my parents could understand.
PILCROW: I have a question about that later, which has to do with sort of like the opposite of that, where there was this spurt of writers with a quote literary background who were publishing these sort of dystopian novels. At what point did you start writing what, whatever we want to call, in like big scare quotes, “literary fiction” and what, I don’t know, how did that change your trajectory or attitude?
NAOMI: Well, I mean, what happened is, midway through my MFA, I really started writing a lot more realism. So I stopped writing as much science fiction. You know, I had a hard time after a while believing in science fiction. A lot of it is about these heroes who are exceptional and are able to defeat, you know, evil empires through their goodness and stuff like that. I mean, I’m being very reductive, but it is about, a lot of it extols the individual. And so I just had a lot of trouble making it work. I was still writing and publishing short fiction, as science fiction, and have for, you know, the last 20 years. But I was really finding it difficult. And then my first novel was a young adult novel, a contemporary, set in high school. And then I published three young adult novels. I sold to a publisher, I published three young adult novels. But I really wanted to write for adults. Maybe if my young adult novels had broken out and been super. Popularity would have been different.
PILCROW: So this is actually three worlds then, really. Like on submission or dealing with editors, what would you say were the biggest differences in those processes?
NAOMI: You know, honestly, I feel I have much more positive memories of the YA publishing industry than the literary publishing industry. You know, with YA, you present…it really is about the manuscript. And the publishers don’t really care who you are. None of the publishers or editors or agents I dealt with knew that I got an MFA, cared that I had an MFA. They didn’t care about any of my prior publications. It was really like, “does this manuscript fit some sort of saleable market category that we understand?” And it was a lot of, you could really sell your manuscripts by comping them to popular TV shows. So my first manuscript was comped to House of Cards. And then there was like this gay romance boom. So my second manuscript was a gay romance. But then as long as your manuscript believably fit the comp, you had a lot more freedom to do whatever you wanted.
PILCROW: That’s actually what I was going to ask. Is there some sense in which the constraint actually opened up? Like, well, as long as you hit these markers, you can kind of do something….if not subversive, then different.
NAOMI: Yeah. And with all of my YA books, I had a tendency to rewrite them after I sold them, which my editors never had any problem with. But there is a constraint. It does have to feel like YA. It usually has to be first person. Or it has to be in a very close third, a very close point of view. And there are various YA things that you can do and there are things you cannot do.
PILCROW: Did you read YA growing up?
NAOMI: No, you know, YA didn’t really exist. Like, I don’t know how old you are. I don’t think YA really existed for us.
PILCROW: Well, that was my next…this is, it feels like such a permanent part of the landscape, but I don’t know, there was The Knife or something that we read in middle school–
NAOMI: I mean, what I read was, like, Twilight. Twilight and The Hunger Games. But you know, those were paranormal and dystopian and both…you couldn’t sell a YA novel in those genres by the time I was writing. It’s so trend driven. So then when I was writing, the contemporary had become really big because of The Fault in Our Stars. And now I never read any of these contemporary YA, like there was some equivalent of them growing up, but I never read any of those. It definitely really was writing like a foreign land to me. I mean, when I was growing up, I read mostly these science fiction fantasy novels that were ostensibly for adults, but in reality, most of the readers were probably teenagers.
PILCROW: Yeah, and that’s something maybe if we make it to talking about Dan Sinykin’s Big Fiction, I read it last week and it’s interesting how some of these genres had a lot of help assembling themselves in the economic structure of the publishing industry. So, okay, if you could bring us up to the default world, which is, I think, firmly within what we might call the literary fiction matrix. It was published by the feminist press at CUNY. Different experience? Either writing and submitting that, or...
NAOMI: Yeah, it was, it was a very, it was a tough experience. I mean, it, um, you know, partially it’s like, I, I didn’t necessarily understand the market for literary fiction, but I went about it the same way as I did with my YA, which is, you know, like there are these diversity books that were popular or when…they’re on the time I was trying to interest people in. The Default World. The Torrey Peters book had come out, Detransition Baby. So my book had a trans protagonist and then Sally Rooney was also popular. So I was kind of comping it to Sally Rooney and Detransition Baby and in the YA world that would be like an instant sell, right? But in the literary world you have to be like…I don’t know, you have to convince people that you are like the hot thing, that you are a genius, that you are a talent. And it was pretty clear that this world did not really regard me as a talent.
PILCROW: Which is a bit strange, in a way, because I was thinking of, like, Private Citizens, Tony [Tulathimutte]. I always fuck up his name.
NAOMI: I can’t pronounce his name either.
PILCROW: And The Default World is entirely, in some sense, about San Francisco and this culture of–
NAOMI: Yeah, but it was not about the content. It was really about the writing. If you read The Default World, it just doesn’t have that extra sauce at the level of the line that makes literary agents and editors excited. You know, like everybody…it’s kind of funny because everybody I know who’s tried to sell literary fiction has gotten these rejections that are like, “it’s too literary.” Like your book is too literary. I did not get those. My rejections are like, “oh this is like YA,” it’s not literary enough.
PILCROW: There was a note, I think I had it in a window ... .that I liked on Substack Notes the other day, I think it was Adam Pearson, oh no, I thought I had it pulled up. It was like, someone who obviously doesn’t read a lot of contemporary literary fiction was saying, well, here it is, okay, saying, the original note that someone was replying to says, “not saying everyone needs to write like Hemingway, but those who purport to being literary nowadays seem to think that equates to making their work difficult or challenging for the reader.” And the person replies, “this is so true, so long as you never pick up a single contemporary literary novel.” [Laughs] I don’t know, because you’re seeing like two ends of the telescope here, one saying, “oh, this is too literary, you need to kind of water this down a little bit or at least make it more transparent.” I don’t know, we hear about…an executive at Netflix telling their writers that the characters need to comment on what they’re doing at all times because people are on their phone. And I don’t know, there’s something to me about that in the kind of transparent narration in what is on the new fiction table in a bookstore that I walk into. So how do you square that circle, or cut that knot, where on the one hand you got feedback that was like “we want more sort of lyrical flights of this” and other people saying “oh you know this agent said it was great but it’s too literary.”
NAOMI: I don’t know. Different strokes for different folks, right? Like literary fiction is the business of prestige, right? Like it’s the business of being good. Like there’s a reason somebody is making that comment about literary novels, but they’re not making it about, you know, um, thrillers, um, that like the thrillers are not written complexly enough or whatever written or what like, so I think like you need to have to, to sell a literary novel, like you need to have that believable, whatever it is that signals like this is exceptionally good, you need to have some of that.
PILCROW: Well, this is kind of a bridge to talking about your, what you call your “tales” in a way, because they’re very stylistically different than I think what most people would conceptualize as the literary short story. But before we get into the stylistic portion of that: it was mentioned, it was the first thing mentioned, and it was the most complimented, in this piece that ran back in May by Peter Baker in The New Yorker which is called “Is the Great American Novel Being Published on Substack?” He said it was – I’m paraphrasing – “one of the most delightful reading experiences of my year,” he said he read half of it just in the inbox of his email. So yeah. You narrate this on on your Substack so I’m not asking you necessarily to repeat yourself in toto, but was there something different about writing that novella versus writing something like The Default World knowing that you weren’t going to…I mean no one’s going to publish a novella in hardback, you know between covers – at least I don’t think so – but did you feel more liberated because it was something that you were going to publish on Substack?
NAOMI: Oh yeah, yeah. I mean, I was just completely burned out. Basically last year I was completely burned out on trying to interest the literary publishing world in my work. And so I started writing, and I started writing these short stories that were in a very different style, my tale style. And then I started…I just didn’t really think I could interest the editors of literary journals in these stories. And even if they did, you know, what would really happen? Like, is one of these stories going to get in Best American? So then I started publishing them on Substack.
PILCROW: Also, would it matter if they were in Best American? I don’t know, it’s been a while since I picked up one of those anthologies.
NAOMI: I mean, I wouldn’t say no to winning Best American. [Laughs] But yeah, so I started publishing those stories on Substack and then, you know, at some point I want to put together a collection. And then I also realized that with this style, something that’s longer seems more serious, so I basically wrote the novella so I would have a longer more serious work in this style that I could point people to as an example of what is the best possible version of this style. I also realized that with these tale-style stories, there are some that are more essayistic, there are some that are on discourse topics, and there are some that are more story-like. And the ones that are more story-like tend to get less–
PILCROW: Which ones are you thinking of here?
NAOMI: I wrote one at one point last year about, well, this year I wrote a bunch of these tales that were about like a paladin Erdrich who goes, runs around righting wrongs. And those stories have less of a readership than…I also write these tales that are about writers, kind of facing various…like a male writer who…I wrote a story about a male writer who wants to write a novel about an angry loser. And then I give him some edits to make the angry loser story a bit more relatable to a female audience. That story does a lot better than my Erdrich story.
PILCROW: Maybe we should actually pause here, because I do want to get pretty deep into this cycle, or whatever you call it, of these tales. Everybody should read Naomi’s Substack Woman of Letters and catch up with these. But can you sort of classify what you mean by that, these “tales” that you’ve been publishing on Substack and how much of it…because you had mentioned, you had been posting about reading the Icelandic sagas and the Decameron a while back. And it seems like that was an influence on trying this style out. So could you kind of encapsulate what this form means to you or how it might differ from what we were calling a typical literary short story?
NAOMI: Sure. So about two years ago, I got very into the Icelandic family sagas, which are these set of prose tales written down in 13th or 14th century Iceland, but they’re all about events that took place a few hundred years before. And these tales – which are mostly about people getting into blood feuds and then suing each other to stop the blood feuds – these tales are all written in this very simple, almost formulaic style. It’s impossible to tell…there are very few style markers in these tales, so it’s very difficult to tell the authors apart or even if they have different authors. Then I also got into reading the Decameron, which is another collection of early prose tales from Italy, like 13th or 14th century Italy. And I read The Golden Ass, which is a similar sort of thing from first or second century Rome. And reading all these prose fictions that had arisen before our contemporary short story and novel economy, I just had a sense of the ways in which you could tell a story that’s just a lot closer to plain language and the ways that we, you know, talk to each other right now. Like, if I’m just sitting down right now telling you a story about something that happened today, that’s a lot closer to what a story in the Decameron is about. Stories in the Decameron are really easy to retell for that reason. There’s a story in the Decameron that is also in Chaucer of a woman who’s having an affair, and then her husband comes in. And she tricks her husband into getting into this barrel–
PILCROW: The Miller’s Tale.
NAOMI: Yeah, yeah, it’s also in the Decameron. And it’s in The Golden Ass too. It’s a tale that’s in all three. And so you can retell these stories without remembering the exact way they were worded. And so I started writing–
PILCROW: It’s a great story because everybody kind of gets their comeuppance in the end. Like no one person, you know…the scholars are shamed and the gullible Miller is shamed and these things. They’re stories of types, in a way. Was this in some sense you saying like, well, “fuck you, you think that my writing’s not literary enough, let me show you something that’s unadorned that is in fact very much like what has been held up in the past as a literary style?”
NAOMI: Yeah. It just made me feel like I didn’t have to hew to these models that come from, you know, that are not that old. Like I don’t have to write the way that Lori Moore writes. And, you know, a lot of the rules that I’d been taught in my MFA program. We work within a certain form as literary short story writers, but that’s not the only way to just say it.
PILCROW: We should just say it. It’s “show, don’t tell, right?” So the older way to speak of this would be like diegesis and mimesis. And that seems important to me for evaluating what you’re doing in these tales, because there aren’t these lyrical descriptions of a parking meter, or something. Whatever torque is in them is not trying to get torque out of the sensorial world. Have you ever read Chekhov’s novella, “The Duel?”
NAOMI: I have, but don’t quiz me about it.
PILCROW: No, no. What strikes me is that – it’s one of my favorite novellas – and sure, there are some proto-modernist gestures in the way that he describes landscapes and all of that, but it’s very much a story of types, and yet they don’t feel… like types, like they are and they kind of acknowledge that they are types in some ways. It’s a very popular thing in Russian literature then for these upper crust guys to be like “oh, we’re superfluous men,” you know it’s very discoursey in a way, and yet this story is idea driven because you see these two types just hurtling toward each other and there’s nothing that can stop this from happening. And I feel that way reading some of the tales that you’re working on on Substack, that the interest is in seeing how these types grapple with what are real everyday issues. I don’t know, maybe we could get into talking specifically about a couple of them. So, again, everybody should go and read these on Naomi’s Substack. But a recent one that I really liked was called “How I Had Sex with a Pretty Girl (Politics Were Involved).” And it takes, well it’s not really epistolary, but it takes the form of these online posts where the narrator is ostensibly responding to people’s comments and these things. I could say where I think it’s set and what’s actually going on, but would that be counter to the program of the tale? It seems to me very much like it’s a story of India and Modi’s political takeover there. But our narrator is this high school boy who’s just as concerned with hanging out with this girl as he is – at least initially – with what’s going on politically, but is nonetheless somewhat insulated from the street level thugs and these things and even his parents who are…I don’t know if this would be the word to describe them, are like liberals, in denial about this happening and this girl that he ends up having a thing with. Her parents are in the, maybe not the absolute upper echelon, but they’re involved in this political movement. And so…yeah, I don’t know. It just flows really, really quickly. It is diegetic. I mean, we are getting this in the form of this online post, but it doesn’t feel like we’re missing anything that’s essential to the heart of this or the torque, I keep using that word, that we’re getting out of this. And I wonder…so I posed this question in our notes. How much of your stylistic…you spoke about the Decameron and the sagas and that. Again, these things that are held up as great literature and yet they don’t, you know, rely on a lot of this sensory description. But was it also in your mind at the time writing these that, well, you know, there is this ongoing idea that people don’t want to read fiction on Substack, but these pieces have a propulsiveness that we might associate with the way that essays move and structure themselves?
NAOMI: Yeah, I mean, it’s interesting you mentioned that piece, which is one of my favorites. So there’s kind of a classic tale style that is like my novella, Money Matters, which is more third person, has this omniscient, intrusive narrator who’s not part of the action. And then I have been looking at ways to switch it up and do different things. And, you know, it is interesting how on Substack, you know, people will read like these long first-person confessional essays–
PILCROW: I’ll read 20,000 words of Sam Kriss and like, part of it’s real, but part of it’s not. And you know that going in, but–
NAOMI: Yeah, so I was like, I bet a first person narrator would just pull people in more for a fictional story, which is allowed. But then I was like, oh yeah, if I have a first person narrator, they have to be different, like very different from me, you know, in order for it to work as fiction. And then I also, you know, periodically there’ll be these Notes on some Substack where people are like, oh yeah, you know, they’ll compare literary fiction to YA, or they’ll be like “literary fiction reads just like YA nowadays.” Which I always find so offensive because there’s these stylistic properties that young adult fiction has that generally you do not find in literary fiction. And so I was like, here’s what–
PILCROW: Such as what?
NAOMI: Well, literary fiction tends to be written from a first person protagonist, but very, very close to the action. It’s not retrospective. It’s like you’re right there. You’re experiencing everything immediately. And it tends to be very slangy and voice driven without a lot of lyricism, not a lot of description. And then, so I was like, here’s what it would look like to have something more literary that was actually written like a YA novel.
PILCROW: Yeah, I mean we touched on this very briefly earlier before we started recording, but I don’t know. Everyone’s coming to this discussion because of Notes and everything. People talk about MFA culture, which, you know, to me seems like a debate that’s been going on for 15 years, if not more, in fact. But this…I think almost a misconception of the prose style in which a lot of popular literary fiction is written, as if it is written in these dense modernist, you know, ways in this prose style, whereas to me a lot of what I see on a table, you know, at a bookstore, even indie bookstores, you know, is written in what strikes me as…if not exactly diegetic, then very transparent. And there, again, the little required literary touches that your agents apparently want, “yes, you must have this little kind of description of that thing.” But those almost seem like grace notes rather than part of the structure of the narrative, itself. I mean, we’re not talking about William Gass or something [laughs] like that in terms of a controlling ideal of what contemporary literary prose sounds like. So I don’t know. I asked before, do you think that some of these categories or these assumptions we have about how prose and narrative is rendered in different genres are a little bit out of date or don’t really reflect what’s happening right now?
NAOMI: I mean, I think you’re using diegetic in two different ways, right? Like, you’re using it to say, like, easy to read, and then to use it as, like, the opposite of mimesis. I think, like, you can have mimetic fiction that is really easy to read, right? Like almost all romance, almost all thrillers, detective novels are all like mimetic fiction, right? You’re supposed to be…most young adult fiction is mimetic. You’re embodied in the narrator, it’s supposed to create some kind of living dream that you’re experiencing along with it and you’re just reading it and it’s supposed to feel immediate, like you’re right there. And I do think most literary fiction strives for that immediacy. What breaks the dream is like literary fiction often has to – doesn’t have to, but it often, it either is told in one of these two modes, it’ll be like this very flat, kind of autofictional mode, or it’ll be like Bret Easton Ellis, or it’ll be in this like very, very lyrical, high lyrical mode like Ocean Vuong. And both of those modes don’t necessarily seem realistic as the internal monologue of a narrator.
PILCROW: It’s a writer writing this.
NAOMI: Yeah. So it in both cases like it kind of breaks the dream because you’re like “who’s whose brain is this?” And it’s not just a problem with contemporary literary fiction, right? It’s like Philip Roth has the same problem, you know? That’s why the best books take place with the Zuckerman protagonist, because–
PILCROW: The Ghostwriter is the one that I always come back to.
NAOMI: The Ghostwriter is the best, oh my gosh. But you know, it’s all written in this very kind of ornate style that is not necessarily…if it was a trucker, it wouldn’t really be believable as his internal monologue.
PILCROW: Well, that’s something that I think might come up in a minute. I do want to talk about the tales a bit more, but you also wrote a piece that I really liked and got shared around a lot about that Dwight Macdonald essay on like Masscult and Midcult. But before we leave the tales, although they could come up later, there’s one that you wrote that…I have them pulled up. Um, “Too many novels are lacking in moral vision,” and we should say the titles, too, are a part of this. They have, you know, essayistic or like viral essay titles, but then they’re not essays strictly speaking, they are stories, and I don’t know…I could try to summarize this one, but maybe you could do it more succinctly. It’s about a young man who’s in college and is having a bit of a crisis and then the story takes the form of four different outcomes of this…did his, you know, RA or someone in the university administration follow up with him, and you give four different endings and discuss why some of them have more of a moral thrust to them than others. And then in the afterward you compare them with some contemporary literature…is that roughly–
NAOMI: Yeah, yeah, basically. It’s like how could you tell this story, and the way that you tell this story reveals something about the moral universe of your novel. And you know, mostly I was taking issue with, a lot of novels will have a story where like, somebody is wronged and then they become increasingly unhinged and then they kind of like go and take with a gun to take revenge on the person who wrongs them and like–
PILCROW: “The Feminist” by Tony [Tulathimutte]–
NAOM: Yeah, yeah, and it kind of seems to be saying something, but what is it exactly? Like there’s still no justice, it feels like this is a unit of someone who’s basically been driven mad by the fact that there’s no justice in their universe.
PILCROW: Do you mean that this kind of writing ends on something that is more like a cinematic moment? Of the recognition that we maybe get some insight into the character, but we don’t know what happens then?
NAOMI: No, I mean, it’s just a story about an insane person who’s overreacting to very ordinary everyday problems. And it’s like, are we not meant to understand this person as just unhinged? Like in Tony Tulathimutte’s “The Feminist,” which is a story that I enjoy, it’s like: clearly most incels don’t take a gun and kill someone, right? Like most incels, if we were to check back with them in 10 years, are probably married and have kids. You know, like that, but it feels somehow more profound to be like “these people have been wronged by life and like their lives have been destroyed by the society” but that’s not really the truth and it’s also just such a dark vision of how reality works.
PILCROW: I was having – I don’t know if this quite fits, you tell me if it fits – so I was talking with someone recently about Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. About the novel, but also the film, which is great, actually, in terms of adaptations is wonderful, at least I think so. But there’s that moment when Newland Archer realizes that all of his society peers have been manipulating everything behind the scenes, and so he’s not going to be able to run off with the Countess Oleska. And it hits him sort of all at once. And I said to my friend, “if this were a modernist novel, this is where it would end.” But then in the actual novel, we jump ahead 25 years and we see that, actually, he had something like a good marriage and his children, you know, try to take him back, to introduce him to Oleska in Paris. I don’t think he goes upstairs, but there’s an epilogue. I mean, it is a kind of epilogue.
NAOMI: That’s the great thing about Edith Wharton, right? Is like: Edith Wharton does not actually believe you should run off with the Countess Oleska! You know, just like in The House of Mirth, she does not actually believe that Lily Bart should marry the poor guy. [Laughs] You know, she understands that her New York society where she lives is full of people who are shallow and many of the marriages are not happy. But she’s like: that is what you should choose. You know, you marry your own kind. And so she has a very decided vision of how people could live…and it comes through–
PILCROW: Maybe we can come back just because I want to mention Miranda July in a minute, but maybe we could connect this discussion about the tales and the way that they are able to have a kind of meta…like Money Matters, for example, is not narrated in the first person. It has this sense that we’re watching this guy, who’s not a monster, but he’s not a hero; he has been kind of mooching off of his gay uncle, but no more so than many other people do. He has this house with the back property taxes, but it does end in this…I won’t call it conservative exactly, but the characters kind of wake up and live a normal life at the end of that. I don’t know, did you get feedback from people saying that that was unsatisfying because it was a kind of normie way to end that? It seems very realistic to me.
NAOMI: No, I mean, I haven’t gone back and read the comments, but the vast majority of the comments that I’ve gotten on the story have been – and the vast majority of the readers it’s gotten have been after The New Yorker. So once The New Yorker has placed something, people are going to be very complimentary.
PILCROW: Sure.
NAOMI: But generally people…they enjoy it. They kind of are like, “I think most men have had that moment where you wake up and you’re like, yeah, like I gotta, you know, get my life in order.” And I think that is basically what this story is about. Like this character has been, you know, taking drugs, partying, like kind of fucking around. And at some point he’s like, “I’ve already run through this cycle too many times, like I gotta wake up.”
PILCROW: Most people do in fact come out of it.
NAOMIL Yeah.
PILCROW: We’re more familiar with stories where people don’t, but most people do kind of hack some sort of, umm, how should I put this, make a certain peace with the world around them. [Laughs] And so this does connect, in fact, to the piece you wrote that begins with your friend reacting really negatively to Dwight Macdonald’s piece. I always forget the title. Is it just Mass Cult?
NAOMI: Masscult and Midcult.
PILCROW: Which was republished in 2011. It was a big essay at the time, but it came back. Do you want to summarize what he’s writing…at what, 1960? What he’s actually saying, because these terms are slippery, like you said earlier. Sometimes I trip over my shoelaces, I’m like “do I mean diegetic or do I actually mean something else?” But his use of these terms. Masscult and Midcult. What does he mean by that?
NAOMI: I mean he’s already a few years into the theory of, like, basically he starts off the essay: there’s this thing we all know is bad called Masscult, which is basically popular fiction, that is made for the masses, that people think is good, but it’s not good. Keep in mind, at this time, genre fiction or category fiction is completely unworthy of notice. So he’s talking about, you know, popular novelists like Edna Ferber. He’s talking about O. Henry. Like, these are all writers–
PILCROW: Does he mention Michener in there? Or was Michener not that big yet?
NAOMI: Michener has already won the Pulitzer Prize, but he’s not big the way he would be later…but he’s like, these guys are all bad. It’s clearly just crap that is a pretense that you send to the masses to make them feel smart. Basically, the key word is “culture.” He does not regard low culture as culture at all. He’s like, but what masses read when they think to be cultured is these popular novels like Edna Ferber. They think it’s culture, but it’s not. It’s just like, it’s not really smart. It’s just made up to be smart to them. Then, for the bulk of the essay, he’s like, but there’s this other thing that’s just as bad as Masscult called Midcult. And Midcult is stuff that even relatively smart people think is smart, but it’s actually dumb. So he names Old Man And the Sea is the major one, and then Our Town, and I forget…Midcult has certain characteristics, I forget what exactly it is, but it’s basically just like shitting out a lot of popular stuff–
PILCROW: Well, and it seems like…I think he’s like, if you want to be Masscult, if you want to be kitsch, you know, or I think of Nabokov writing about…I can’t pronounce the Russian poshlost, you know, um, that’s fine because we can put you at a distance, but if you presume to go halfway up Olympus, then that’s actually the bigger problem. Confusing people about what actual literature is. Is that a fair takeaway from his analysis?
NAOMI: Yeah, I mean, it’s basically the narcissism of petty differences type stuff, right? It’s like, why is there this stuff that is highly, relatively highly regarded in my time, but I think is stupid? You can’t just say, I think it’s bad. You have to also explain why other people think it’s good and then turn them liking it into a moral failing. And so then this way of talking about what people like has been super influential, so that now it’s like every time people want to critique some popular thing, you also have to be like, and people who like that are bad in some way.
PILCROW: Although I don’t know, I wonder…because you know I oppose this question… because there is a sense in which MacDonald is promoting what were then values of high modernism. I’m not sure that had as much of an effect on post-war fiction as he would have wanted it to because I think you could classify a lot of the things that were held up as literary there as sort of Midcult. In a way.
NAOMIL: I don’t know if it had an effect on fiction, I’m just saying this essay and this way of talking about things that you dislike was highly influential.
PILCROW: Yeah. I wonder what he would say…well I mean that’s almost entirely an unanswerable question – about what he would think today and with the complications of…what we think about in terms of what is “literary fiction” or I don’t know…this is going down a rabbithole a little bit, and and I want to I want to come back to like the nuts and bolts of–
NAOMI: Okay the funniest thing about this essay, I will say, the funniest thing about this essay Masscult and Midcult is that he was originally going to publish it in the Saturday Evening Post, which seems crazy, [laughs] because the Saturday Evening Post was the most popular, it had an 8 million circulation. It was super popular, and very little of what the Saturday Evening Post published would be considered literary. But basically, the editors of the Saturday Evening Post really, really wanted him to say that The New Yorker was Midcult.
PILCROW: Where he worked.
NAOMI: He wrote frequently for The New Yorker; he did not think The New Yorker was Midcult. He thought The New Yorker was good. He’s like “we tell people what’s good and we are correct.”
PILCROW: A lot of people now would say that The New Yorker is Midcult– [laughs]
NAOMI: Many people even then said it was Midcult! Right? People have been hating on The New Yorker for its entire history, which, The New Yorker is not that old, right, it’s only 100 years old. But he refused and they wouldn’t publish it and he published it in the Partisan Review instead.
PILCROW: In this piece that you wrote about this, I think what seemed, well, there’s two things that seemed interesting to me. One was, you mentioned Edna Ferber and James Michener, these very popular novelists who wouldn’t necessarily leave themselves open to the charge of being, quote, Masscult. They obviously had some literary value to them. Before the recording, we were talking about whether Pearl S. Buck is, you know, Masscult, Midculot, or in fact, literature. But there was some discomfort with how to categorize these things. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how. Because I think this is happening in your post on that, this connection between what you were exploring in the tale, about a moral content in short fiction, or even in a novel and how these – you call it middle-class realism in the piece – and how those things maybe do or don’t plug into each other.
NAOMI: Well, so the post is about the middlebrow, which is just another term for the Masscult. And the question is about whether: is middlebrow just an insult for things you don’t like? Or is there a recognizable middlebrow aesthetic? Scholars who study the middlebrow debate this a lot. And I was reading these Edna Ferber novels, which I really enjoyed. And I started to come down more on the sense that like, maybe, there is a recognizable middlebrow, like middlebrow aesthetic. That, you know, these Edna Ferber novels, they really seem to be about these women who had a strong sense of integrity and they were often married to these men who were kind of like rakes or like fools in other, in various ways and they had a lot of conflict–
PILCROW: Many such cases.
NAMOI: But the men weren’t that bad, they just were more dreamers than the women, and they often had a lot of conflict with these men. And the men were really brittle and kind of not able to adjust to reality. But the women are able to evolve and find a way of living in society, making money, having an impact and maintaining their integrity. And it really felt like–
PILCROW: They’re not Romantic anti-heroes.
NAOMI: Yes. Yeah. Like oftentimes the women, you know, will be very successful in business. In So Big, her most popular novel, the hero in Selena De Jong becomes a very successful cabbage farmer selling cabbage to restaurants in Chicago.
PILCROW: Which is a thing that happens in the real world.
NAOMI: Yeah. And, and then she gets really mad at her son, Dirk. Because Dirk, he went to school to become an architect. But then he gives up architecture to be a stockbroker. And she’s like, what is the deal with this stockbroker stuff? This is no good. Building buildings is good. Selling stocks and bonds is not a good life. You’re just doing it for money.
PILCROW: There’s something very Protestant ethic about this, in a way.
NAOMI: Yeah. And I don’t know, I really responded to that vision. I was like, yeah, this is exactly how my parents, and I assume many people’s parents taught them, that whatever you do in the world should be good. It should be something that has value. But if you’re middle class you also learn that, hopefully, you can get paid money and have a nice middle class lifestyle doing that valuable thing
PILCROW: Well, and that’s being grappled with in your novella Money Matters; the guy is like “am I a loser? Or do I have something to contribute to the world?” and it ends in the way that it ends, somewhat somewhat hopeful that these two characters have dodged, you know, a life of dissolution and uselessness.
NAOMI: Yeah.
PILCROW: And there’s two directions this could go, but I want to stick with just briefly a question – because I recognize some of these novels that he’s, that, you know, MacDonald is assigning these kind of categories to – you know, I grew up…on the bookshelves at my parents’ house. There was Michener or there was John Jakes, you know, with his series, his somewhat unlikely series about this family who’s somehow at the vortex of everything big that’s ever happened in America. But these were very popular novels. And yet – as I said in our notes – my parents read Stephen King and Tom Clancy and Dean Koontz. It’s not like the novels weren’t there in the house, but what I saw them most enjoying were sort of popular, genre works. You mentioned earlier that you don’t think that this genre, like middle-class realism, is completely gone from the landscape, but…it doesn’t have a place of primacy. And, I mean, if it didn’t back then, then Macdonald wouldn’t have been writing against it! There was a certain feeling of threat that, oh, no, no, we have to draw these lines because, you know, Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny is an insanely popular book. So, I don’t know. Do you have thoughts about that?
NAOMI: I do think those books were popular. I, myself, growing up in the 90s, read so many James Michener novels. I’ve certainly read at least 10 or 15 James Michener novels. I read a number of Erich Segal novels. I was only reading science fiction, so the only realist fiction I read were these James Michener books. Erich Segal, and these Arthur Hailey books where he would write about a different industry in each book. Those had a huge impact on me. I don’t know. I love those books.
PILCROW: I don’t know. Maybe it’s just idiosyncratic to what I saw, but they were definitely there. So, okay, in that piece that you wrote, there’s an obvious way in which Macdonald is trying to stake out this territory, like quite frankly. And I think he won in some sense in terms of academia, in terms of what we consider high literature in the second half of the 20th century. And I posed the question, do you think that it was a Pyrrhic victory in some way? And importantly, with these tales that you’re writing – that I think do bring some of these questions and concerns back in – is there a sort of sub rosa manifesto that you think that you’re communicating with these? That we should write in a way that doesn’t ignore these everyday, whatever you would call it, struggles with how one situates themselves in the political economy that they happen to be born into?
NAOMI: I mean, you gotta write, whatever you write, you gotta believe in, right? I think. Most people writing in literary fiction, they don’t necessarily believe in these middle class values [laughs]. They’re much more individualistic and rebellious. And so even if they have, you know, bourgeois lives themselves…you know, in the last 10 years, there are a number of literary novels that are about mothers who feel kind of trapped and stifled by motherhood, and we talked about the Miranda July book or like Department of Speculation and, you know, people who write literary books, they often want to construct some sort of heroic vision of themselves or of what people can be. So that’s what they got to do. Books with middle-class values, they still exist. I liked Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, the massively popular book that’s about people who find meaning in designing video games as part of a company that gets startup funds.
PILCROW: I mean, this is an extra-literary question, though. It goes beyond just talking about aesthetics or publishing trends. Does the middle class, in fact, however we’re talking about it, have those values anymore? To back up just like two sentences, I had quoted to you, there’s a sociologist I really like, Richard Sennett, and he wrote this book – I think in the late 70s – called The Fall of Public Man, which…it’s too complicated to explain his thesis, because I’m not sure I totally even understand it [laughs] but there’s a line in it, he speaks about “the vulgarization of the Romantic quest for personality.” And he goes on to say we haven’t really tallied up the consequences of that. There’s a little bit…he’s not a polemicist like Christopher Lasch is, but there’s something similar there and I wonder about that in terms of the…decline of prominence of middle-class realism. Is it just that everybody wants to “get that bag?” Are we in fact these vulgarized Romantic heroes as influenced by a lot of what we see in the media? I don’t know quite how to phrase this.
NAOMI: I think what’s interesting that we kind of have alluded to when you’re talking about Stephen King, your parents reading Stephen King, is sometime in the 70s or 80s genre fiction just became massively more mainstream. Before then, genre fiction was rarely released in hardback. And so then suddenly, due to various changes in the industry, these mystery, romance, science fiction, fantasy books all started getting released in hardback. And they really were the books that displaced this middle-class realism. And that now dominate the bestseller list. Like if you look at the bestseller list right now, it’s all these romantic books. There’s nothing like James Michener. And James Michener would be quite frequently amongst the top selling hardcover books in a year when he had a book out. So he was like the romantasy top headliner of his day. No longer. And you know, these genre novels really do also have a very romantic vision. They’re all about these heroes who are chosen.
PILCROW: And that’s what I wanted to ask you about. I mean, so if Macdonald is saying, okay, there’s this high modernism that is…gives birth, you know, to the existentialist movement and is very much about the individual against society and flouting these social norms and ending in this ambiguous way that doesn’t pick up 25 years later when, you know, whatever happens. Is that also true of certain kinds of genre fiction that are like, no, actually you’re special? You speak about this in one of your tales, one of my other favorites, that features…the narrator is talking about these sci-fi books that she read when she was younger, that have this sort of uncomfortable orientation toward colonialism, basically, although it’s pictured in this sci-fi way, but there is this emphasis on the individual heroic spirit that is…that is where modernism went, is into…I don’t know.
NAOMI: I don’t know. I mean, I think that’s where modernism always was, right? It’s these guys like Knut Hamsun, Hunger, or like the underground man, Dostoevsky, all these guys are kind of…they’re special, you know? Because of their sensitivity. The outsider, the stranger.
PILCROW: I have a question, because I think you’re one of the only people I know who could answer this. I would say in the late 2000s, early 2010s, there was a spate…and this is while autofiction is sort of at its peak, with Jenny Offill, with Ben Lerner, with Knausgård, with you know, with Rachel Cusk. So that’s what was happening in the literary world, in readings, like in New York I saw all these people read. But there was this other thing going on where writers who didn’t have a foot or a background in the genre world were publishing these…maybe not exactly sci-fi or fantasy, but they were dystopian.
NAOMI: Yeah, like Station Eleven.
PILCROW: Yeah, Station Eleven, or Zone One. There’s others you could mention. There was a real, like, ripping trend for a minute on that. What was the reaction to that in the established genre community?
NAOMI: I would say what created a much bigger reaction was Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake. Because I remember for years, there was a lot of anger towards Margaret Atwood. Because she gave an interview where she’s like, “oh, I don’t write science fiction, which has talking squids and rocket ships.” Like I write “speculative fiction.” And so people were super angry with her. I mean, they wouldn’t admit to it now. But when Cormac McCarthy won the Pulitzer Prize for The Road, there was a lot of anger. Because, you know, it was a science fiction novel, like…no science fiction novel that was not written by Cormac McCarthy would ever even be considered for the Pulitzer Prize. And then it was also written in a way that…no science fiction writer ever would have written the book the way he wrote it, because the ecology of his world made no sense. There are no living things in this world at all, other than human beings who survived by eating each other. I mean, it was different from science fiction, which was partially the point.
PILCROW: I like McCarthy in some ways, but I always felt that book was self-parody.
NAOMI: I like The Road. I’m fond of The Road, but there was a lot of…you know, McCarthy in 2006 wasn’t like McCarthy is today, right? He was not sainted yet. So there was a lot of anger. I think by the time this trend for the crossover genre novel or the high concept genre novel became popular. There’s a lot less anger because a lot of science fiction writers benefited from that. You know, like, Jeff VanderMeer, you know, was like–
PILCROW: Annihilation and everything–
NAOMI: But he was publishing in the science fiction, fantasy genre for years. And then he, you know, got a new agent, he sold his books to FSG, and he broke out and made a lot of money. And we’re like, oh, yeah, like...that is good–
PILCROW: Did Brian Evenson have the beginning of his career in that or–
NAOMI: I mean Brian Evenson is a bit of a different case because he was always associated with academia. Or like Nicola Griffith also had a book with FSG…and then Karen Joy Fowler is not quite…she had crossed over a while ago. But basically a lot of science fiction writers – who had published as science fiction writers for a long time – started getting a lot more respect, which really took the edge off. And then the other thing that happened in the science fiction world, which is an unnoticed or understated change, is the background of science fiction, fantasy writers got a lot more elite, you know? Like now if you look at like up-and-coming science fiction fantasy writers, it’s not at all infrequent that they, you know, went to private school, went to Harvard, have MFAs. Even 20 years ago, it was not like that at all. Most science fiction writers were super middle class.
PILCROW: I would have said that about the literary fiction world in some ways in, I don’t know, certainly 30s and 40s and these–
NAOMI: Oh, yeah.
PILCROW: So, I mean…some of what we were circling around earlier talking about, like the structure of the industry, is obviously in Dan Sinykin’s Big Fiction. But also Mark McGurl wrote that book The Program Era. And what I was expecting coming to that was a more sociological analysis.
NAOMI: Yeah.
PILCROW: I was probably the least elite person that I went to an MFA program with. They’re very nice people. But I was like, would you have been doing this in the 70s?
NAOMI: No, of course not!
PILCROW: Wouldn’t your parents have been like, “no, you need to go to law school.”
NAOMI: It’s true of, like, literally all of society, right? People used to…Edna Ferber graduated high school and became a newspaper reporter. Ernest Hemingway graduated high school, became a newspaper reporter. Nowadays–
PILCROW: William Shawn, the fiction editor of The New Yorker, dropped out of college and was a newspaper reporter in New Mexico before his wife got him a job as a fact checker at The New Yorker.
NAOMI: Yeah. So like getting these jobs used to just not be as difficult, you know, it was much more because…if you really were from an elite background, there was a lot of other better, more important stuff to do. You know, you could join the CIA and overthrow some government.
PILCROW: Exactly. [Laughs] Well since we’re getting somewhat political now, I want to query you about something, because…I had a lot of thoughts about the essay on Macdonald’s piece, and how differently we might express a kind of, as we said earlier, a kind of peace made with things as they are. But I can see another aspect of someone saying, “oh, I pick up, you know, a book at the new fiction table at Barnes & Noble and it’s all these neurotics and deviants and these sorts of things.” And I don’t think that was what you were saying in that essay, but I had a conversation with somebody once who said something similar, simply, “why are there no normal people in so much literary fiction?” And as I said to you earlier, this person was not shy about this being a very reactionary statement. It was pregnant in what was being said, and it gave me some chills a little bit. Like A) what you think about that, and B) if that wasn’t part of what Macdonald was sort of worried about, and this connects to that recent Substack piece – was it Republic of Letters or TMR – about Herman Wouk, about The Caine Mutiny, where part of this objection by the high literary mandarins to The Caine Mutiny is that it was upholding this establishment or institutionalist…you know, way of seeing the world and they thought that was borderline fascistic.
NAOMI: Yeah, oh man, yeah, like The Caine Mutiny is so good. So there was a piece in The Metropolitan Review recently that was by a serving military officer of some sort, Theo Lipsky, and he was saying, going through this whole history where, you know, at the end of The Caine Mutiny – I mean, what an incredible novel – because like in The Caine Mutiny, the commander, Queeg, is just like obviously horrible and incompetent and then they’re in a storm and the crew mutinies because they think that he’s going to get them all killed and then at the end they all get put on trial for mutiny and the lieutenant is the JAG officer, is brilliant, and gets them off, but at the end he privately tells the leader of the mutiny like “no you were wrong. Like, you guys should have done, you know, an army depends on discipline and chain of command and you should have done what Captain Queeg said, you should have made it work.” Um, which is, I mean, and what’s great is like, he kind of gets you to believe it. Like, even though you’ve seen the first half of the book, how terrible Queeg is, like at the, in the second half, you’re like, “Oh, maybe he has a point.” Other than in the context of that specific book, it is hard to say what a novel that was like that today might look like.
PILCROW: All we hear is there’s no trust in institutions. On the left or the right. I mean, to be frank, like, what if you were going to write a novel that was like, “no, actually institutions are good.”
NAOMI: Umm, “we looked into these sexual…HR, looked into these sexual harassment charges. We decided there’s nothing to them. And you know, we, the process was carried out fully and we think that’s great.”
PILCROW: [Laughs] Right. Yeah.
NAOMI: Valiant HR department head. Heroically trying to balance individual rights and the institutional mandate.
PILCROW: Right. I mean, which leads you to Macdonald’s point, which is that institutions are…we shouldn’t trust them. Right? I mean, this is like Joseph Heller, this is Catch-22. Maybe The Caine Mutiny sold more books, but what do we read in high school or college? We read Catch-22, with Yossarian being like, “no, this is all bullshit.”
NAOMI: I mean–
PILCROW: Which is, quite frankly, my great-uncle, he was in the Air Force in World War II, in North Africa and Italy, and he was much more like Yossarian than he was like Herman Wouk. He was like “it was all bullshit,” so I don’t know…
NAOMI: I don’t know either. People who feel like these institutions have really done well by them, are the ones who have to stand up for them, right? This is something I think about myself because…you know, I felt really burned by the publishing industry, and felt kind of bitter about it. But now I have been selected, right? Like The New Yorker has selected me with…you know? With good results for my career. And so I have thought, like, is it my responsibility to be like, maybe it’s all good? I don’t know.
PILCROW: That brings up something that I wasn’t sure that if you wanted to talk about, I mean, there has been, I mean, if you look at, like – not that one should care too much about this, but it is social media – essentially, you know, the top like three, four, whatever, leading like literature Substacks. A lot of them have this model where it’s like, “let me explain to you, you know, like John Milton, let me justify the ways of God to man.” You know, this is how it works. And there’s a kind of tonic, like put some steel in your spine thing about, “oh, you’re complaining about this on social media,” on whatever axis someone might be complaining–
NAMOI: Which Substacks are we talking about?
PILCROW: Well, um, let’s look. No, I mean that it is just like there are a lot of like, “how to sell your novel…”
NAOMI: Like “Before and after the Book Deal.”
PILCROW: Sure. I don’t know. I mean, I asked you this question in the notes, like, when does a descriptive claim become a normative claim? To what extent is it important to tell people, like, look, as Dan Sinykin does in Big Fiction, although, I mean, his thesis is this is a good thing. I think it’s more complicated than that. But how do you thread the needle between justifying and saying, “okay, yes, this is how it is,” with things that you’ve written before, saying, I had an antagonistic relationship, or a somewhat cynical relationship with how publishing is, if someone’s not going to supply some brilliant solution to this?
NAOMI: I don’t know. I mean, like, our publishing system, at least for literary fiction, is, to a certain extent for other genres too, is like kind of breaking down in that if you’re selected by these big publishing companies, they can’t necessarily turn you into a success anymore and provide you with the audience.
PILCROW: Ross Barkan mentions this in “The End of Prestige”. It’s like, have we forgotten how to make stars out of people?
NAOMI: Yeah, so I mean like I think whatever is, is done, you know, like I think there are definitely still books and there are definitely still people buying books. But there’s a reason that, you know, like a lot of the biggest bestsellers now were originally self-published. It’s just because it’s easier to bet on somebody who’s already found their audience and who’s already found a path to their audience…than it is to find an audience that maybe doesn’t exist for somebody.
PILCROW: I would be remiss in my job if i didn’t plug what what we’re doing with PILCROW…like that was the conception of it and taken from a number of different inspirations. One, you’re mentioned in The New Yorker piece, John Pistelli serializing his novel and then getting picked up, but also this has been de rigeur in genre fiction, it’s like you make a splash in this online community and then maybe someone picks that up. And I don’t know. I wonder what you think about that in terms of literary fiction.
NAOMI: I think a lot of people, you know, seeing this landscape are really desperate for someone to do the work for them, you know. For someone to find them an audience, are desperate to do something that means they don’t have to go out and like, you know, shake people down one-by-one to get them to read their book. I think for me it’s been very empowering to have control over my own platform to some extent. I mean, it’s still on Substack, but basically to be able to experiment and do different things and switch things up. Like I don’t serialize, um, because my theory is like…the readership for your second installment is only going to be a fraction of the readership for your first installment. So why not just put everything in your first installment that you want them to read?
PILCROW: Right. Like with the novella.
NAOMI: Yeah. Or like that. But I do these like connected stories because, I’m like, Oh, then each story is like a new, maybe a new entry point into this world. Although, you know, varying things with that. I’ve learned a lot from being able to experiment and stay nimble and alter things and find ways of winning people’s attention. And I sometimes wonder if it’s worth giving up that control.
PILCROW: Something that, I don’t know, John Pistelli said in our interview was like, “I would give this up tomorrow if I thought there was an infrastructure,” that I don’t actually necessarily like doing this.
NAOMI: I mean, John Pistelli wants to be, you know, he wants that big, that big book deal. Like he, he would…I think he would love, he would be great. I hope he gets whatever the 2025 or 2026 version of that is. I just, I personally…when this New Yorker thing happened, it was really important for me to keep publishing, to keep experimenting, to maintain that connection to my audience. Because I’ve now seen so many people get those big book deals and put their faith in these institutions. And then it doesn’t really pan out. It’s kind of like with these web comic artists, right? Like when web comics took off. There were some webcomic artists who were like, oh, they got attention. And they were like, okay, we’re done. We’re gonna go do graphic novels now, like Kate Beaton. And then there are other webcomic artists like Randall Munroe who are like, okay, we’re gonna have our side projects, but we’re gonna keep doing our daily or however many times a week webcomic. And I think that latter ultimately proves a lot more sustainable.
PILCROW: Well, my students would identify with this. It’s hustle culture.
NAOMI: Yeah, it’s like, but you also like, are you really going to sign over your audience or your reputation, your prestige to like some publisher? And then like, now it’s theirs to handle and to like, mess around with and bobble and, you know, like, no, you gotta like, you gotta keep that’s what that’s all that makes you valuable. And then if you lose that you’ll be done.
PILCROW: Right, although…look i mean look, so I published a piece recently on how Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood got published. So it’s important to know Peggy Guggenheim [laughs] if you can, right? People who knew T.S. Eliot and these things happened in such a different way. And I said, in all of these debates about who’s represented, who’s this or who’s that, there’s a kind of festering, psychic wound that, well, maybe there was a time when there was some sort of maverick editor out there, where if I submitted it to the right place, then they would go to war for me, and be a kind of aesthetic champion, or something. And I feel like people don’t have that sense anymore for all of the reasons that Sinykin talks about in Big Fiction. That’s just not the world that we’re in anymore. And I don’t know how often I’ve seen that articulated as like...an emotional, psychological gap–
NAOMI: Yeah, right–
PILCROW: There’s no one there like, you know you’re someone from Nowheresville and you know…I mean Thom Jones came in over The New Yorker’s slush pile, right, and that did happen in the 90s, not all the time obviously–
NAOMI: But it did happen, it did happen– but it does not happen anymore.
PILCROW: And I think people are slower to arrive at that. They may know this intellectually, but on some level it’s like, well, isn’t that kind of the promise of what something like the publishing industry should be? We know that it doesn’t work that way, but it’s not like the washing machine industry. We expect different things from the culture industry.
NAOMI: I mean, I don’t know. I do feel like at some point I realized. Everybody uses the internet, right? Salman Rushdie is on the internet! You know, like that is, that’s exactly how this New Yorker thing happened is like a critic for the New Yorker just happened to be a subscriber to my blog for my takes. So there’s not necessarily some…we have this vision of, there’s some magical cultured person out there or group of cultured people that they...you know, are reading the the paper New Yorker or are paying attention to the Pulitzer Prize list, and here’s a key that will turn, like the right editor can unlock the key and get me this great cultured audience, but in reality whoever that cultured audience…if they exist they’re on Instagram same as everybody else, right? They’re on TikTok and Substack, same as everybody else. And it’s potentially a lot easier to reach them that way than it is through the pages of The New Yorker.
PILCROW: So you would say that you’re bullish about Substack?
NAOMI: I am. I mean right now the algorithm’s good. I don’t know. I do worry. I’m all tied up in this platform that could change overnight, and who knows what’ll happen. All I know is like, the old system, whatever it was before, however it worked before. And by the way, agents and editors will definitely dispute that they are not, do not champion people who come in over the transom. But whoever they champion, whoever they believe in, it was not going to be me. So then, you know, the new is better for me.
PILCROW: I wonder if it’s too hard of a jump or connection to talk about your book that’s coming out from Princeton Press in May of 2026. What’s So Great About the Great Books? Which I think, if I’m not wrong, some of this comprised your earlier activity on Substack.
NAOMI: Yes. Well, actually what happened is I had an essay in the LA Review of Books, speaking of prior eras of the internet. And this essay was about how really cultured people today don’t necessarily read the classics. And this essay became very, very popular. It was the most read article in LARB that year. And then an editor for the Princeton University Press reached out about developing a project. And so I developed this project about how you should read the great books. Like for the last 15 years, I’ve basically been reading books from this Great Books list, the New Lifetime Reading Plan. Which I think is a good thing to do.
PILCROW: Sorry, but I also think there are a lot of people like that on Substack. Some of them are like Henry Oliver, or there is this weird groundswell of people who want to read the classics and debate them.
NAOMI: Oh yeah. So then, in the course of writing this book and developing my Substack, I actually realized there are a lot of people who read the great books, so I had to alter the way the book was written because it was originally, “oh people don’t read these,” it was like no, a lot of people read them. But anyway, more people should do it. People should do it if they’re on the fence. And it basically talks about the history of the Great Books movement and various arguments for and against doing it. And I hope makes a case that something good is likely to happen if you start opening these really old books.
PILCROW: Well, Naomi, we have about an hour and slightly less than a half on us. Is there something else or a direction that we didn’t…this was a great conversation. Thanks. Thank you so much for joining us tonight.
NAOMI: All right. I gotta go.
PILCROW: I’m gonna edit this. I always forget where the stop recording button is, but….
