PILCROW: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 Each quarter we will present excerpts from the unpublished novels of three rigorously selected finalists, and invite our subscribers to vote on one to be fully serialized on our Substack.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 Ross Barkan. Ross is the author of five books, including the novel Glass Century. His next novel, Colossus, will be published in 2026. He is a columnist for New York Magazine, a contributor to The New York Times Magazine, and writes the popular Substack, Political Currents.
PILCROW: Welcome, Ross.
ROSS: Thank you for having me. Very excited to chat.
PILCROW: Likewise. I wonder if we could start kind of broad with you telling us a bit about how you came to Substack and the different projects you’re involved with here.
ROSS: I am something of a Substack original or a true veteran. I’ve been on the platform a shockingly long time, though I don’t think of it that way. I joined in April 2020, which, though at the time was quite early, I didn’t conceive of it being early. I actually had known of one person being on there in 2019. And I remember – sorry, May of 2020, not April, May of 2020, I started my Substack. And it was during the pandemic, and the original idea behind it was it would be a repository for my reporting and commentary that didn’t fit into the publications I was writing for. So at the time, I was writing a lot on COVID and politics and New York City for The Nation and for some other outlets, and I found myself. Especially writing critically about the governor at the time, Andrew Cuomo, and his handling of COVID, as he was getting enormous praise, which I thought was undeserved.
PILCROW: Yeah, the original title of your Substack was The Cuomo Diaries?
ROSS: The Cuomo Files. That’s what the Substack was called, The Cuomo Files. And it was about Cuomo. And I would branch out months later. I would start writing. By the summer, I was writing much more on broader New York politics than national politics as well. That was really the first year of it. And really, to me, it was just a blogging platform where I could be myself, be the unvarnished self. And it felt more meaningful than Medium because I had the mailing list. I had emails. This was a very interesting time in the history of Substack because everything was new. And there really was not much advantage to being on then versus joining a few years later. I think there’s this idea, because I joined in 2020, I must have been accruing all these followers, and that’s why today I have a larger following. But really, most of my real explosive growth came in 2023 and 2024 after the introduction of Notes. My list was quite static for several years. It grew gradually. It would grow bit by bit each year. But I remember when Notes debuted and I was very skeptical of it because I was tired of Twitter and I didn’t want that recreated on Substack.
PILCROW: Yeah, I want to talk about that in a minute, the changes on Substack. But in addition to Political Currents, you founded The Metropolitan Review, which is, though it does sometimes have political content, is more geared toward the literary community and being a literary magazine. What made you want to do that given that you had so many other things going on?
ROSS: I had been hungering for a long time for a publication that would review books and take writing and literature seriously. And those publications exist, but they are not large in number. And many of them just don’t want to write book reviews. Even the little magazines and all the new publications that have come into being, of which I am an admirer, they’re not really places you go to find critical assessments of literature and non-fiction. And they’re not really a place you go all that often to discover new writers. I grew up in Brooklyn. My father was a very heavy reader. He read The New York Review of Books. He taught me all about the old Village Voice. My mother is a reader as well. And I always admired the legacy of the intellectual publication, the publication that really is nurturing writers, finding and discovering new literature, promoting writers of note. And I wanted to do this, and I didn’t quite know how, and last year I really started to brainstorm on it more, and I ended up linking up with Lou Bahet, and we decided that we would launch this literary publication that would have a print product – we’re working on that right now – and would exist both on Substack and have its own independent website.
PILCROW: It does feel in some ways like a throwback to journals of an earlier time. I know I see some of the nostalgia for that coming out in your novel, Glass Century, which we can talk about later. Like where does that energy go? It’s something you addressed in a recent Substack Note that I want to quote from it here. It’s slightly abridged. This was just a few days ago.
Substack, whether you love it or resent it or feel indifferent, is in the early innings. I make this statement as dispassionately as possible. It reminds me of YouTube in the 2010s. This doesn’t mean Substack can ever reach YouTube scale, but there’s room to grow. Writing is going nowhere and Substack until something significantly changes is going to be the prime venue for that, particularly nonfiction. Fiction is a growth area for Substack, and the literary world is slowly (and now quickly) bending to it…The next step in the Substack revolution will be the rise of more institutions to harness the individualized energy. That’s why I started The Metropolitan Review. Institutions, if done well, are incredibly beneficial for writer and reader.
So this question of institutions is something I take very seriously. It’s a big part of why we started PILCROW, to have a kind of convergence point for people who have finished novels and thinking about putting them out there to the public, not exclusive to looking for an agent or an editor, but as a part of that process. With The Metropolitan Review, or even this larger question of institutions on Substack, do you feel like there’s a resistance to or skepticism of this process among people on Substack or people outside of that?
ROSS: That resistance is melting away to some degree. I sense there’s a lot of excitement about institutions now. Substack is an interesting place because you have very established writers, some of whom are still a part of institutions. You have many outsiders, some of whom are cast out. Or some were never in in the first place. And there is a kind of natural anti-establishment flavoring to it. And I myself have an anti-establishment dissident streak to me while at the same time enjoying establishment institutions. And my feeling is not that institutions on their own are bad or mistaken, it’s that we need better institutions. The 20th century, in some ways, culture is at its peak, though I think now we’re entering an era of cultural renaissance. I truly believe that. In the 20th century, you had a bounty of institutions, mainstream and independent. Counterculture and elite. And there was a real symbiosis between them. Hollywood was taking its cues from the counterculture and becoming more innovative. Mainstream publishing was looking to the vanguard writers, the avant-garde writers, those who were in touch with the sexual revolution or attempting formal experiments.
PILCROW: But there was a kind of upward channel there.
ROSS: Very much so. There was very much an upward channel. There was very much a conversation happening. That began to peter out, I think, as these institutions atrophied. You had the withering of alternative media, the Village Voice-style publications, the zines, magazines, larger magazines that were still publishing literature like Esquire,. And you had the conglomeration at the top. I mean, just fewer and fewer publishers as these massive conglomerates came into being. And I do think sometime around the last 10 to 15 years, mainstream publishing got slack. And that doesn’t mean there still aren’t good books coming out of the so-called Big Five. It just means there are less of them, in my view, and you’ve got to be more and more skeptical of the attention they’re getting. My experience with reading book reviews is that even a novel that didn’t quite meet the hype was still pretty good on the merits, I would say, into even the 2010s. And I just had this experience over and over again where I read a novel that received all this praise, wild praise. And it just isn’t very good.
PILCROW: That damages you as a reader in some ways. “Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?” And even if you don’t go on Twitter or wherever and decide to complain about this, there’s a slow drift away from…I think Hemingway says in The Sun Also Rises about, the character says, how did they go bankrupt, “gradually and then suddenly.”
ROSS: Yeah, and The Metropolitan Review was founded as a place for honest criticism. One of my philosophies was that writers will get to be themselves and write what they think, and we’re not going to produce criticism that’s merely back-scratching, that exists to flatter a certain writer. An unspoken quid pro quo that happens in a lot of reviewing since there are very few, if any, outside of really The New York Times, the Washington Post, full-time book critics anymore. So book criticism is being performed by freelance writers who are in a vulnerable position because if you pan a certain novelist from a certain publisher, you may find that when your book is out, you will get the cold shoulder.
PILCROW: Sure.
ROSS: Or you may find other writers resent you. And I’ve seen this phenomenon more and more in the last few years as the precarity in the industry increases. So I view The Metropolitan Review as a real bulwark against that. I mean, we’re all freelance, but my promise to the writer is: you get to write what you think. This is a place where you can speak honestly, either in praise or in scorn. And the other part of The Metropolitan Review I’m very proud of is protecting the individual voice. We do a lot of other things.
PILCROW: Sorry, I want to cut in here, because there’s a particular Metropolitan Review article that exemplifies a lot of this for me. You might know what I mean. Alexander Sorondo’s piece on William T. Vollman. It’s, conservatively, it’s something like 11,000 words.
ROSS: Yes, around 11,000 words, yes.
PILCROW: And it’s one of the most shared and most liked, I think, pieces that you all have published.
ROSS: It is, it’s our second, I believe it’s our second most popular piece.
PILCROW: And then Vollman himself, who I have a soft spot for, at best is a pretty niche, cult writer. And this article…Alexander Sorondo, he works at a grocery store in Florida. That’s his day job. This is not someone who’s coming from the inside. So I saw that blow up. I don’t know, what did that mean to you?
ROSS: It meant a lot, and it validated a hunch I had for a long time. That if we did something very ambitious, if we safeguarded the individual voice, we allowed talent to shine through, and we let the writer tell an interesting story, we would be rewarded. And Alexander Sorondo is someone I met on the internet through Substack early this year. He actually interviewed me for his podcast, and I was struck by the intelligence of his questions. He’s asking about Glass Century, and he was a remarkably attentive reader. I was blown away by how he was reading the novel and even opening my eyes to currents in the book that I had not fully perceived. And he pitched me on this idea of this Vollman piece, and it sounded great to me. And I told him to go for it. I warned him, we can’t pay very much. If it were up to me and we had a massive budget, everyone would get at least $1,000 [laughs]. We can’t do that. But we could pay him. And he told me, as we were messaging, that he had pitched this idea to different magazines, and they’d all passed. On one hand, this floored me, because I’m like…you have interviews with William Vollman, you’re going to talk to friends and agents, and you’ve got all this sourcing. This is such a deeply reported piece. And editors don’t want that. And my thought was that if this were 20 or 30 years ago, a version of this piece is an Esquire, it’s in–
PILCROW: This is exactly what they were paying people to do, these long–
ROSS: Yes, and he’d be getting paid a lot of money to be in Esquire, maybe a Harper’s, you know, somewhere. It would be a big magazine piece. And that full ecosystem is just gone. They’re not interested in that anymore. And so when he turned this piece in, it was quite long. He’s warning me ahead of time, “listen, I’ve got a lot of material. And I’m going to give this to you and tell me what you think.” And I remember reading it and I was so enthralled by it. And there’d be one voice in my head telling me this section can be cut. That was the editor inside of me, the journalist even inside of me thinking this is slightly tangential. Maybe I could narrow this down. Maybe I can lose this. Maybe there’s like a thousand words we can leave on the cutting room floor. And the more I read it, and the more I found myself drawn in, I realized that that was just the wrong impulse.
PILCROW: We want something bigger and capacious to live inside.
ROSS: Yeah, in a way, you want a piece to match the ambition of Vollman himself. And also, it’s the sort of piece, and this is what editors just don’t get: a person who is not interested in William Vollman or literature will not read this thing even if it’s 1,000 words. But if you have any interest in literature at all, if you either know Vollman or you’re intrigued by this idea of this acclaimed and very strange writer trying to get his final epic across the finish line, you will keep reading. You will read 5,000 words. You will sit for six. You will sit for seven. If this is something that genuinely is interesting to you, you want more. No one complains that The Godfather is too long. If something is good and interesting and has nuance, it will hold the reader, even in this era that we’re in. I kept coming back to that, where I’m like, he’s got all these tangents on the publishing industry, and I found it fascinating. I don’t want to cut this, and if I like it, I know I’m idiosyncratic, but there’s enough people like me out there who want to read about this stuff. And I was right. Lou and I were right. And we took the gamble. And I’ve had just so many fights with people over the years, being in media, about shrinking your copy and writing short for short attention spans and making it bite-sized. That’s all just wrong. It’s really wrong. I maintain we’re in the era of internet now where people want to feel invested. They have limited time, but when they use their time, they want it to matter and they want to invest it in good, quality things, especially as they are overwhelmed by slop. And when a real piece shows up–
PILCROW: I want to read 20,000 words of Sam Kriss in Mongolia–
ROSS: Sam Kriss is a perfect example. No editor would look at the Sam Kriss project and go, “I want that.”
PILCROW: Ever.
ROSS: And yet he is an extremely popular Substacker, and I love reading him and many people love reading him. That’s why Substack is great. And the fact that we can operate on this platform and we can take risks, I mean, that’s the exciting thing in that review to find writers like Alexander Sorondo who aren’t breaking through and help them break through, because he deserves to break through. He’s very talented. I myself, I broke through in the nonfiction media world. I could not break through on the literary side.
PILCROW: Well, that sort of sets up this question that I have. We’ve been sort of circling around it because we have been talking about nonfiction pieces. And one thing I hear from people – well-intentioned people – is, well, you know, fiction is not going to do as well on Substack as these sort of absorbing, voicey essays. So in the The New Yorker article back in May, which we reference in PILCROW’s mission statement, Peter Baker seemed of two minds about this. He mentions Naomi Kanakia’s novella Money Matters and also your interview with Pistelli on his novel Major Arcana. But then he says, “Substack’s literary influence, if it ends up having any, might come less from the fiction that is published there and more from the platform’s role as a new hub for people interested in literature and its possibilities.” But he also says shortly after that, or shortly before that, that he read half of Kanakia’s novella immediately in his inbox. “No other piece of new fiction I read last year gave me a bigger jolt of readerly delight,” he says. So [laughs] is there something of a contradiction here? What do you put this down to?
ROSS: On one hand, it’s easier for a nonfiction piece or an essay to take off. There are more ways for the well-timed manifesto, argument, or even Kriss-style essay to strike a nerve, to travel far. But fiction can succeed, too. I think we’re in the early stages of that. Naomi’s showing it’s possible. We at The Metropolitan Review publish short stories now. One of our most popular pieces is Sherman Alexie’s short story. It’s in our top 5 to top 10. We had a short story run recently by a young writer [Hyun Woo Kim] a story called “Chubby Bunny”” that was quite popular. So I believe fiction is growing. I think there is a place for fiction. John Pistelli’s novel, of course, an example of something that found the following, getting serialized, then picked up by a mainstream publisher. It’s not either or, as John showed. Having it in book form is important. But serializing, which has a long history as we know, is one way fiction can survive and thrive on Substack. And so I do think nonfiction will always hold the advantage. I don’t deny that. But there is a place for fiction. And I think that’s just going to continue to evolve as the platform matures in some ways. The more people join, as there’s more interest, as there’s a wider literary community. I think the literary community is moving here. You know, the smart writers are on Substack, the writers who want to have a conversation with their readers and to be in some ways impactful, they operate on Substack. The ones who are big enough where they’ll never have to won’t, and that’s okay. But I think there was a standoffish quality that the literary world had towards Substack and that’s melting away.
PILCROW: I want to ask about this. Because you have a unique perspective on this, I imagine, because you’ve had a pretty unambiguously successful career in traditional journalism. You write regularly for New York Magazine. You have bylines in the Times Magazine. You just had the front page of the New Statesman, an article about Zohran. So you’re not exactly on the outside looking in, and yet you devoted a lot of time and passion and energy to Substack. It seems to me, looking over the past couple of years, that some established writers who migrate to Substack have a more ambivalent relationship with…maybe call it “the commons” that they find here. And I’m not trying to dig something up, but I thought of Becca Rothfeld. And I like Rothfeld’s work. I’d been reading her for at least a couple of years in the journal The Point. But, you know, she had a certain experience with the dialectic, the back and forth, of Substack. Is that exemplary to you of other things that you’ve seen with some established writers not quite being…it’s either on the one hand suited to the form, not everybody wants to get out there and mix it up, you know, in comment sections or Notes or whatever, but also just a type of writing that maybe that lends itself better…or is this just growing pains?
ROSS: There’s a certain kind of writer that I do think struggles with the concept of Substack because it is a remarkable equalizer. This is actually something Henry Begler wrote about in speaking about the romanticism of the old magazine world and how there was something to the fact that writers existed at a bit of a remove. And now with Substack, and of course Henry is a fantastic writer on Substack and critic–
PILCROW: Who just wrote a great piece about his first year on Substack.
ROSS: Yes, and you’ve got a real...Substack is a place where writers who have won Pulitzer Prizes and been celebrated worldwide are shoulder to shoulder with people who have no renown at all relative to them, but have real followings on Substack and might even have bigger followings. It’s a bit like social media in that way, but I do think with Twitter the relationship of Twitter to fame was more one-to-one. If you were famous in the real world, you had a large Twitter following. Obviously, there are people who got big on Twitter. That did happen. But in terms of writers, the writer of Twitter, their clout in the literary world matched up to their clout on Twitter. And the clout in the literary world still just mattered a lot. I mean, the 2010s, I think will be remembered as the last decade where literary words are very meaningful. The type of book tour you had is very meaningful. Your New York Times book review really mattered. If Dwight Gardner gave you a review, I mean, I remember when Dwight Gardner gave a rave review to Catherine Lacey, who’s on Substack now, and that really broke her out as a novelist. Dwight Gardner still gives raves and pans, but it just doesn’t matter in the same way. I mean, I would love if Dwight raved about me, but it’s just not going to change my reality all that much.
PILCROW: This is connected to something that you wrote, an entire article on this called “The End of Prestige” on your personal Substack, Political Currents. I want to get into that, but since we’re also talking about Twitter, I wanted to ask something because I’ve seen people saying this on Substack, because there have been a lot of changes to the user experience in recent months. Some people worry about these changes that Substack corporate is making. For example, on the app the landing tab of the app is now Notes, it’s not my Inbox. Calling it the Twitterification of Substack, and now with the Trending box. I take it that this isn’t as alarming to you, and I wonder why that is?
ROSS: It’s not, because it hasn’t fundamentally changed my newsletter, my relationship with my audience. And that’s the reality. As long as Substack does not alter the formula that brought me here and kept me here, which is: I’ve got my blogging software, my writing software. It’s very easy to use. I am not censored in any way. The algorithm is not throttling me in any way. And I can message my subscriber list. They can read my pieces. I’m happy. The rest of it’s noise. I remember I had this discussion with Brandon Taylor, and Brandon and I have become friendly. We were a little at odds at first, and I think Brandon’s a great writer and has a fascinating relationship with the platform. But I remember telling him, listen, you hate Notes, just turn it off. You can mute notifications, you can ignore it. You don’t have to be on there. And I think he realized that. Now he does have a relationship. He does use Notes. And Notes to me doesn’t bother me because I just see people I like, I follow. It’s my subscribers. It’s the people I follow. I’m rarely exposed to people I didn’t choose to engage with. And Notes is nice because unlike Twitter, where you can’t even share your articles anymore because the algorithm throttles you–
PILCROW: Right, they suppressed all the links.
ROSS: I can share pieces and I don’t have to pay extra if I want to write full paragraphs. I mean, sometimes my Notes turn into full-fledged essays, that has happened. So for me, I am not burdened by Notes, and I lived through the worst of Twitter. I’ve been on Twitter-slash-X since the year 2011. So I’ve seen all of it. I was an original blue-checker back when that mattered and you didn’t pay for it. Then I lost it thanks to Musk. I never paid for it again because it just didn’t matter anymore. I didn’t care. So I’ve seen like the whole arc of social media, almost, I mean, I’m not that old, but I’ve lived it. And for me, Notes is fine. It is not replicating the pathologies of the old Twitter. I think you see a little of it sometimes. You know, a guy like John Ganz, and I told this to his face on Notes that you could bring back some of the old Twitter energy. But generally speaking, people are polite and there are reasons and you have real exchanges. And you go back to your day. So I wasn’t wary of it…when it debuted in 2023, I was wary, but I am not anymore. And as long as Substack does not change the fundamental formula of how I engage with my readership, I am content.
PILCROW: What I think a lot of people, I include myself in this, forget sometimes is that a lot of people are not on the app. I got it immediately when it came out because, just…I did, right. But I have to remind myself, a lot of people are still reading these as newsletters in their inboxes.
ROSS: Right. Which is great.
PILCROW: I wanted to connect with the other thread of what you were saying earlier. You were mentioning Dwight Garner and the power that his approbation, his reviews used to carry. You wrote an article for Political Currents called “The End of Prestige.” For me, that piece gets at something really essential. Because, as you said, Substack has or had a kind of dissident flavor to it. All kinds of criticism we’ve heard before about the mainstream publishing industry, demographic groups, these kinds of things. But amidst these debates over who’s “represented” or not in publishing, what seems to me to rile people up, whether they’re conscious of it or not, isn’t really about sheer publication numbers of any particular demographic group, but this elusive prestige question. Are we still as a culture as a literary culture engaged in a certain myth making around our literary figures? And what does it mean A) just if we aren’t, or B) what does it mean if we’re not capable of that anymore? Because I feel like that’s what the piece was engaging with.
ROSS: There are a few different currents at play. The first is fame is not what it used to be, and this cuts across industries. It’s not just the writer, it’s the movie star, it’s the professional athlete. It is harder and harder to find individuals, especially individuals newer to the scene, who are broadly famous, quickly. And I can pick any industry. You know, the fact that in Hollywood there was a time you could name 20 movie stars who are known to every American, and now I would argue if you look at movie stars under 30, you’re down to Sydney Sweeney, Chalamet, and I don’t even know if I can think of a third, like someone who is known to everyone. We’re talking like Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Angelina Jolie, Julia Roberts. I mean Tom Cruise. You could go on forever.
PILCROW: Do you think this is just the internet? The fracturing?
ROSS: Yes, I mean there’s a fracturing in the culture. The NBA does not have under-30 superstars like they used to. Millennials still pretend the NBA is as big as it was in the 2010s, and it just isn’t. LeBron and Curry are either in their middle, late 30s or 40s. You don’t have the under-30 NBA player who’s known to every single American. I mean, baseball, the NFL, honestly falls into that category. Patrick Mahomes is now around 30. Travis Kelce is famous because he’s marrying Taylor Swift. It’s just different. Fame has changed. The internet, the fracturing of cultures, the fact that you could be a massive Twitch star, a huge TikToker, and just not be known to a broad swath of the population. That’s just how it is. So literature, of course, the literary star is not what he or she used to be. That is inarguable. Some of that is the decline of the novel and of literature in the cultural firmament. I think that is true. I don’t argue that. I also think the nature of fame has changed. And you start there, right? Then you have the fact that the markers of prestige in the literary world used to make or break careers. Michael Chabon, who’s joined Substack, very wisely, obviously a very successful novelist.
PILCROW: I think he’s serializing a novel.
ROSS: Yes, I think he’s going to. He wrote a very good piece recently about winning the Pulitzer Prize for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, which is his most well-known novel, it was a bestseller. Really made his career. He’d been successful before then, but he was vaulted into the stratosphere, as he says in his piece, because he got this call that he won the Pulitzer Prize. He writes about how his novel was doing decently, but not remarkably, and he’d had kind of a mixed year. And this is the great turning point in his career, the gift from the heavens, he’s bestowed the Pulitzer Prize. Even the Pulitzer Prize, I mean…I would love to win the Pulitzer Prize because I’m egotistical, but it just doesn’t matter like that anymore. Joshua Cohen, a writer I admire quite a bit. I think he’s one of the more talented novelists under 50 working today. He won the Pulitzer Prize for The Netanyahus. I think he’s less famous than he used to be. He’s bigger in the 2010s. He’s getting profiled in The New York Times.
PILCROW: He’s been an interesting case study for me because, again, like you, I’m competitive. I have that urge. He’s a little bit older than me, but same generation. I just never hear him brought up that much.
ROSS: No, he just isn’t brought up, and some of that is by design. He’s not an outspoken guy. He lives in Israel now and he’s somewhat withdrawn from the scene, but Donna Tartt’s withdrawn from the scene and she gets brought up a lot. It’s just different, like the Pulitzer Prize–
PILCROW: A plug here for Helen DeWitt, one of my favorite living American writers, also somewhat withdrawn from the scene.
ROSS: Helen DeWitt is great. The Last Samurai is a wonderful novel.
PILCROW: Although she should be on Substack. She had a great blog called paperpools for many years. She sort of knows the form.
ROSS: She should get here.
PILCROW: I want to connect this to something and I want to approach it with eyes open because there’s a lot that’s tedious and a lot that’s played out about this discourse, at least on Substack, even though The New York Times has also written about it. One of the smarter takes on this issue – and I’m talking about the quote-unquote white male novelist discourse – actually came from someone we mentioned, Naomi Kanakia. And her take on this, if I don’t misunderstand her argument there, and it’s possible that I do, was that this is a kind of funhouse mirror of the identitarian discourse of the 2010s. And I take her point there, but…because Naomi is a complex, nuanced writer, sometimes I don’t quite feel like I can access what is the argument and what is the survey here. But to me, and I think you referenced this in your post on the Cultural Cold War, which I want to connect this with, it seems to me like a very grim forecast that culture either always was or always will be these little wars of position between identity groups, whatever you want to call it, that we can’t escape that. And it haunts me because I’m not totally sure that it’s an unpersuasive argument. This is the second time I’ve mentioned Francis Fukuyama on the pod [laughs] but his idea that liberal society is just a mediator or manager between groups wanting their thymos recognized, wanting their sort of Warholian 15 minutes. It seems to me a very technocratic vision of culture and expression that wasn’t always widely accepted, but that enough people on some level may be sort of comfortable with? Does that seem like a limiting worldview to you?
ROSS: I agree with Naomi’s take. One of the better takes on this came in a Substack Note that eventually was expanded into a piece done in The Metropolitan Review, “Kill the Editor” by Caleb Caudell.
PILCROW: It’s a good one. I read that.
ROSS: And I read Caleb’s piece, I thought his reaction to the Jacob Savage white male writer piece, which went viral, which was drawn up, I think, somewhat drawn upon a piece I’d done more about male writers the year before for my own Substack. Caleb’s point was just, you’re bemoaning the decline of these sort of tokens of prestige being handed out to white male writers. Which is true. I mean, Jacob’s point is correct. Whether you think this is a good or bad thing, it is inarguable that white male writers born after or around the mid-1980s have not been represented at all in the prestige literary world, and you could blame the writers themselves, you could blame a kind of woke politics, you can make many arguments, I think they all have validity. But I think Caleb’s point was that it just doesn’t matter that much anymore. Because even if you get all these kinds of tokens of prestige, they don’t move the needle. I mean, even a short story in The New Yorker. It’s a great thing to do because you can brag to your friends and you could cut it out and frame it [laughs] but gosh, your career is not getting shot up into the stratosphere if you publish in The New Yorker. The Paris Review, I think more people might read The Metropolitan Review than maybe the average piece in The Paris Review. I don’t know.
PILCROW: If you look at the circulation numbers and subscriber numbers, there’s a strong case to be made for that.
ROSS: I mean, they have, I’ve heard they have a very large mailing list. And, you know, I mean, it’s The Paris Review. I’m not comparing what I’ve done in less than a year to what The Paris Review is and was. But it’s just these types of places, and not even knocking them for their quality, though, I mean, you can make an argument about the quality. It’s just whatever it is, The Paris Review, The New Yorker, the National Book Awards, the Pulitzer. Getting certain fellowships, right? Getting published in certain smaller literary journals tied to prestigious MFA programs, and we can name the Iowa Review or the Kenyon Review or Prairie Schooner and a million others, right? If you rack up all of these kinds of badges of accomplishment, if you achieve them, like in a video game, and you reach the next level you’re not unlocking the same prizes you used to. There was a model that you published in prestigious magazines or small circulation journals and the agent found you then they put out your short story collection with a very good publisher
PILCROW: Right, John talked about this in our interview, right? You have your–
ROSS: Right, and then there’s a whole pipeline, and that’s just over, that is over. And in a way, it’s liberating. I don’t really bemoan it. I think when I was 25, I did, because it was dawning on me as I was aging. At the end of my 20s, I would say, I was beginning to understand this old world that I’d grown up reading about and following had fallen away. I sensed it. I sensed the changes happening.
PILCROW: In this somewhat fallen world, it seems to me there are pieces on the ground to pick up. Which is one of the reasons that, despite anything we might have talked about, I’m very bullish about Substack.
ROSS: Yeah, that’s what makes Substack great. I argued that the worst time to be a writer is probably the middle to late 2010s. And a far better time is right now. You could say the 2000s are as good as now or better. I mean, I’m not going to necessarily debate that. But the 2010s were awful in many ways, because unless you’re one of the winners, you’re really on the outside looking in. Like if you are able to reach those plateaus we talked about, to become like a Roxane Gay. Or a Jia Tolentino on the nonfiction side, or, on the fiction side, at least get the million dollar book deal like Garth Risk Hallberg, though that book was a flop, or a Chad Harbach, which was more successful, The Art of Fielding, if you were able to do that, it was good. The world was good to you. You’re going to make a lot of money, and you’d get a movie deal, and you’d go on a big book tour. But if you weren’t able to get there, it was very hard to be an outsider artist. In the 20th century, if you weren’t at the top of the heap, you could still have a pretty good career. There was a big mid-list. There were ways to get reviewed in all these small newspapers and magazines.
PILCROW: There was an ecosystem that supported this.
ROSS: Correct. There was a large ecosystem. You didn’t have to be Philip Roth. You didn’t have to be Norman Mailer. You could exist at a different level and still do pretty well.
PILCROW: On that note, I want to talk about your novel, Glass Century, and how it fits into this conversation. But I want to ask you a final question, not just about Substack, but obviously the boundaries between the political and the literary are permeable, as well they should be. But given the tenor of so much political discourse right now. You wrote a piece that I thought was very astute that was sort of contra what we had been seeing a couple years ago, the sort of crowing about “vibe shift” discourse, that maybe we’re moving into an era where the center of culture, literary culture is maybe relaxing a bit, that there are more windows into maybe something more interesting or something more like small-L liberality in a way and….I don’t know. Could you tell us a little bit about that piece? Because I felt like – especially given what’s happened in the past couple of weeks – what seems to me like a kind of bunkering down, or even the piece that you posted earlier today, where do you see this going?
ROSS: I think on one hand, you have real attempts at speech suppression from the federal government, from the Trump administration. MAGA wants to restrict speech. The optimistic part of me tells me this is not going to be successful. I think it’s not organic. I think there are people who are going to suffer. But broadly speaking, you cannot command the culture to suddenly care about all the things you want them to care about. This needs to happen in a more widespread and natural way, like the jingoism of the post 9/11 era, or the anti-communist mania of the 1950s. People believed these things. People were passionate about these things. They were scared. They were angry. We’re not quite in that moment anymore. So I do think discourse is still much more open, generally speaking. I think literary discourse is far less restrictive. I think Substack is going to continue to flourish. The founders have made it clear that they are committed to free speech. Which I think in addition to being moral, it’s a good business decision. You want to be in the business of free speech. Disney suffered reputational harm for suspending Jimmy Kimmel. It was an embarrassment for them. A lot of people in the entertainment industry reacted negatively. Viewers in general, unless you were a hardcore Republican, reacted negatively. So I’m optimistic. I think we are in an era of freer discourse on the ground level. I think with the caveat that the Trump administration is going to try very hard to threaten those who are pro-Palestine, those who aren’t sufficiently MAGA, those who make jokes about Charlie Kirk’s assassination, that is all going to continue. And I don’t take it lightly, but I don’t think that will be enough to stifle the level of expression that we’re seeing. I think people are defiant. And I also just think in the non-political literary world, it is still much easier to talk about certain issues, to have certain debates than it would have been a few years ago. I don’t feel any more restricted, I don’t feel like I have to censor myself in any way. I feel I can be completely honest and nothing feels taboo. And that is a good feeling. I think that will continue.
PILCROW: I want to pivot here and talk about Glass Century, your novel, which was published in May, I believe. So there’s a lot of things I would like to talk about. Maybe we could put a pin in talking about its publication process, because it has a lot to do with things that we were talking about, what is the road to publication and the environment we’re in right now. But one of the things that stands out in the book to me, and I’m technically a state employee, is the character’s jobs and the question of middle-class stability, is something that is very present for them and unique in a way to the sort of post-New Deal New York these characters grew up in. Saul works for Governor Rockefeller, but later, I believe, for the General Services Administration. He has this career in public service, and we’re talking about a steady job, a pension, that we associate with that pre-’75 fiscal crisis thing. The novel is narrated by many characters, but I would say that Mona Glass is our perspective character. She is really the heart of the novel. And she starts out working for the city. But she gets laid off in ‘75 when a lot of people did. And she gets this job as a photog for the Daily Raider, which is very much cast as this lurid crime tabloid. But it also seems to me there’s a sprinkling of the Village Voice in there, this countercultural thing. And given those two primary characters…I think that some anthropologists call this a quote “lifeworld,” this idea of what’s reasonably possible or achievable and all the psychological aspects of that, the way that it affects our vision of the future. You’re quite a bit younger than these characters, but I assume you were growing up seeing an older generation dealing with the way that that shifted. And I wonder if that was sort of ever-present as you were writing this.
ROSS: It was. I mean, the book has elements of autobiography. I don’t like to delve too deeply because then people will play the game, “Oh, is this real? Is this fake?” Mona and Saul have jobs not dissimilar from my parents, though with the caveat my mother was never a photographer and there’s no such thing as the Daily Raider. And she worked for the federal government. She spent her career in the federal government for HUD. Housing and Urban Development. My father had various federal jobs as well, so I myself was a product of this post-war middle class. My parents were not rich, they were not poor, they had very steady incomes, and they had good pensions. My mother just retired. She receives a very good federal pension. My father, he passed away a few years ago. He also had a very robust federal pension and that helped. He had a very good health plan that as he was in poor health, it covered everything. It was that…they definitely were part of the social contract era when there was this consensus that seems to have crumbled that the government would create ways to provide for its workforce, and would have a large workforce. And these people would have a lifetime, if they wanted it, as long as they were good workers, of employment. So certainly with Mona and Saul–
PILCROW: And it created entire communities.
ROSS: Yes. Yes. And of course, Mona falls out of that. She gets laid off. My mom was not laid off, but Mona is, and that’s why it’s a novel. That’s when I get to have fun and really cast her into this underworld of tabloids. But yes, I mean, there is a little bit of the Village Voice in the Daily Raider. There were also these very strange underground newspapers that I’ve always been interested in and I took some elements from there and then just let my imagination really go crazy and try to imagine what would the most peculiar and lurid and oddball newspaper of 1970s New York be, and I fell upon the Daily Raider. And yeah, those are some of my favorite sections to write.
PILCROW: They’re some of the most engaging, yeah, they’re great parts of the novel to read because you do get put in touch with this lost world. And even later in the novel, characters are thinking back to that era of these underground newspapers, pretty wistfully. Although what seems remarkable, and I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong about this, but impossible now, is that she does lose her good job with the city and the pension, but she’s able to string together at least a lower-middle class life stringing for these papers, starting with the Daily Raider, but then later she works for the Daily News and the Post. And I wondered, because as much as we’re talking about things like Substack, about a kind of vanished world of countercultural papers and these ecosystems, you did in fact start out in the traditional news world in New York, if I’m not mistaken.
ROSS: I did. I began at a local newspaper in Queens, the Queens Tribune, that no longer exists. I was a staff reporter making what is now sub-minimum wage, and I was living at home and driving to work. And then I got a job after that, the New York Observer, which was once an outstanding weekly newspaper that no longer exists. It was owned by Jared Kushner and is known, beyond that, it’s known for being where the Sex and the City column began. What became Sex and the City was Candace Bushnell’s New York Observer column. So it was really a fascinating and brilliant little paper that I was proud to be a part of for a few years. And yes, to your point about the economics of it, there were two factors at play that made Mona’s life possible. One was that rent was cheaper in New York City. Talking to my parents about it, and we know from history, New York had a lot of problems in the 1970s and 80s. You don’t want to sugarcoat it. I don’t think my novel sugarcoats at all. I try to really get at the crime and the challenges and the instability and kind of the inherent chaos in the background of the city. But it really was a city for working-class people. It was not hard to afford an apartment. It was not something that if you had a job you thought about too hard. It was, you know, much of the city was relatively cheap. Even Manhattan. Downtown was not expensive, downtown was not in demand. And if you wanted to live in Brooklyn, which was much less fashionable, it was quite doable. And my mom lived in Brooklyn, and eventually she bought the co-op apartment I grew up in. And so for Mona, you could be a stringer. These newspapers, especially once you got to the Daily News, they paid pretty well. The Daily News was once a very vibrant and profitable newspaper. They could pay a pretty good amount of money to someone for their photographs, and rent was lower. So you factor in better rates from publications plus lower rent. You had a real middle-class and working-class city where there were wealthy people, there was income inequality, but broadly speaking it was not a struggle to find an apartment and to make rent and you could live a life that way without overthinking it. And that just is not true anymore.
PILCROW: Yeah she does get to live this sort of very New York, like Isabel Archer experience of turning down marriage, being independent, because there is that structure to support that. I wanted to ask about the process to publication for Glass Century. And it ties into a lot of what we’ve already discussed. It was published by Tough Poets Press, which is a good press. But least for me, growing up, what the small press world used to represent is, okay, maybe it’s something too experimental for mainstream, or what we now call the Big Five presses, or is it especially regionally focused, or is it a very particular type of novel with a sort of small audience, but Glass Century is very much, to me, on the model of a DeLillo novel, a Roth novel. We could list other influences, or you could. It’s a family saga. It’s an epic. We go from at least the late 60s or early 70s up through, you know, 9/11. And it seems like the kind of novel that used to get published. Pistelli said in his interview, you know, Ross’s novel didn’t have any of the ideological hamstrings that mine did [laughs]. So what was your process? Did you look for an agent or were you just directly contacting presses?
ROSS: No, I had an agent. It was a convoluted process. I finished this novel in 2020. That’s why it concludes at the start of the pandemic. That was less a flourish than the fact that that was the present day. And so I finished the draft in August of 2020. At the time, I actually had an agent who is or was quite prestigious. She was a so-called power agent. I sent the novel to her. Her assistant liked it. Her young assistant liked it. She took a year to respond to me. I’m not exaggerating. I got a response back in the fall of 2021 that it was not a fit for her. I don’t think she had a very good reason for it. I think she just felt that the market for whatever reason would not support it. So [laughs] I was at that point, you know, I had to try to get the novel published somehow. So she turned it down. I shopped it around to other agents, another agent liked it and agreed to represent it at some point in 2022. And then he took a very long time to send it out. It was around the summer of 2023 when finally he brought it to market. We did send it to large publishers. We sent it to prestigious smaller publishers. They all either ignored the book or passed on the book, mostly ignored. And some of this might have been my agent’s fault. Some, it was also the fault of the publishers themselves, of course. And at that point, I knew, I was not despairing as much as I had been. For a long time, I was despairing and believing I had somehow failed. And by the time the submission process had dragged on for many months, it was the fall of 2023, I began to change my thinking. My thinking used to be, if I don’t succeed here, I have in some way done something either wrong or my novel has failed or I didn’t meet some expectation. And it changed from that to actually it’s the publishing world’s problem. It’s not me, it’s them. That was a real shift because I never used to think that way. I did not think that way. And–
PILCROW: So, sorry, I was thinking about this. Because of the kind of novel that Glass Century is, it is patterned on these large intergenerational, family sagas. And, you know, if a publishing house is just saying, “Well, you know, this isn’t a good fit for us,” I mean right now the most hyped, best-reviewed film out from a major studio is One Battle After Another, with DiCaprio, which is a Thomas Pynchon adaptation of Vineland, which is an epic multi-generational saga. To add to which, Pynchon has a new novel out this year [laughs]. I don’t know. There seems something contradictory.
ROSS: And Vineland’s a more difficult book to read than Glass Century. I read Vineland and it’s actually not one of my favorite Pynchon books [laughs]. But it’s very true. This is where I think the publishing industry is just fundamentally broken, where I had a novel, again, I really don’t want to be too conceited about it, but I think it’s very good. It got well reviewed. It got a very nice review from Sam Sacks and it’s gotten attention.
PILCROW: It was in the Wall Street Journal–
ROSS: Yes. And I have a new agent now who’s quite good and I think there’ll be some hopeful developments, we’ll see, in terms of foreign editions and others and you know, there’s kind of some momentum around it. So the fact that every publisher pretty much passed on it, I ended up going to Tough Poets because they’d actually published my debut novel in 2018. I went back to them, and I like Tough Poets. You’re not going to make any money from…well, what’s good about Tough Poets, I’ll say this, we did a royalty split, which was nice. I’m collecting more on the royalties, but that’s in lieu of taking a large advance. So it’s not bad, at all, and they’re nice. The nice thing about a small press is I got a lot more control. The cover was my idea. I’m not a cover designer. I don’t design covers, but I dictated what I wanted to see, the type of font I wanted. I knew I wanted the Twin Towers on there.
PILCROW: Is it Agate font? Which comes up in the novel, the newspaper font?
ROSS: It’s the font that is closest to the Portnoy’s Complaint font that I was always very fond of. Those old school, 1960s books. Roth’s novels have them. It was that font. And so I asked the publisher to find a font that resembled it in some way. And I wanted kind of a hearkening to DeLillo and the Underworld cover, obviously, with the Twin Towers there.
PILCROW: Well, I couldn’t help but notice that Mona and Saul both use the word “counterlife” to refer to their affair throughout the novel.
ROSS: Yes. The concept of a counterlife is very interesting to me, not just because I like that novel, but because they are living alternative lives. They have this affair, this illicit affair, that is the heartbeat of the book, and they are both in love and in some case living a lie. And they both are aware of this and thinking about the life they present to the world and to their parents and family, and then the life they live with each other, which is somewhat in the shadows, I mean, relatively speaking. I think we as people, not that we all are conducting affairs and living in such a way, but we have our inner life or outer life. We have the internal monologues, the ways we conceive ourselves, the ways the world conceives of us. I do believe there’s not just one simple life, one arrow pointing forward. There are many tangents and tendrils and currents, and I wanted to capture that in Glass Century. I’m proud of the interiority. One of my favorite reviews of it actually came from John Pistelli, and what he said, which I thought was very observant, was that yes, it owes plenty to DeLillo, which I think is clear in the scope, and certainly some of the dialogue is very DeLillo-esque. I enjoy DeLillo’s dialogue. But also there’s Virginia Woolf, and I’m a fan of the Woolf-style interiority, To the Lighthouse and Mrs Dalloway and The Waves are some of my favorite novels.
PILCROW: I think we see that a lot in Tad’s sections of the novel. Probably one of my favorite sequences is his. Tad, who is Saul Plotz’s son. This sort of peripatetic trip through the American hinterlands in the 90s. And I like how that’s paired with his awareness of the news. He’s working in these different places and picking up on say, O.J. Simpson, and the Oklahoma City bombing, but in this ambient way.
ROSS: The Tad sections might have been the sections that I enjoyed writing perhaps the most. I think they’re also the most polarizing. What I love about publishing a book, and this is the first book I’ve had where I felt like a lot of people just engaged with it. I never felt that way about prior books. Maybe my book about Cuomo, but that was non-fiction. But it was very fun. One of my favorite parts of publishing this book was seeing it out in the world and seeing just different people have different takeaways. And a thread I’ve found is there is this real debate over Tad. I had reviewers and friends tell me, “you really should have expanded on Tad. You could have gone another 100 pages, 200 pages with Tad.” [laughs] And I did not disagree. There’s a part of me, knowing what I know about my publishing journey now, I would have just made this book 700 pages and taken it straight to Tough Poets instead of, actually I cut it down a little bit. It was at 140,000-odd words. Or it was 160, and maybe I brought it to 140. I forget what it was. I had to cut about 20, 25 on the advice of my agent. But knowing what I know now and how the publishing journey played out, I maybe should have just gone for broke and made this like an 800-page book. And I do think if it became an 800-page book, which maybe would not have been the best, I don’t know, Tad would have grown and grown and grown because I was so drawn to creating this outsider, alienated character, who was a total invention. I would say you could find in Emmanuel similarities with myself, though again many differences, I was not running a drug trade in high school, but I went to a school similar to the one he was at. Mona and Saul do share similarities with my parents, but again with many inventions in the book.
PILCROW: I’m glad you didn’t cut this part. This is when Tad finally comes back to New York. “Enough time had passed in the shadowed rib of the strange country.”
ROSS: Yes, that’s one of my favorites. I loved writing that. That was one of my favorite lines in the book. I was very proud of that. That opening I thought a lot about, those sections I felt very viscerally about, thinking about him as this other almost, this person really cut out from the rest of society, outside of the flow, trying to make his way. And it’s like he’s approaching the new century. It’s like he can sense what’s coming, and we’re drawing him closer, kind of like the convergence in V. V. is one of my favorite novels by Pynchon, and V. has that structure, the convergence. So I was thinking like that as well. So Tad, he’s coming back. And–
PILCROW: His parents’ world doesn’t really exist anymore in what he’s growing into.
ROSS: Yes, he comes from the suburbs and he’s reared in relative affluence. Roslyn, New York is a wealthy Nassau County suburb where he lives with Saul, his father, and his mother. And his sister, who we don’t really see very much of, who’s very conventionally successful. And he drifts away. He rebels against it. He’s alienated by his father. He realizes his father is lying. And he enters the country. Yes, he enters the hinterland. I took a real interest in writing him moving through the woods, especially finding this corpse. And again, like I said, with Tad, there are people who wanted less of this. There are people who said it should have been a Mona book and a Saul book, and I respect that. I understand that Tad is not for everyone.
PILCROW: But in many ways, it is.
ROSS: It is, but I think Tad thematically, almost in style, too. I would say my style shifts when I write about Tad and I’m not quite in the same register anymore. I think for certain people they really enjoy that and they relish that. I do think it’s disorienting for some people. But that’s the beauty of a novel, why it was a real labor of love because I got to tackle a lot of different themes, a lot of different currents, and also just reckon with a lot of different influences. I mean, Watchmen, I’m not a fan of graphic novels in general, but I adore Watchmen.
PILCROW: There is something in there with the character of Vengeance.
ROSS: Yes, the Rorschach, for those who know Watchmen, Rorschach is certainly an influence there. And the kind of Watchmen milieu; it’s a novel set in 1980s New York. It’s, if anything else, that is what it is. And you get the feel of the city very well through Watchmen. And that, as much as Roth and DeLillo and Woolf, to an extent, too, and Nell Zink, a writer I also like quite a bit, the Watchmen influence is there in the novel, too. I think that that’s a part of it.
PILCROW: Yeah. Speaking of Tad’s, sort of adventures in the heart of the heart of the country, maybe that could steer us into the final question I have for you. Your next novel, Colossus, is coming out in 2026 from Arcade Press. Do you want to tell us a little bit about that, about what to expect?
ROSS: Yeah. What to expect? On one hand, it’s a departure from Glass Century, because it is much shorter and it’s set in a small Michigan town. On the other hand, it does have a New York corollary to it. It’s about a pastor named Teddy Starr who is the big man on campus. He is very wealthy, he is quite successful, he is the popular pastor as well as a real estate developer and slumlord, he owns a trailer park in town, and he’s got all kinds of investments. So he’s the American Dream come true. You know, he’s good looking. He’s got a family that people adore, and he’s being talked about as a possible candidate for office one day. And he’s got a dark secret. I don’t want to reveal too much of the dark secret, because that would be a spoiler, but he’s got a dark secret. He is not who he says he is. Let’s put it that way [laughs]. He’s living a lie. So in some sense, you’ve got some thematic similarities with Glass Century. And the novel, while it’s chiefly set in a small, rural town, it does spend time in New York City as well. I would say it draws inspiration from. Sinclair Lewis’s Elmer Gantry; you have the pastor, the evangelical, you know, hustler. And also just stylistically from Richard Ford’s novels like The Sportswriter and Independence Day. Since it’s written in the first person, it’s written from Teddy’s perspective, there’s a similarity in Teddy’s easygoing, erudite voice with Frank Bascombe in the Richard Ford novels, though I think of Teddy as a much darker Frank Bascombe. If they both are philanderers, Teddy’s a philanderer, Frank also sleeps around quite a bit in the novel. It’s a, yeah–
PILCROW: Yeah, I’m drawn to this. It’s a lot like where I grew up, so for that reason then, definitely looking out for it.
ROSS: I do think people like it. Like I said, it’s not as sprawling as Glass Century. It’s more contained. And it’s also a first-person book. So you are living in the consciousness of Teddy Starr. You are nowhere else. Glass Century, I had the pleasure of roving among four characters. Here, I stick with one, though I think that one is going to be worth your time. And I’m very excited to have the book come out through Arcade. I think Arcade is doing great things.
PILCROW: Bruce Wagner, and–
ROSS: Yes, they’ve got Wagner, they’re publishing a lot of other good...this book they gave me by Yannick Murphy that’s coming out in November, that is very good. I just finished it. And they’ve got a real growing roster of novelists. And I’m excited to publish my book with them. And I’m trying to finish my work on another novel now. I’m trying to finish it by the end of the year. That’s my goal. And that’s actually a New York novel, though it’s more contemporary. I would add, too, Colossus is contemporary. And there is a small callback to Glass Century and Colossus. I won’t say what it is. But whereas Glass Century ends in 2020, Colossus is set in the present day. It’s like the mid-2020s. So it’s a current novel in a lot of ways.
PILCROW: Looking forward to it. Maybe we’ll have you back on then. Thanks so much for joining us today, Ross.
ROSS: Yeah, thank you for having me. This was great.
