29 Comments
User's avatar
Adam Pearson's avatar

This was oddly motivational.

Expand full comment
Josh Moss's avatar

I would also add that substack, in ways oddly more than peak twitter, functions in the same way peak internet did for music. There is pitchfork aspect to the fiction community with substack. There is an intrinsic credentialism within substack for those who's opinions you trust, that allows recommendations and plaudits to be taken more seriously here. The best contemporary fiction I have read is not from bookstore recommendations but from substack recommendations such as this one. This also may be a metacritique of the politics of staff recommendations at bookstores, but that is a whole other argument.

Expand full comment
Groke Toffle's avatar

Agree with other comments here that this piece was, oddly motivational! Also, Ross - to speak to the last paragraph, you're winning the current battle with self.. Glass Century is for sure one of the best things i've read this year (I was the guy on Bluesky who let you know i'd 'saved' the book for when I was on a plane to NYC for max impact). Can't wait to see (read) whatever it is you decided to grace us with next. I go to NYC every August so please keep the tips (Sweetychat etc.) coming on where to find readings : )

Expand full comment
Patrick Redding's avatar

I LOVE _The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P_ for all the reasons discussed here: "the pacing, the pitch, and attention to detail." It's a novel of manners in the tradition of Austen and Wharton applied to Williamsburg and Gowanas. So I'm thrilled to see this novel recognized here, and agree that it's "one of the great American novels of the 2010." BUT--is this judgment widely shared among other Gex X readers? My sense is that this book is far less well known than it should be. (Sidebar: Waldman's book is vastly superior to Gessen's own treatment of the same topic, _All the Sad Young Literary Men_)

Expand full comment
Unset's avatar

I don't think so. I'm Waldman's age, and my mostly Gen X/elder millennial book club read it when it came out. We liked it ok, but were certainly not blown away, as I recall.

Expand full comment
Alexander Sorondo's avatar

Fascinating shift here from the personal/rumantive re-read into a comment on the new literary scene. For some reason I latched onto your comment about The New Yorker, and how getting a short story in its pages meant more even a decade ago than it does today -- and it made me wonder if maybe the virality of that "Cat Person" story (strange to think that this, too, is nearly a decade behind us) had some lasting effect on the NYer's fiction status...

Expand full comment
Ann Landi's avatar

What is a "personal/rumantive re-read"?

Expand full comment
Alexander Sorondo's avatar

Assessing it from a personal lens. Not critiquing it so much as thinking/riffing about the personal effect. More re-considering than reviewing.

Expand full comment
David A. Westbrook's avatar

Ross Barkan with good description of what seems to be happening around Substack, why it seems important. A generous take.

Expand full comment
Blake Lefray's avatar

Really nicely observed and helpful for those of us who weren’t paying close attention to the NYC literary scenes of the past 20 years.

Expand full comment
GregorianChantress's avatar

In a post-literate world, skimming a fragment and spinning it into a theory of “prestige” passes for cultural commentary. But the publicist’s assistant, waiting for you to deliver on that promise to hype your own novel on Substack, remains unmoved

Expand full comment
Slender Petting's avatar

What has clearly been lost is the ability to write an essay. Instead we get reflections upon having read a chunk of something. If Ross’s pot literate work here is an example of the new prestige we are all in trouble

Expand full comment
Ann Landi's avatar

What is "pot literate"? Does it apply to eating or smoking weed?

Expand full comment
Gadfly's avatar

PR disguised as cultural critique. The insularity is suffocating. A few hundred or even thousand readers is evidence of what exactly?

Expand full comment
Mark M Breza's avatar

Substack where the 'I' gender generation are always in the first person

& think their critical thinking is so individually important

that they are the subject not us the reader.

Expand full comment
Richard Ellett Mullin's avatar

Ross, thanks for this excellent essay. There is a lot to think about here. I look back at two and a half decades of Shannon Ravenel's Best of the South short fiction anthologies and they are filled with the names of luminary writers who published in top journals over the years. We know many of those authors by their books, but journals were always there in the background, alive with new fiction, and apparently with more actual arms length readers than today. You seem to be saying that the scene is simply different now. Am I hearing you say that journals don't sit at the center anymore? That they can't deliver eyeballs on the page. The magazines paid the great writers. But...journals for the most part never paid much of anything and were simply the first ladder rung on the climb to book publication where there was at least some hope of selling something, and having work read more widely.

So Substack is it now, huh? What is the corollary then?

Let me take a stab at one: For most writers content is worthless; having it read is the prize.

In my heart of hearts I have internalized this truth. For example, I just wrote 6 short, sequential essays in opposition to short term rentals like the ones facilitated by Airbnb. My wife said "you're wasting the chance of really publishing them somewhere real by squandering them on our neighborhood Facebook page." I said, "no, you're wrong, it is the one place where someone might actually read them with genuine interest."

Ross, I guess what I'm coming around to concluding is this: after essaying your topic myself here in so few bumbling words, I agree with you.

Publishing has certainly changed.

Expand full comment
Luch of Truth's avatar

The internet has changed so much, including literature. The question is: does giving equal space for the amateur and the professional to judge open the way to measure the “real quality” of an author more than before? Perhaps the influence of the expert class in past eras was overstated; after all, we don’t remember any “official” reviews of Shakespeare’s plays in his own time, and yet he endures.

Expand full comment
Ak's avatar

The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P is an excellent choice. I can't think of a novel written since 2010, or perhaps earlier, that's even remotely as good.

Expand full comment
Slender Petting's avatar

What has clearly been lost is the ability to write an essay. Instead we get reflections upon having read a chunk of something. If Ross’s pot literate work here is an example of the new prestige we are all in trouble

Expand full comment
Slender Petting's avatar

What has clearly been lost is the ability to write an essay. Instead we get reflections upon having read a chunk of something. If Ross’s pot literate work here is an example of the new prestige we are all in trouble

Expand full comment