Can literary Substack save the American novel?

In e book world, the summer time of 2025 is formally the summer time of Substack.Over the previous few years, Substack has been slowly constructing a literary scene, one through which amateurs, relative unknowns, and Pulitzer Prize-winning writers rub shoulders with each other. This spring, a sequence of writers — maybe finest identified for his or her Substacks — launched new fiction, resulting in a burst of publicity that the critic, novelist, and Substacker Naomi Kanakia has declared “Substack summer time.”“Is the Subsequent Nice American Novel Being Revealed on Substack?” requested the New Yorker in Might. Substack “has grow to be the premier vacation spot for literary varieties’ unpublished musings,” introduced Vulture.Can Substack transfer gross sales like BookTok can? No. However it’s doing one thing that, for a sure set, is sort of extra precious. It’s giving a shot of vitality to a faltering e book media ecosystem. It’s constructing a world the place everybody reads the London Assessment of Books, and so they all have blogs.“I personally consider BookTok as an engine for discovery, and I feel Substack is an engine for discourse,” mentioned the journalist Adrienne Westenfeld. “BookTok is a listicle in a approach. It’s individuals recommending books that you just won’t have heard of. It’s not as a lot a spot for substantive dialogue about books, which is just a limitation of quick type video.”Three years in the past, Westenfeld wrote about Substack’s rising literary scene for Esquire. Now, Esquire has slashed its e book protection, and Westenfeld is writing the Substack companion to a historically printed nonfiction e book: Adam Cohen’s The Captain’s Dinner. That development is, in a approach, par for the course for the present second.All of the unhappy younger literary males which can be mentioned to have disappeared are there on Substack, thriving.With each social media and Google diverting potential readers away from publications, many shops are not investing in arts protection. The literary crowd who used to hang around on what was referred to as “Guide Twitter” not gathers on what’s now X. All the identical, there are nonetheless individuals who like studying, and writing, and serious about books. Proper now, lots of them appear to be on Substack.What strikes me most in regards to the Substack literary scene is simply how a lot it seems to be just like the literary scene of 20 years in the past, the one the millennials who populate Substack simply missed. The novels these writers put out are usually sprawling social fiction in regards to the generational foibles of American households à la Jonathan Franzen. They put up essays to their Substacks like they’re placing weblog posts on WordPress, solely this time, you possibly can add a paywall. All of the unhappy younger literary males which can be mentioned to have disappeared are there on Substack, thriving. On Substack, it’s 2005 once more.Substack is a lifeboat in publishing… or perhaps an oarSubstack has lots of big-name writers, a few of whom the platform courted aggressively with advances when it started scaling up round 2021 and 2022. (Substack was first based in 2017.) Acclaimed literary icons like George Saunders and Salman Rushdie are on Substack — so are newer voices like Elif Batuman and Carmen Maria Machado.Writers can supply Substack literary credibility, whereas Substack can supply writers a direct and monetizable connection to their readers. In a literary panorama that feels perennially on the sting, that’s a precious attribute.“So long as I’ve needed to be a author, so long as I’ve taken it significantly, it’s been largely dangerous information,” mentioned the novelist and prolific Substacker Lincoln Michel. “It’s been largely advances getting decrease, articles about individuals studying much less, e book assessment sections closing up, much less and fewer e book protection. Substack seems like a little bit of a lifeboat, or perhaps an oar tossed to you in your canoe as you’re being pushed right down to the waterfall. You’ll be able to construct up a following of people who find themselves actually interested by books and literature or no matter it’s you may be writing about.”Substack summer time, nevertheless, isn’t in regards to the established big-name novelists. Substack summer time is about writers who will not be notably well-known, who discovered themselves amassing some tens of hundreds of followers on Substack and who’ve not too long ago launched longform fiction. They’re those whose works are getting mentioned as central to a brand new literary scene.In her unique “Substack summer time” put up, Kanakia recognized three novels of the second as Ross Barkan’s Glass Century, John Pistelli’s Main Arcana, and Matthew Gasda’s The Sleepers. To that record, Kanakia might simply add her personal novella, Cash Issues, which she printed in full on Substack final November. “No different piece of recent fiction I learn final 12 months gave me an even bigger jolt of readerly delight,” the New Yorker mentioned in Might of Cash Issues.It wasn’t fairly Oprah placing Franzen’s Corrections in her e book membership, nevertheless it was nonetheless extra consideration than you’d fairly count on.When Barkan and Pistelli’s novels got here out in April and Might, they garnered a shocking quantity of consideration, Kanakia mentioned. The books have been each formidable sufficient to be of potential curiosity to critics — Glass Century follows an adulterous couple from the Nineteen Seventies into the current, and Main Arcana offers with a dying by suicide at a college. Nonetheless, each books have been from comparatively small presses: Belt Publishing for Main Arcana and Robust Poets Press for Glass Century. That type of e book historically has a restricted publicity price range, which makes it laborious to get reviewed in main retailers. (Not that protection is all that straightforward for anybody to get, as Michel famous.)Nonetheless, each Main Arcana and Glass Century obtained reviewed within the Wall Avenue Journal. A couple of weeks later, Kanakia’s Cash Issues, which she printed on to Substack, was written up within the New Yorker.It wasn’t fairly Oprah placing Franzen’s Corrections in her e book membership, nevertheless it was nonetheless extra consideration than you’d fairly count on. “I used to be like, ‘One thing’s taking place,’” Kanakia says. “‘That is going to be massive. That is going to be a second.’”“Had this novel been launched two or three years in the past, it might have been utterly ignored,” says Barkan of Glass Century. “Now it’s been broadly reviewed, and I credit score Substack with that absolutely.”Pistelli’s Main Arcana is much more a product of Substack than the others. Pistelli initially serialized it on Substack, after which self-published earlier than Belt Publishing picked it up. The e book didn’t garner all that a lot consideration when he was serializing it — Pistelli’s feeling is that individuals don’t go to Substack to learn fiction — however after it got here out in print, Substack turned the peg for protection of the e book.“A number of the opinions, each optimistic and damaging, handled my novel as type of a take a look at of whether or not Substack can produce a critical novel, a novel of curiosity,” mentioned Pistelli. “The decision was combined.”The speculation that Substackers have about Substack is that this: As social media and search visitors have each collapsed, the sorts of publications that normally give individuals their e book information — newspapers, literary magazines, e book particular web sites — have struggled and grow to be tougher to search out. Substack, which delivers on to readers’ inboxes, has emerged to fill the hole within the ecosystem.“It’s very straightforward to speak to individuals and it’s very straightforward to get your writing on the market,” mentioned Henry Begler, who writes literary criticism on Substack. “It seems like an actual literary scene, which is one thing I’ve by no means been a part of.”Whereas there are many publication social platforms on the market, Substack is pretty distinctive in that it’s each a spot for newsletters, which have a tendency in the direction of the essayistic, and, with its Twitter clone Notes app, a spot for warm takes and conversations. The 2 codecs can feed off one another.“It creates an ongoing dialogue in an extended and extra thought-about type than it might be on Twitter, the place you’re simply attempting to get your zingers out,” says Begler.The buzzy authors of the Substack scene are additionally all related to the Substack-based literary journal The Metropolitan Assessment. Barkan is co-founder and editor-in-chief, and Kanakia, Pistelli, and Gasda have all written for it, as has Begler. “Mainly, we’re only a group of pals on-line who learn one another’s newsletters and write for a number of the identical publications,” mentioned Kanakia.For Barkan, the Metropolitan Assessment is on the heart of a brand new literary motion, which he’s dubbed New Romanticism, that’s “correctly exploiting the unique freedom promised by Web 1.0 to yank the English language in daring, unusual, and thrilling instructions.”Barkan’s thought is that the type of publications that used to host such daring, unusual, and thrilling speech not do, and the Metropolitan Assessment is getting into the breach. He argues considerably optimistically that the Metropolitan Assessment, which has round 22,000 subscribers, is “one of many extra broadly learn literary magazines in America.”The mixed mythologies of Metropolitan Assessment and Substack summer time have given these writers the beginnings of a cohesive self-identity. The world they’ve constructed with that identification is, apparently, a little bit of a throwback.The literary tradition of 2005 is alive and wellHere are some traits of the literary world of 2005: an enchantment with a gaggle of gifted younger male writers who wrote primarily massive social novels and lots of pleasure in regards to the literary potentialities of a nascent blogosphere.Listed here are some traits of the Substack literary scene: lots of younger male writers, lots of social novels, and lots of pleasure in regards to the literary potentialities of publication essays.Glass Century and Main Arcana are each massive, sprawling novels that happen over a long time, and Glass Century, particularly, reads as if it was written underneath the affect of Jonathan Franzen. That’s a departure from what’s been extra not too long ago in vogue, like Karl Ove Knausgaard’s titanic autofictional saga.“I feel there’s lots of nostalgia for a time when the novel was perhaps a extra mentioned type or a extra very important type or attempting to seize much more of latest society.”“The large pattern on the planet of literary fiction for the final decade or so was actually autofiction, the thought of you’d write a slice of life first individual narrated usually in a type of clear, not very adorned prose,” mentioned Pistelli. “I feel there’s been some need to get again to that larger canvas social novel that has been misplaced within the autofictional second.”Literary Substack basically additionally appears to espouse a need to return to a time when literature was extra culturally ascendant. “I feel there’s lots of nostalgia for a time when the novel was perhaps a extra mentioned type or a extra very important type or attempting to seize much more of latest society,” mentioned Begler. “It’s partially only a shift from one mode of considering to a different, and it’s partially a nostalgia in your Franzen and your David Foster Wallace and no matter.”This need is, in its approach, very Franzenian. Franzen famously wrote an essay for Harper’s in 1996 through which he describes his “despair in regards to the American novel” after the jingoism of the lead as much as the primary Gulf Struggle. Franzen thought that tv was dangerous for the novel; he hadn’t but seen what TikTok might do to an individual.Whereas the Franzen mode pops up quite a bit with this crowd, there are outliers to this free pattern. Gasda’s Sleeper could be very a lot a product of millennial fiction (indifferent voice describing the foibles of Brooklyn literati), and Kanakia’s work on Substack, which she calls her “tales,” tends to be sparse, with little consideration paid to description or setting.There’s additionally the query of gender. The quantity of males on this literary Substack scene is especially notable in a second so wealthy with essays in regards to the disappearance of males who care about and write books. Some observers have drawn a lesson of kinds from this phenomenon: The mainstream literary world alienated males. They needed to flee to Substack to construct their very own protected haven.“The literary institution treats male American writers with contempt,” wrote the author Alex Perez on his Substack final August. His commenters agreed. The reply, they concluded, was constructing a platform and self publishing.“I’m a middle-aged, straight, white, conservative, wealthy male who writes literary fiction. It’s like a demographic poo Yahtzee. I don’t stand an opportunity,” wrote one commenter. “However I’ve 85K Twitter followers and an electronic mail record with hundreds of individuals, so I can self-publish and promote 5,000 copies of something I write.”“These aren’t manosphere males who’re continually raging towards the affect of girls on fiction. These are males simply writing.”For the Metropolitan Assessment crowd, the quantity of males in Substack’s literary scene is usually value-neutral. “I do suppose there’s one thing to the truth that after I obtained on Substack, I used to be like, ‘These are individuals which can be producing work that I’m truly interested by and I truly discover compelling,’ and that they have been most likely majority males,” mentioned Begler.“General, it’s a slightly welcoming setting for all,” Barkan provides. “These aren’t manosphere males who’re continually raging towards the affect of girls on fiction. These are males simply writing.”Kanakia thinks the narrative about literary white males is extra difficult than literary white males let on, however finally innocent. “In 2025 the styles of males advocating for themselves — most of them are very horrific. This selection isn’t so dangerous,” she says. “If they need a e book deal at Scribners, like, high quality, if that’ll make you content. That’ll be nice. I’ve no downside with that.”Within the meantime, literary Substack retains increasing. Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon simply signed up. “It’s sensible of him,” says Barkan. “If I have been Michael Chabon and was engaged on a novel, I might be on Substack. I feel extra literary writers who’ve platforms already ought to be there.”The closest antecedent to this second didn’t final. The literary second of 2005 was blown aside the best way every little thing of that period was: underneath the stress of the 2008 recession and the so-called Nice Awokening, underneath the gradual collapse of the blogosphere as social media took off — and every little thing that got here together with them.Will the identical factor occur to this crowd? It’s laborious to know for certain this early. A minimum of for proper now, Substack is having its summer time.