Is the Next Great American Novel Being Published on Substack?

This past October, subscribers to Woman of Letters, the Substack newsletter of the writer Naomi Kanakia, received an e-mail titled “Why I am publishing a novella on Substack.” This novella, Kanakia wrote, was fifteen thousand words long. She was proud of it, and hoped that it might someday be the centerpiece of a book of stories that would be published in a more conventional manner. But that possibility felt distant, and obscured by all the uncertainties of the publishing ecosystem with which she’d become intimately familiar over years of releasing books and stories with conventional presses, sci-fi journals, and literary magazines. For now, she would e-mail the story to her newsletter subscribers and see what happened. “I expect that most of you won’t finish reading it,” she wrote. “And that’s fine.”

I’d signed up for Woman of Letters a few months earlier, and I had been enjoying its mix of prickly takes on contemporary literature, reflections on the Great Books, reports on reading through the Mahabharata, and short stories that Kanakia called “tales,” which felt like a crossbreed of classic parables, polemical essays, and literary fiction. Two days later, Kanakia’s novella, titled “Money Matters,” arrived in my inbox, and before I knew it I had read halfway through. The experience felt a little like getting unexpectedly absorbed in a trashy episode of reality TV, but also like suddenly realizing that a conversation that started in the shallows of small talk has at some point drifted into the deep waters of meaning. I reached the end in a happily disoriented daze. No other piece of new fiction I read last year gave me a bigger jolt of readerly delight.

Kanakia’s main character, Jack, is at first glance (second glance, too) an incorrigibly selfish protagonist. He lives a directionless life enabled by his having inherited a paid-off house from an uncle. Freed from the burden of paying rent or a mortgage, he throws parties, drinks and gets high, and covers his expenses with some light drug dealing. He’s fixated on status, and constantly rehearsing what he stands to gain (or lose) from every interpersonal interaction. “You could call it ‘manipulation,’ if you wanted,” he muses, “but it wasn’t—it was just the game, the only thing that mattered. The game of getting your needs met by other people.”

Jack’s immediate need is cash. An irresponsible steward of his life-transforming windfall, he’s fallen behind on his property taxes. Letters from the city are piling up. A lien is out, and his drug proceeds won’t cover it. The obvious solution—getting a proper job—is, for Jack, a non-starter: conventional work repulses him. Instead, he sets about evaluating the women in his life, including an ex-girlfriend, Cynthia, and his current kinda-sorta girlfriend, Mona, wondering what it would take to get one of them to cover his financial needs. What would he have to offer them in return? Would it be worth it? We soon learn that he engaged in a similar calculation with his uncle, intentionally befriending him with an eye to snagging the house.

“I know many of my readers, particularly women, will read Jack as a sociopath,” the story’s narrator says. But “I really don’t think that’s fair.” This feels, at first, like a provocation that Kanakia is daring us to disagree with, especially when Jack, in the middle of a daytime bender, starts mulling what it would look like to maneuver Mona into sex work, with himself as her pimp. But the more time we spend with Jack, the harder it feels to write him off as a jerk, or as just a jerk. Maybe he’s different from how he first appeared. Maybe he’s changing. Eventually, he decides that he’s fallen in love. Has he really? Can love change him, or is “love” another tool he’s deploying in “the game.” Is he an asshole? A manipulator? Or a fairly normal young person, doing some fairly normal growing up, his every thought subjected to an unflattering X-ray vision?

The writing’s most salient quality is speed. There’s very little scene-setting or physical description. Jack’s house, despite being the location for most of the action and a central plot component, is left almost entirely to our imagination. We learn little about what the main characters look like, other than, occasionally, how conventionally attractive they are in Jack’s eyes. (“You’re so hot,” he tells Mona. “If you wanted to be trashy,” he says to Cynthia, “you could obviously be super hot.”) Time zips by breezily, the point of view slides around unpredictably, and more than one plot strand is introduced without ever being resolved.

But somehow these features, rather than being an obstacle to engagement, converge perfectly with the story’s interest in how it feels to be swirled around by the vortex of time, all your inherited circumstances, choices (wise and foolish), and luck (good and bad) running together so close you can’t tease them apart anymore, because they’ve become something else: your life. On the rare occasions when the narration slows down, it has the effect of making the action—often a long, fumbling conversation—feel etched in sharp relief, and loaded with some meaning just out of sight, something we can feel the characters reaching toward and, simultaneously, refusing to explicitly acknowledge.

Kanakia isn’t the only one playing with fiction on Substack. The National Book Award winner Sherman Alexie posts fiction, poetry, and essays on his Substack, and Chuck Palahniuk (of “Fight Club” fame) serialized a novel on his. The renowned Israeli author Etgar Keret (who, like Alexie, is a frequent contributor to this magazine) posts fiction on his Substack. Rick Moody, one of the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful literary authors of his generation, recently published a nearly twenty-thousand-word “non-fiction novella” on the Mars Review of Books Substack, and the Times columnist Ross Douthat has, since September, been using the platform to publish “The Falcon’s Children,” a fantasy novel, at the rate of a chapter per week. This is to say nothing of the many names—including George Saunders, Mary Gaitskill, Catherine Lacey, and Elif Batuman—who have popular Substacks where they publish nonfiction about literature and life.

These are writers who already enjoy considerable levels of professional success and are using Substack to experiment with new styles, build direct connections with their readers, or make a few bucks selling premium-tier subscriptions to their biggest fans. On the other end of the spectrum are passionate amateurs who post stories, serialize novels-in-progress, commiserate about the joys and agonies of writing, talk smack about the literary establishment, and cheer one another on. In the middle sit writers who have, like Kanakia, acquired some of the markers of professional success without becoming names. Their outputs are a mélange of the passion and experimentalism of the amateurs with the polish and ambition of the pros, and they often possess a briskness that feels shaped by an awareness that an endless selection of other stories is mere clicks away.

In March, 2023, John Pistelli, an adjunct English professor and longtime literary blogger, began serializing a novel called “Major Arcana” on his Substack, where he also posts lectures on literature. It is a long, playfully serious novel that starts with a dramatic public suicide on a college campus and then works backward in search of an explanation, spinning a kaleidoscopic plot that spans three decades and tangles, along the way, with tarot, comic books, perception-altering drugs, academia, and the cultural politics of gender. After a year, when the serialization was complete, Pistelli self-published the book using Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing platform.

In April, 2024, an interview with Pistelli appeared on the Substack of Ross Barkan. Barkan, a novelist himself, is a frequent contributor to publications such as New York and the Times, but he is also a prolific and popular Substacker and one of the most fervent evangelists for the platform’s salutary effects on American literary life. In his introduction, Barkan showered the seven-hundred-page novel with praise, calling it “better than almost any fiction being produced today” and admitted that it had helped him reconsider a bias against self-published work. (In August, Barkan ran a similarly laudatory interview with Kanakia. “I first discovered Naomi Kanakia, as I find most talented writers these days, on Substack,” his introduction began.)

Anne Trubek, the publisher of the respected independent press Belt Publishing (and the author of a Substack of her own, Notes from a Small Press) saw Barkan’s interview, read “Major Arcana,” and quickly offered Pistelli a publishing deal. At some point, the Kindle Direct version became unavailable in the Amazon store, and, last month, “Major Arcana” was published by Belt, substantially increasing its odds of appearing in bookstores and being covered in traditional publications. (It has already been reviewed by the Wall Street Journal.) This is one glimpse of the type of future that writers such as Kanakia are cheering for, one where Substack is both a testing ground for new voices and a fast-moving pipeline to existing cultural institutions. There is, at times, an optimism in the digital air that recalls the early days of blogging and of Twitter, when both seemed to create new scenes relatively unencumbered by old hierarchies and blind spots: the types of places where a passionate amateur had what felt like a real chance of accelerating the process of becoming a name.

Of course, as generations of bomb-throwing literary upstarts have discovered, decrying the mediocrity of much published and acclaimed fiction—perhaps the most common activity on literary Substack—is one thing; doing better oneself is another. So far, none of the stories or novels-in-progress I’ve read on the platform has captured my attention as “Money Matters” did.

I admired the ambition and intelligence of “Major Arcana,” and I can imagine it finding a passionate readership, especially among people who are pleased to see a big, unambiguously literary novel taking on the subject of the occult with total seriousness. But the book’s architecture doesn’t always support its ambitions—an artifact, perhaps, of its serial form. Most chapters, on their own, are well written and interesting, almost a world unto themselves. But the movement from chapter to chapter doesn’t always have a strong sense of necessity; reading “Major Arcana” can sometimes feel more like paging through an encyclopedia than like being pulled along by a current. (On Substack, I can imagine this being a sort of virtue, enabling readers to get hooked by whatever chapter they happen to stumble upon first, or to find their way back in after skipping a few.)

Of course, it’s early days. But 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. The literary mainstream has always been shaped (for both better and worse) by intermediary institutions like university creative-writing programs, plucky little journals, and newspaper book reviews. Perhaps Substack could have a similar era of influence, becoming a place where people gather for an accessible twenty-first-century version of literary community, collaborate on the formation of new readerly sensibilities, and share their own experiments at high speed and low cost. Or perhaps, when we look at Substack a few years from now, the main thing we’ll see is yet another digital space where authors felt the vague obligation to maintain a presence.

After I’d read “Money Matters” for the third time, I picked up “The Default World,” the literary novel that Kanakia published with the Feminist Press last spring. (Her previous novels were written for the young-adult market.) The main character, Jhanvi, is a trans woman trying to persuade a well-off, progressively minded San Francisco tech worker to marry her so she can use their company’s generous medical benefits to fund her gender-transition procedures. The novel is light on its feet, very funny, and admirably committed to rendering its characters, Jhanvi included, with a rigorous blend of sympathy and acid honesty. We see all their delusions laid bare but have a hard time holding these against them.

“The Default World” shares several preoccupations with “Money Matters,” including Bay Area real estate, inherited wealth, and the difficulty of drawing a bright line between sociopathy and clear-eyed realism. But “The Default World” is a distinctly less successful fusion of story, form, and style. Unlike “Money Matters,” it plays out largely in scenes rendered in a literary approximation of real time, and observed almost entirely from the main character’s perspective. The novel has more descriptive density than the novella, but it often has a flimsy feel, like something the book is rushing through out of a sense of obligation. I wasn’t surprised to learn, from Kanakia’s interview with Barkan, that she originally wrote the book in something like the fluid, omniscient style of “Money Matters.” But agents, she recalled, “kept saying they felt ‘distanced’ from the action, so I eventually rewrote the book in a more-embodied close-third perspective. On my Substack, I’ve been playing around with a style that’s more influenced by pre-modern and early-modern prose, and I’m really loving it! In a lot of ways, it feels like the development that my writing wanted to take with ‘The Default World,’ but which the publishing industry wouldn’t allow.”

“Money Matters” was published less than two months after Kanakia’s interview. It has even less descriptive writing than “The Default World,” but the story is built in such a way that this lack comes across as a feature, not a bug. To the extent that Kanakia’s newsletter made her feel like she could write this way, it deserves a nod of recognition, regardless of what else may be published on the platform. “Go out and do whatever you want, as long as it’s what you really want,” someone tells Jack, trying to help him avoid a life of curdled resentments and disappointment. The line feels a little like Kanakia talking to herself, cheering herself on in the quest—lonely under the best of circumstances—to get things right in art. I look forward to watching her try again, wherever her writing appears. ♦