When my first novel came out, I didn’t have any novelist friends. Writing it, and then, years later, publishing it, felt good, like it was my own thing, and that everyone else I knew had their thing, separately. Now, everywhere I go in New York is crawling with young novelists. I wonder—and often ask—what it’s like for them. Thinking I was the only one doing what I was doing did wonders for my self-esteem, something essential to writing, at least the act of sitting down to do it, with the intention of publication.
Which is to say, huge congratulations to everyone with a first novel out this summer, despite all odds. Several were at the Volume 0 issue 7 launch at Mr. Fong’s and/or the Kismet issue 2 launch party at TJ Byrnes on Thursday: Stephanie Wambugu, Zoe Dubno, Anika Levy, Sophie Kemp, likely more. Rachel Cockerell’s Melting Point published last year but she’s in New York to promote the US version now. Out of everyone I spoke with, about half had a galley circulating, myself included: pre-order Grand Rapids, please!
I’m interested in Volume 0 for the same reason most of my writer friends are: it pays more than most literary magazines do for short stories, and doesn’t charge a fee to submit. I’m told that this is possible because it’s funded by the wildly successful personalized subscription program Book of the Month (started in 1926, sold many times, and restarted as its current, buzzy iteration in 2015). In some ways, Volume 0 appears to be acting as Book of the Month’s underground press arm, capturing the attention of a certain youthful literati with a tried-and-true method: open bar tabs.
I went to their first party, at the Air Mail Newsstand, and Graydon Carter was there, so I guessed he had published it, but was corrected. Next, they had launches with Paper and Climax Books, where I’m sure people were as confused: is this the new lit journal by a (now) online-only pop culture mag, or another Isabella Burley venture? It’s neither, but those would be good guesses. It looks like its provocateur contemporary Heavy Traffic, but leads with dollar amounts (the Newsstand party had fancy hors d’oeuvres, the Paper party was at fancy hotel bar Sloane’s).
We all recognize certain contributors’ names—the ones on the covers of other journals, like Emma Cline and Tony Tulathimutte. Upon Googling the rest, I notice an airport-friendly cover trend: scribbled typeface in white or neon, across torrid images: the back of a woman’s head, a fence on a beach, misty woods, a fogged train car window. Unlike Emma and Tony, these other authors publish about one novel a year, and I assume those become Books of the Month for many a subscriber.
That would make sense, and make the project of Volume 0 one of merging two spheres that are often pried apart: genre fiction, which prides itself in fast and avid readership, and literary fiction, defined by its demand for deeper reading—in other words, the books that don’t get reviewed by critics or added to academic syllabi, and those that do. But the authors of bestselling serials likely went to MFA programs, too, writing short stories for workshops, not thinking they would get the scribble cover treatment. And it’s their work, in the case of Book of the Month’s system, that pays for that of the more critically acclaimed.
Speaking of genre, romance/erotica is trending again in New York/London circles, reprising an attempt to pad authors’ unpaid spells with opportunities of selling fiction to alternative audiences: No Erotica, Jouissance Publications, Hinge’s No Ordinary Love, 831 Stories, etc. Remember Badlands Unlimited New Lovers series, based on the model of an anonymous collector buying sexually explicit stories by the page from Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin when they needed the money?
There’s also The Ripped Bodice, an all-romance bookstore with locations in LA and Brooklyn—but apparently this concept exists all over America. Climax Books in the East Village is decidedly not a romance store, but it does sell sexy lingerie at the moment, and when I stopped by on Tuesday, they were doing a Supergoop sunscreen suite with beverages by Ghia, brands that feel somewhat vintage porn-inspired.
Anyway, Thursday: the readings at Mr. Fong’s were spaced out: two, and an hour later, two more. By the end, no matter how much shushing occurred, I could hear at least one woman squawking—over the voice of Kyle Seibel, who was basically yelling, as is, I gathered, his style. “I’m from California,” he announced, “and this is my first time in New York since I was, like, seventeen.”
I wondered: was he flown out? Genevieve Hudson, Navid Sinaki, and Aïda Riddle also read. The stories, as per editor John Lippman’s guidelines, are “edgy,” and according to a press release, “somewhere between high lit and pulp fiction.” That means they deal with taboo topics like chewing used condoms or getting a vasectomy, and end with gut punches.
Sicky Sab (Pretty Sick’s Sabrina Fuentes) DJ’d, which meant cute girl songs—by Lily-Rose Depp, Addison Rae, Grimes, et al. A taco truck outside that had been hired for the evening was entirely free, as were drinks and magazines. Everyone kept asking, how do they get away with all this?
If my calculations are correct, each issue’s work alone costs $35k to acquire, and six issues are published a year. So, that’s $210k, which is all besides the printing and promoting and distributing and party costs times six, plus editorial salaries. I hope it continues, because that’s a lot of capital being siphoned into experimental writing, at a time when National Endowment for the Arts grants are being pulled from just about every indie press.
Yet another reason publishing a novel will be even more difficult, said some writers I saw later at TJ Byrnes. Graywolf Press, for example relies on NEA money to make sure they can publish who they want to, not who might sell millions of copies. (I wonder if those conspiratorial sounding novels about discovering the truth about some oppressively woke system—announced in my inbox every other day by some weird, far-right leaning publisher I haven’t unsubscribed from out of morbid curiosity—will have a better chance now, or if they’ll get thrown out with the bathwater.)
I missed the Kismet readings, Zoe and Elvia Wilk among them, but got to see Janique Vigier on her birthday and buy her a Campari with soda in a plastic cup, which somehow cost a few dollars less than my own. “I love my job,” said the bartender, after asking me how my night was going. “Very well, actually,” I said, surprised by how honest it felt. Because reading-hopping isn’t really my thing, but maybe should be? Or at least going to places where people care about writing in a real way and are excited to go home because it means they get to read in bed.
The next evening, I dragged myself to a Brooklyn house party and stayed out all night because it had taken me so long to get there, but ended up having a conclusive conversation right before calling a car. If everyone is so afraid to talk about anything of real interest, said a self-described homophobic homosexual, why are we even talking? We could be doing anything else, and there is much else to do.
But, I reminded him, we had spoken to someone in the process of a serious breakup, someone who had closed their relationship this week, someone who had closed on an apartment with their boyfriend that day, someone writing their first book, a couple about to have their first child, someone planning to propose—so, not just a bunch of guys in tank tops on drugs, exhausted from art week but not quite willing to call it a night at 3am. And there’s a reason or two they’re not ready to go home, yet, or really ever, which is just as dark and interesting as the literature we read and write, which is, when it’s good, not a distraction but a clarification.