Lost Shy Girls

The literati gossips about itself

I was asked to write a sort of ephemeral scene report on today’s publishing world, expanding on what I’ve touched upon here and here, for example, with anonymized insights from this insular game’s players: buzzy authors, Big Five editors, ex-agents, critics, etc. So I started interviewing acquaintances. The story immediately became unruly. I was relieved when the commissioning magazine killed it.

The more I spoke and emailed with people, the less their opinions cohered. My vague hypothesis, that everyone is feeling very different ways about the literary landscape, was too easily proven. In part it’s because everything is more atomized than ever: What one writer assumes everyone is talking about turns out to be totally unfamiliar to another—even to another who has readership overlap and lives in the same borough.

Those embedded in it were exhausted by the Substack opinion factory, but just as many said they were totally disconnected from or unaware of its impact. At the time, it felt impossible not to discuss the controversies surrounding Madeline Cash’s Lost Lambs launch (if the attention it received was normal), but in weeks following, we would have moved on to the previously self-published Shy Girl being picked up by Hachette and then dropped once readers discovered it was AI slop.

Side note: Naomi Kanakia is apparently “amazed that a big corporate press would publish” Shy Girl’s “insane premise” of “a sex worker who gets hired by a man to sexually role-play as his dog,” especially “since it’s obviously the author’s sexual fantasy.” What?? Isn’t that basically everything being published right now? Like I said, we’re clearly not seeing the same stuff on here.

To anyone I conversed with on the subjects, apologies: that piece isn’t coming out. But the process was hopefully therapeutic for more than one of us. And from it, I’d like to share some anonymous quotes that may at least give others here a sense of accord. One knows that’s difficult to come by these days.