Panning for Gold

sipping "the brine of hostile criticism"

I wrote the following a while ago and thought better of posting it then, and now I’m thinking: what the hell, why not?

On a slushy winter evening in Manhattan’s West Village, I found myself having dinner with several debut novelists—Sophie Kemp, whose Paradise Logic was published in March of 2025; Stephanie Wambugu, whose Lonely Crowds launched in July; Anika Levy, whose Flat Earth was published in November—and Megan Nolan, whose second novel, Ordinary Human Failings, came to the US in July.

This dinner was spur-of-the-moment and off-the-record, a pit stop before a literary magazine launch down the street. No one had anticipated that a diatribe mentioning Levy and Kemp, written by another debut novelist, Grace Byron, would be gaining traction on its native Substack that day.