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Non Grata’s Spring issue deals with the technology question, which we consider one of the great wars of our time. Through this theme and conversation around our A.I. policy, we connected with Brazilian artists in the photography, film, and fashion space. They were already at work on their own anti-A.I. project, simply titled “Not A.I.”

The “Not A.I.” project seeks to create photos that appear to be A.I.-generated but, in actuality, are rendered through printing techniques and experimental coloring. In the next issue we have dedicated space for their photography, which poses questions about how LLMs will affect the creators and viewers of the visual arts.

The broader question here is: How do all the arts respond to LLMs taking aspects of human style? Do writers ditch the em dash? Or, when facing the marauders, do they hold firm? Somewhere in-between? As of now there are more questions than answers—but the questions are worth thinking about seriously.

We’re thrilled that we found this group posing them. Even better that they’re from Brazil. Non Grata always has and always will love Brazil. We can’t wait to include their photography in our next issue, which, in the words of Nattannaella, the creative director for this project, “was made 100% for the love of art.”

Credits:

Creative Director & Filmmaker: Nattannaella - @nattannaella

Photographer: Marina Faria - @mm.faria

Stylist: Luan Gabriel - @lu_lluan

Art Director: Morgana Addor - @morganaaddor

Makeup: Giulianne Rodrigues - @gigiurodrigues

Movement Director: Lia Cará - @lia.cara

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Only two notable things have ever happened in Oxford, Mississippi. JFK and RFK mobilized approximately 30,000 soldiers and federal agents to put down a riot preventing James Meredith from enrolling at Ole Miss in 1962. William Faulkner lived there and died that same year. Eight years later, Joan Didion wandered from Grenada, Mississippi and tried to find his home.

Faulkner’s old white house is on prominent display, and it’s easier to find than the Archie Manning statue, or the Library (a bar), or Square Books, or the Grove. But not in 1970.

We drove out on Old Taylor’s Road at night to look for Rowan Oak, William Faulkner’s house. There were fireflies, and heat lightning, and thick vines all around, and we could not see the house until the next day… I read a book about Faulkner in Oxford, interviews with his fellow citizens in Oxford, and I was deeply affected by their hostility to him and by the manner in which he had managed to ignore it.

In the lead-up to Didion’s arrival, Faulkner and books and black people were all just minor incursions on the oasis of Oxford in a desert of kudzu and poverty. The third observation in Didion’s Oxford notes is that there is barely a store in which to purchase a book. The second was that “the self-image of the Southern Blood as Cavalier” was very apparent there.

South and West doesn’t give a sense of what the South is like now. Oxford has changed. The drunk college boys still call themselves the Rebs, but it sounds like an affectation when there’s a nineteen year-old from Rockaway Beach in the group. The hushed racist barbs sound more like appeals to tradition than a philosophy of one’s own. The kids here read, or at least they buy books. There are a lot of Reagan-Bush muscle shirts on patriotic holidays, but the wearer wouldn’t know the name Barry Goldwater. Few of these rich sons of this poor state would use the word “cavalier.” Few could mount much of a defense of the Lost Cause, but they would try; they’re anti-intellectual in a more blunt way than their grandfathers. The only commonality they have with Faulkner, really, is getting wasted and skipping class.

South and West is just a notebook. The bones of a great Didion work, buried in a shallow grave, excised, and put on display for the gawkers, the real Didion-heads. It materialized as she drove around Mississippi and Alabama (from New Orleans) and then left one month later in disgust. The last line of the notebook, presumably an addendum in the 2000s, says simply: “I never wrote the piece.” Many notebook entries preserve the detached tone her followers try to shamelessly affect. In others, her disdain and confusion haven’t been sheared off.

At dinner one night in Birmingham there were, besides us, five people. Two of the men had gone to Princeton… They talked with raucous good humor about ‘Seein’ those X-rated movies’... This was a manner of speaking, a rococo denial of their own sophistication, which I found dizzying to contemplate.

The reader can still see the naked questions whose answer she would turn into a feeling, had the book been written.

Didion bends to triteness twice. Writers from the North and from Hollywood (to a real Southerner, the only two places besides the South) find themselves commenting on southern humidity before all else: “In New Orleans in June the air is heavy with sex and death, not violent death but death by decay, overripeness, rotting, death by drowning, suffocation, fever of unknown etiology.” She evokes a less oblique piece of small talk from the book American Melodrama: “...Norman Mailer, who may know about such things, described the sensation of living and breathing in the Miami Beach atmosphere as ‘not unlike being made love to by a three-hundred-pound woman who has decided to get on top.’” (Mailer liked re-animating this brusque metaphor. He used it to describe Tom Wolfe’s A Man in Full thirty years later: “At certain points, reading the work can even be said to resemble the act of making love to a three-hundred-pound woman.”) After the Northern or the Hollywood writer brings up the weather, they bring up the war. “The time warp: the Civil War was yesterday, but 1960 was spoken of as if it were about three hundred years ago.” The weather and the war probably are the most important things to bring up. The trouble is that everyone does.

The specter of divorce haunts the best Didion essays of ’66 to ’77. The ghost also claws its way into the writing of her husband, John Gregory Dunne. Vegas is a reflection of the last death throes of arrested development, a boy-man’s last stand against a commitment he made to a timid, smart young woman still living in L.A. His “memoir of a dark season” is dedicated to the man who was his wife’s first, and maybe greatest, love. The W. H. Auden quote that opens Vegas is a lesson Dunne must have internalized only after the manuscript was finished:

Like everything which is not the result of fleeting emotion but of time and will, any marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting and significant than any romance, however passionate.

174 pages later he recollects calling Didion from his apartment on the strip. She tells him she’s depressed. He tells her a friendly prostitute lined up a nineteen year-old for him to sleep with. Didion tells him that it’s “research.” The White Album and Slouching Towards Bethlehem—two collections containing essays from this period—are riddled with similar holes such as “We are here on this island in the middle of the Pacific in lieu of getting a divorce” and “…the apparently bottomless gulf between what we say we want and what we do want… between, in the largest sense, the people we marry and the people we love.” A marriage in such a state, in a land so pre-occupied with marriage, could never be allowed to feel comfortable.

Dunne accompanied Didion to New Orleans, but was rarely seen in the notes. His silhouette is backlit when dinner hosts ask why her husband allows her to “spend time consorting with a lot of marijuana-smoking hippie trash.” She doesn’t note his coming to her defense, but she doesn’t record coming to her own. “I had never expected to come to the Gulf Coast married.” She visits a hospital in Meridian and she tells the doctor she has a husband. “This did not sound exactly right, either, because I was not wearing my wedding ring.” Most sections are headed by a location within the South: Meridian, Grenada, Biloxi. Each contains some inquiry into her marriage status, or a stranger proffering their own, conferring meaning upon themselves. Here in the South there is still that sense of marriage being a prerequisite for personal importance, but there is less marriage now. The right kind of women are still aggrandized here, but the wrong ones have sunk lower.

About the cathouse: the notion that an accepted element in the social order is a whorehouse goes hand in hand with the woman on a pedestal.

New places tend to upskirt our insecurities. When I visit San Francisco I feel that I do not make enough money, and when I visit D.C. I feel as though I am missing vital connections with important people. The chorus of South and West is sung by Didion’s insecurity about her marriage. But the discomfort with the oddity of her marriage was not so off-putting as the unions she found in Louisiana. “It occurred to me almost constantly in the South that had I lived there I would have been eccentric and full of anger… Would I have taken up causes, or would I simply have knifed someone?”

The anger builds and builds in her notes and it drives her back to New Orleans and to a “senseless disagreement on the causeway, ugly words and then silence. We spent a silent night in an airport motel and took the 9:15 National flight to San Francisco. I never wrote the piece.”

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I.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury — before the defense begins, I propose two axioms regarding the dangers of literary myth-making which we should all be able to agree upon:

1. Writing autofiction inherently invites myth-making.

2. You cannot control a myth. Once an author’s life becomes myth, it no longer belongs to him or her, but to the people.

If these are acceptable, perhaps we can add a slightly more controversial maxim:

3. Most attempts to ‘counter’ a myth result in the creation of a new myth, not a distillation of factual truth.

In the past two hundred years, no country has been more invested in elevating authors to the strata of myth than the United States of America. And in the past fifty years, no country has been more invested in tearing down those very myths.

If the 20th century will forever be remembered as the American Century — when the United States transcended the category of nation to become the world’s premier empire, exporting its high and low culture across the globe — then one couple stands as the king and queen of that dawning golden age: Francis Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Sayre.

II.

My adolescence happened to coincide with the rise of a new kind of alternative-history game, very popular at schools, universities, newspapers, magazines, etc., and supercharged by social media. Perhaps you know the game. It’s called, ‘He Wasn’t Actually a Genius’, and the rules are very simple: You pick a historically admired man and point out that he had a talented (or at least vivacious) wife, and then posit that his genius was not singular but more likely the result of an intellectual partnership with said wife. So far, not that controversial. However, you cannot win this game by staying within the realms of reason; instead you must fervently argue that the man had limited talent, that he ‘stole’ the work of his wife, or else that she was an uncredited equal partner due to pervasive sexism and brutishness. And thus, you destroy the myth of the lone male genius.

Of course, this game is pointing at a sometimes true aspect of domestic relationships. It cannot be denied that Mileva Marić was a better student and more organized physician and mathematician than Albert Einstein, or that John Stuart Mill repeatedly stated that his wife Harriet should have been listed as a ‘joint author’ on some of his great philosophical treatises. And in the realm of famous littérateurs, Anna Funder’s recent book Wifedom sheds light on how closely involved Eileen Blair was in the development of her husband’s novels Animal Farm and 1984. Whether a spouse’s assistance in discussing, debating, developing, typing, or editing a manuscript should count as ‘co-authorship’ or give rise to claims of ‘uncredited plagiarism’ is a nuanced matter. What about non-marital editing relationships? Should we delete Raymond Carver’s name from his short story collections in favor of Gordon Lish? What about Thomas Wolfe and Maxwell Perkins? Or Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, which famously took editor Tay Hohoff two-and-a-half years to extract from the originally bloated manuscript?

This nuance, however, was nowhere to be found in the heady days of the early 21st Century, when I was making my way through secondary school. Instead, as I first dipped my toes into the fiction of Scott Fitzgerald, I was told with much gusto that he ‘wasn’t that great a writer,’ that he ‘stole most of the good stuff from his wife Zelda,’ and that she was the ‘true talent.’ It was also implied that this unfair treatment was what drove Zelda insane, with a jealous Scott committing her to an insane asylum so he could cash in on the books filled with writing stolen from his estranged, glamorous, brilliant wife.

This was the new myth: that behind every talented man crouched an even more talented, but cruelly subjugated, woman.

III.

I spent the first three years of my legal career representing individual litigants in unlawful termination cases, battling their former employers for a bit of cash. My clients were an even 50/50 split between individuals who had truly been wronged, and those who deserved to be fired but couldn’t accept it without a fight. The right person didn’t win every time. Sometimes the litigant who deserved to be fired was able to win on a technicality. Sometimes they were just more winsome and likable in the courtroom. And sometimes the person who you knew was innocent of whatever the company claimed, was so ornery and unlikeable in front of the judge that they had no hope of winning. This all goes to say that I know a thing or two about how to win a case despite defending an unlikeable person.

If there is any real competition between Scott and Zelda, it’s not about their literary abilities (more on that later) but who you should feel more pity and revulsion toward. They were both raging alcoholics that were commonly kicked out of hotels for disturbing other guests (as well as for destruction of property), that got into trouble with fire brigades and law enforcement for making false reports, that once boiled guests’ expensive watches in a pot of tomato soup as a joke. Zelda also had a penchant for throwing herself off cliffs and down staircases, setting things on fire and overdosing on pills, while Scott commonly drank himself to blackout and attempted suicide on multiple occasions. In essence, the Fitzgeralds perfected the attention-seeking, self-destructive, tabloid behavior of young people thrust into the limelight, which was set to define the following century.

However, the central question is not the character or morals of the Fitzgeralds’, but (a) the quality of Scott’s writing, and (b) whether or not Zelda was the genius behind his novels and stories. How much truth lies behind the myth and counter-myth? Does Scott Fitzgerald deserve to be called the first great American writer of the first great American Century?

IV.

Hemingway certainly thought so. One of our best primary sources for understanding the nature of Scott and Zelda’s relationship from a literary perspective is A Moveable Feast, Hemingway’s swan song, completed just before he died in 1961 and published posthumously in 1964.

Hemingway, who dolled out compliments sparingly, was in awe of Scott’s raw talent when they first met in 1925. Scott had just published his third, and best, novel, The Great Gatsby, and any personal foibles that Scott demonstrated (there were many) could be overlooked by the usually impatient Hemingway. He regularly met up with Scott in Paris to discuss their respective writing, agreed to travel with him through the French countryside to retrieve a car that Zelda had impulsively left behind in Lyon, and the two young families spent holidays together, despite the strong reservations both Hemingway and his wife Hadley maintained about Zelda’s non-stop party lifestyle.

Hemingway’s recurring frustration with Scott was how he let Zelda affect his craft, how the dazzling genius emergent in This Side of Paradise (released when Scott was just twenty-four years old and before he married Zelda, who agreed to their union only after the book was published), was beaten into something self-doubting and drab by his constant ‘whoring’ — Hemingway’s term for Scott’s habit of rewriting short stories to contain dramatic twists and romances and happy endings so slick magazines would publish them — in order to provide for the lifestyle Zelda believed they deserved. As it stands, if Zelda has any real claim to being involved with Scott’s writing, it’s through her habit of reviewing his ‘far too literary’ drafts and suggesting where they might be changed to appeal to the mass market readers of The Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s Weekly and Esquire, in addition to contributing a few quotes and pages to his multi-thousand-word oeuvre.

V.

For all the modern griping about autofiction, it can be extremely entertaining to read when well done. Scott struck gold with This Side of Paradise, through which he learned the power of mythologizing oneself. After that he couldn’t seem to stop doing it, no matter how sad and desperate his life became.

When you read Scott’s novels and many of his short stories you can’t help but feel the thrill of recognizing the real-life people he has given new aliases, and seeing how he shapes their brokenness into something with a deeper meaning. It works because he does more than tell us of toxic relationships and the agony and ecstasy of spiralling out of control; he places the reader inside the heart and mind of people like himself — men and women who aren’t ‘bad’ per se, who have a sense of morality, but can’t stop themselves from trying to manipulate people and grasp at things they cannot have. Scott consistently risks readers criticizing his own nature by giving us an interior view of his pseudo-biographical characters’ moral failings.

For example: in “Babylon Revisited,” a 1931 short story, we tag along with a Scott stand-in who is trying to recover custody of his daughter from his deceased wife’s relatives. Despite being a washed-up alcoholic, he has his wits about him, and he knows to play the situation delicately in order to get what he wants:

He knew that now he would have to take a beating. It would last an hour or two hours, and it would be difficult, but if he modulated his inevitable resentment to the chastened attitude of the reformed sinner, he might win his point in the end.

The crux of the story is the protagonist, Charlie, interacting with his sister-in-law, trying to convince her to relinquish her guardianship over his daughter, even as she blames Charlie for her sister’s death. And Scott freely shows us how disingenuous Charlie is, even if his desired outcome is not necessarily a bad one. He’s attuned to human emotions and he is doing his best to play them for his own purposes, but without descending into cartoonish psychopathy. At one point Charlie partially loses control, swears at his sister-in-law, and has to back off. But in doing so he leaves room for her to pounce and she overreacts, causing her own husband to take Charlie’s side, causing the narrator no small amount of glee:

But [Charlie] pulled his temper down out of his face and shut it up inside him; he had won a point, for Lincoln realized the absurdity of Marion’s remark and asked her lightly since when she had objected to the word “damn.”

This is a good short story and Scott is a good writer, but his work would be less interesting, less purely entertaining, if you didn’t know how closely his fiction dovetails with his own tragic life. Scott seemed to relish in writing about his life through the thin veil of fiction, raising him and Zelda and their cohort up to the realm of gods, while they carried on like Greek gods and goddesses — cavorting in endless bacchanals, collapsing night after night from drink, sleeping around, jumping onto the hoods of cars, literally swinging from hotel chandeliers. They were momentarily Gods of their own myth, but the myth quickly became a Titan, which began to swallow them whole. As time went on, both Scott and Zelda became suicidal — Zelda often threatened suicide in public settings as an argument-ender — and they severely mistreated their child, Frances ‘Scottie,’ while constantly mistreating each other. Through it all, Scott couldn’t stop writing about their lives in the guise of fiction, couldn’t stop trying to spin the muddy straw into gold.

As I said at the start, nothing invites myth-making about an author’s life like a work of autofiction. The only safe way to go about it is the Elena Ferrante method, total anonymity. But that was never Scott’s style, leading to the instant birth of the Fitzgerald myth. However, Scott himself admitted to editor Malcolm Cowley, another member of the Lost Generation, that blurring the line between truth and fiction came with several burdens:

Sometimes I don’t know whether I’m real or whether I’m a character in one of my own novels.

The trouble for Scott and Zelda is that self-mythologizing initially gave them a taste of the high life — all the attention and riches available for a young novelist and his exciting young wife, both willing to become the story — before it all came crashing down.

It should be recognized that Scott essentially invented the term the ‘Jazz Age’ and used it liberally, as an ongoing act of conscious mythologizing, placing him and Zelda as crown prince and princess of a kingdom that only ephemerally existed. The adolescent, freewheeling, heavy-drinking life of pre-WW1 college students, preserved forever in Scott’s mind as the best years of his life, was a representation of the Fitzgeralds’ monied decadence, not a true reflection of the ’20s and ’30s. In reality, Scott’s novels are at their heart Edwardian, with ghosts and specters and hauntings, and with characters wishing to return to the past due to conflicts in their social mores. Scott may have used the ‘Jazz Age’ as his setting, but even he knew it was a fantasy.

On the topic of myth, it’s not surprising that as a practiced mythologizer Scott would become so entranced by the real-life Max Gerlach, a millionaire bootlegging fabulist that he was able to sculpt his best work into a meditation on the nature of myth itself. The Great Gatsby is, at one level, an outflow of game recognizing game. The forever insecure Scott — always fretting about his poorer upbringing and lack of class credentials, trying to appear wealthier and more accomplished than he was — peering across the cocktail party at the ebullient Gerlach, confidently lying about his nationality and the providence of his riches. Gerlach achieved what Scott never quite managed — a fully embodied myth, a man forcefully transcending any unhelpful or unsavory elements of his origins and upbringing to become whatever he desired.

VI.

Zelda, Zelda, Zelda. A woman who was the definition of a self-determined and raucous ‘flapper,’ a term she popularized alongside Scott’s ‘Jazz Age,’ writing in 1922 that:

“[the flapper] flirted because it was fun to flirt and wore a one-piece bathing suit because she had a good figure… she was conscious that the things she did were the things she had always wanted to do.”

Somehow she went beyond myth and became an archetype, ‘the flapper’ remarkably prescient for our age of influencers and celebrities and politicians willing to debase themselves in a million ways for attention, but unable to get out of their own way once they have it. Incredibly self-destructive, wretchedly self-obsessed, narcissistic and shallow, but rewarded by a society entranced with car crashes and natural disasters. Zelda Fitzgerald was intelligent, there’s no doubt about it, but she was intelligent in the way Paris Hilton is intelligent, or in the way Donald Trump is intelligent. And neither of them are, of course, good writers.

I propose a reasonable bar for the spouses of great writers to clear before we credit them as having contributed to the great writer’s genius: (1) they contribute a non-insignificant amount of new material to the writer’s body of work, or (2) they significantly edit or rewrite the novels most lauded by critics and the general public. And (3) they really should have demonstrated some writing talent of their own, independent of their more famous spouse.

Unfortunately for Zelda, she doesn’t pass any of these tests. All the arguments about Zelda’s supposed ‘stolen genius’ largely hinge on Scott’s use of Zelda’s diary entries and letters in several of his novels. But, importantly, this practice of wholesale reproduction was used sparingly — in the order of, at most, a few sentences in the course of a novel — and Zelda wasn’t the only target. This Side of Paradise reprints entire letters Scott himself sent to both Zelda and his priest, Father Sigourney Fay, as well as their responses, despite being categorized as fiction. Of course every writer takes characters, passages, and dialogue from life, and even if one argues that Scott should have credited her for these sparse words, his colossal genius cannot be reduced to discrete sections of text pillaged from correspondence. It’s also telling that nobody, not even Zelda’s most ardent supporter Nancy Milford (who wrote the the foundational text of the pro-Zelda mythology, Zelda: A Biography, in 1970), has been able to show that Zelda contributed meaningfully to any of Scott’s best work — not to his two best novels The Great Gatsby or Tender is the Night, nor his best short stories: “Babylon Revisited”, “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz”, “Winter Dreams”, “The Rich Boy”, “Bernice Bobs Her Hair”, “Absolution”, “May Day”, or “Crazy Sunday”. By comparison, the stories with the most clear Zelda influence are trite pieces of fluff: “The Offshore Pirate”, “The Jelly-Bean”, “Our Own Movie Queen”, “The Original Follies Girl”, “A Millionaire’s Girl”, etc.

The real genius of Scott’s prose lies in the tone and voice that is entirely rooted in the anxious ego and belligerent id of his narrators and protagonists. We are let into the inner machinations of neurotic strivers and obsessives, jealous outsiders and secret-keepers, and the entire atmosphere of his novels bends around the gravitational pull of these men who are intelligent but insecure. Scott’s talent was in realizing protagonists didn’t have to be likable to be compelling, as long as they had a soft spot among the neuroses, as long as they were vulnerable. For Scott, so similar to many of his male characters, his vulnerability was always Zelda.

The fact that Zelda demanded Scott rewrite his stories to make the plots more interesting so they sold better, then demanded he come out partying all night instead of writing, so that his follow-up to The Great Gatsby took nine years to write instead of the customary two or three he had previously managed, should be evidence enough that Zelda did not care for the work of literature. She cared for the lifestyle of being attached to a successful writer.

If you still aren’t convinced, let’s compare two similar passages from the estranged couples’ twinned novels — Zelda’s Save Me the Waltz of 1932 (which, it should be noted, Scott first accused Zelda of plagiarizing from him, but then dropped those claims for fear of further upsetting her mental health, and then ultimately helped her get it published) and Scott’s 1934 Tender is the Night, his last complete work before his death at forty-four years of age. Both novels are set in the French Riviera and involve unhappy marriages and infidelities. Here is Zelda’s description of the locale:

The Riviera is a seductive place. The blare of the beaten blue and those white palaces shimmering under the heat accentuates things.

And here is Scott’s:

On the pleasant shore of the French Riviera, about half way between Marseilles and the Italian border, stands a large, proud, rose-colored hotel. Deferential palms cool its flushed façade, and before it stretches a short dazzling beach… The hotel and its bright tan prayer rug of a beach were one.

Scott’s description gives us a sense of what the exclusive and sacred space the Riviera represented for a certain class of people, with hints toward deference and pride and religious piety all bound up in a few short sentences. Whereas Zelda’s own description of the same location is juvenile, the sort of thing any teenager in a creative writing class could produce. She lifts up her dress to flash you with ‘seductive’ and then refuses to go any further by retreating to the generic ‘things.’

VII.

One of the other lessons I gained from being a trial lawyer: be careful of who you call as a witness. The most seemingly eager supporters can sometimes do more harm than good.

A Moveable Feast and much of Hemingway’s correspondence during the ’20s certainly paints Zelda in a negative light — she’s shallow, vain, constantly drunk, overly materialistic, casually cruel, and oftentimes insane. She clearly interferes with Scott’s writing, both in terms of not allowing him any time away from the nightlife and by bullying him on what to write and for which publications. The feminist scholars who have been pushing the ‘Zelda as the true genius’ idea since the ’70s sideline this evidence due to Hemingway’s obvious misogyny, but even if we attempt to correct for any gendered biases, Hemingway is not actually as helpful for Scott’s case as he may seem. Despite being fond of his friend and in awe of his talent, Hemingway inadvertently (or maybe advertently) paints Scott as weak, foppish — a nancy boy, to use the parlance of the time. This too becomes part of the Fitzgerald myth.

Take, for example, how Hemingway describes Scott when he believes he has fallen sick in a hotel on their drive back from Lyon, as Hemingway tries to pamper the childish Scott despite there being nothing wrong with him:

On this evening in the hotel I was delighted that he was being so calm. I had mixed the lemonade and whisky and given it to him with two aspirins and he had swallowed the aspirins without protest and with admirable calm and was sipping his drink. His eyes were open now and were looking far away. I was reading the crime on the inside of the paper and was quite happy, too happy it seemed.

‘You’re a cold one, aren’t you?’ Scott asked and looking at him I saw that I had been wrong in my prescription, if not in my diagnosis, and that the whisky was working against us.

‘How do you mean, Scott?’

‘You can sit there and read that dirty French rag of a paper and it doesn’t mean a thing to you that I am dying.’

‘Do you want me to call a doctor?’

‘No. I don’t want a dirty French provincial doctor.’

‘What do you want?’

‘I want my temperature taken. Then I want my clothes dried and for us to get on an express train for Paris and to go to the American hospital at Neuilly.’

‘Our clothes won’t be dry until morning and there aren’t any express trains,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you rest and have some dinner in bed?’

After this went on for a long time the waiter brought a thermometer.

After Hemingway messes about with the thermometer and tries to convince Scott that it is working properly and his temperature is normal, Scott demands that Hemingway use it on himself, which he does, after which Hemingway informs Scott that they have the same temperature (despite the mechanism not actually working):

Scott was a little suspicious so I asked if he wanted me to make another test.

‘No,’ he said. ‘We can be happy it cleared up so quickly. I’ve always had great recuperative power.’

This is all played for laughs, with great comic timing, but Scott then rushes off to call Zelda with claims that the two of them “have never slept away” from each other since they were married, which Hemingway points out can’t be true in the light of Zelda’s affairs which Scott has confided in him earlier that day. The version of Scott found in A Moveable Feast is consistently like this, self-defeating and foolish, and Hemingway can’t help but do what inwardly insecure but outwardly masculine men have been doing for millennia: he makes Scott his cuckold.

It’s strange that Hemingway was able to manage this, because in many ways Scott was the stronger writer, and Hemingway knew it. But to this day, Fitzgerald is far less esteemed by MFA students than their sacred ‘Papa,’ and that is partly due to the surviving mythos of Hemingway as the clear-eyed reporter of human facts vs. Scott as the romantic weakling and cuckold. When comparing their writing, I have to admit that I’m often inclined towards Scott’s romantic modernism over Hemingway’s minimalism. Take their scene descriptions in the first chapters of each of their third novels, The Great Gatsby and A Farewell to Arms, respectively:

The wind had blown off, leaving a loud bright night with wings beating in the trees and a persistent organ sound as the full bellows of the earth blew the frogs full of life. The silhouette of a moving cat wavered across the moonlight and turning my head to watch it I saw that I was not alone—fifty feet away a figure had emerged from the shadow of my neighbor’s mansion and was standing with his hands in his pockets regarding the silver pepper of the stars. Something in his leisurely movements and the secure position of his feet upon the lawn suggested that it was Mr. Gatsby himself, come out to determine what share was his of our local heavens.

and

In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.

Scott is clearly doing a lot more work in his paragraph, drawing us toward the lush atmospheric stage his main character is about to walk upon, compared with Hemingway’s dull and repetitive reportage. I am by no means calling Hemingway a bad writer(!), but I do think we lose something in jettisoning Scott’s romanticism for Hemingway’s dry style. I think one of the reasons this happened is due to the diverging myths surrounding the two men.

Scott and Hemingway’s Paris days among the Lost Generation are key to understanding how they would go on to be viewed by the reading public, as those brief years somehow entered the literary legendarium and formed a lens through which we view them both; but we should note that it is a legend shaped largely by Hemingway himself. In the mythic version of 1920s Paris, Scott is literally cuckolded by Zelda and figuratively cuckolded by Hemingway — he will always be the simpering, fussy loser to Hemingway’s clear-headed strongman. It doesn’t help Scott that there is a smack of truth about this. He was close in upbringing and temperament to his protagonists — Nick Carroway, Amory Blaine, Anthony Patch, and Dick Diver — neurotic and physically unassuming men, who are stuck in their own heads, always analyzing and worrying, always seeking to understand the social dynamics around them. This is why it was too easy for Zelda to yank Scott’s chain. For a period, she convinced Scott that his penis was too small to bring pleasure to a woman, which required Hemingway to inspect his friend’s member, and then take Scott on a tour of the Louvre’s classical statues to prove to him that he was normally endowed. (And in evidence against Hemingway’s supposedly raging misogyny, he also instructed Scott on the use of a pillow to achieve the right angle for pleasing his wife during copulation. Ernest Hemingway, ally of female pleasure.)

It also doesn’t help Scott’s myth that he ended his life as an alcoholic suffering from cardiac arrest in his lover’s shabby Californian apartment after a failed attempt at becoming a Hollywood screenwriter, while Hemingway was snatching marlin from his Cuban cruiser and smoking cigars with Castro, his shotgun and mouth still yet to meet for another twenty-one years.

VIII.

As both and have recently pointed out, there is probably no literary character more relevant to our culture today than Patrick Bateman, the protagonist and narrator of Bret Easton Ellis’ 1991 transgressive novel American Psycho. The question arises: are Scott’s characters the progenitors of Bateman? If not, then why do so many of Scott’s leading men feel nearly psychopathic, trapped in their minds, obsessive toward people and interactions with them, inwardly observant of their own minds and thought processes but unable to reach out and truly connect with another human being, unable to give any other person access to that secret locked door buried in their selves? There is something of Patrick Bateman both Amory Blaine and Jay Gatsby: the obsession with wealth and status, with class dynamics and interpersonal slights, the focus on women and wishing to have some sort of romantic connection that never quite eventuates. But even in “Babylon Revisited,” there are hints of Bateman as a purely materialistic egregore of late ’80s capitalism. See the specificity and focus on the restaurants, the lingering regret, the sense of not existing, as Charlie moves through 1930s Paris:

Outside, the fire-red, gas-blue, ghost-green signs shone smokily through the tranquil rain. It was late afternoon and the streets were in movement; the bistros gleamed. At the corner of the Boulevard des Capucines he took a taxi. The Place de la Concorde moved by in pink majesty; they crossed the logical Seine, and Charlie felt the sudden provincial quality of the Left Bank.

Charlie directed his taxi to the Avenue de l’Opera, which was out of his way. But he wanted to see the blue hour spread over the magnificent façade, and imagine that the cab horns, playing endlessly the first few bars of La Plus que Lent, were the trumpets of the Second Empire. They were closing the iron grill in front of Brentano’s Book-store, and people were already at dinner behind the trim little bourgeois hedge of Duval’s. He had never eaten at a really cheap restaurant in Paris. Five-course dinner, four francs fifty, eighteen cents, wine included. For some odd reason he wished that he had.

As they rolled on to the Left Bank and he felt its sudden provincialism, he thought, “I spoiled this city for myself. I didn’t realize it, but the days came along one after another, and then two years were gone, and everything was gone, and I was gone.”

But as I have said before, this is also a reflection of Scott himself. His protagonists are never very far from his own nature. Which partially explains why Hemingway describes Scott as acting so oddly upon their first meeting, incessantly interviewing people about their habits, their social ethics, their sex lives. Why do they do things and do they feel what they do is wrong? It’s like an alien trying to understand the nuances of humanity’s social cues.

The episode Hemingway describes, of travelling with a neurotic and hypochondriac Scott — delusional about his own vitality while simultaneously being convinced of illnesses he doesn’t have — reveals the man to be a sadly comic character. Tragic in his self-deceit, but somewhat innocent and lovable in how he moves through the world, sympathetic because of how much he clearly doesn’t understand while yearning to. Much in the same way Amory Blaine and Jay Gatsby are sadly comic characters — nearly Machiavellian were it not for the soft underbellies we get flashes of from time to time, and which ultimately trip them up. And, come to think of it, wouldn’t Patrick Bateman also be a sadly comic character, with his status obsession and inability to connect with people, were it not for all the killing?

IX.

It is ironic that The Great Gatsby is the work Scott is most known for today, on multiple levels. First, because it was the worst-selling book of his career upon release. And second, because it is his one major departure from clearly autobiographical writing. Gatsby is the only male protagonist in all of Scott’s novels who isn’t a direct analogue for himself (leaving aside the posthumous The Last Tycoon, which was assembled and edited by his friend Edmund Wilson in 1941, and which I do not count as a true Scott novel).

With the release of This Side of Paradise in 1920, Scott, and by extension Zelda, became stars overnight, vaunted to national newspaper columns and living in the Biltmore Hotel. But their star power was more flash-in-the-pan than most realize, and the mythos of the debutante genius capable of representing the newly unshackled younger generation vanished nearly as soon as it descended. This Side of Paradise sold 40,000 copies in the first year and made Scott a household name, but The Beautiful and the Damned (1922) was panned as too depressive, leading to The Great Gatsby (1925) selling poorly. That the novel he was most proud of, the best-written work of his entire oeuvre, was not popular, bothered Scott more than almost anything else, robbing him of his confidence and allowing Zelda more purchase in her campaign for Scott to write stories that earned them money instead of critical respect. After 1925, he would never again write anything nearly as ambitious.

Upon considering his friend’s wasted writing abilities with the benefit of hindsight, Hemingway wrote:

His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly’s wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless.

By the time Hemingway wrote this, Scott had been dead for twenty-four years; penniless and pathetic in his final days, largely disregarded by the critics and general population. Zelda followed him to the grave (literally, they were buried together in a Protestant cemetery before being moved to a Catholic plot) eight years later, after being burned alive in a sanatorium, following twelve years spent inside mental facilities as a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic. And this too became part of the Fitzgerald myth: the rise and fall of a literary genius and his hard-partying wife, on a speedrun through four decades of life, burning with the quick flame of gin-slinging, foxtrotting youth, without enough time left to stage a comeback.

And then, also mythically, their reputations were resurrected due to a rediscovery of Scott’s work by generations emerging from the ashes of WWII, who were removed from all the scandal and the sadness involved. With enough time passed and the sad realities dead and buried, the mythic glories of the Jazz Age could live on.

X.

Given all of the above, it is my position — ladies and gentlemen of the jury — that Zelda, the life and death of every party she ever attended, need not be remembered as a ‘literary genius’ to be part of the pantheon of American culture. In many ways, she better embodies the national consciousness than the nervous and striving Scott, though the nature of their mutual toxicity, how they brought out the worst in each other as they entered middle age, is also deeply archetypal of our modern age. In 1929, Zelda tried to kill herself, Scott, and their daughter by seizing the steering wheel of the car as they drove through the French Alps, which marked her as possessing ‘a homicidal mania.’ And upon Zelda’s initial treatment for schizophrenia in 1932, Scott wrote the following to one of the doctors at John Hopkins Hospital, laying out the nature of their mutual destruction:

Perhaps fifty percent of our friends and relatives would tell you in all honest conviction that my drinking drove Zelda insane—the other half would assure you that her insanity drove me to drink. Neither judgement would mean anything.

Acutely aware of how to transpose fact into myth, of how to transpose sad realities into higher legends, Scott was unable to discern any meaning behind the widening gyres of his and Zelda’s increasing instabilities. He couldn’t see how to escape the downward-spiralling effect they had on each other.

But none of this, none of the myth-making or tragic personal histories, changes the fact that Scott was the first great American writer of the 20th Century. At his best, he possessed a precocious talent for revealing the true nature of the modern man — cunning, conniving, intelligent, obsessive, but vulnerable in his felt isolation. And he was able to imbue the settings and atmosphere of his work with a unity of action, serving to twist the whole world onto the focal point of the story, the desperate man and his female obsession. That his characters are frequently disoriented by the pace of cultural progress is also prescient for the age that was to come, even as Scott and Zelda themselves broke taboos and set new patterns for how young artists in the limelight were to behave.

And more than any of his peers, Scott represents a firm commitment to autofiction, to the mythologizing of his life as he lived it, in a way that most writers only attempt at the end of their careers out of nostalgia, like Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast.1

Ultimately, Zelda may have been in the right to accuse Scott of lifting pages of her diaries or correspondence, though she certainly saw no issue with using the structure of his draft novel for her own attempt at literature. But these minor events are superfluous to the underlying argument. At the end of the day, it’s clear that F. Scott Fitzgerald achieved what very few writers can, which is to completely mythologize and cannibalize his own life, and alchemize stellar literature from that process.

To me, F. Scott Fitzgerald is a tragic genius, a cautionary tale, a man whose talent I admire even as I pity the course of his life. It is a tragedy that his best work was not duly recognized during his lifetime, and that he died so young. But for us to now discredit his genius and thus tarnish his legacy, by giving credit to someone it does not belong to, is both dishonest and cruel. The truly under-appreciated should always get their due, but to create a myth in order to steal it — that certainly is a bridge too far.

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Nobody reads anymore. Or, to put it more accurately, nobody reads like they used to.

Well, except for you, of course.

This should not come as a surprise to those of us living through the late-stage evolutions of the Information Age. We have all bore witness to the rise of epochal technologies like the iPhone and the social media platforms that followed suit, which have drastically altered our information consumption habits. In an age where the static, written word must compete with AI-powered, auto-scrolling algorithms and stimulating short-form video content, the former loses. Badly.

Over the last twenty years there has been a 42% drop in the number of those who read for pleasure daily, according to an analysis of the American Time Use Survey.1 When paired with the fact that 19% of American adults were responsible for 82% of the country’s reading, the picture becomes stark.2 There are myriad theories as to why people are reading less: An individual preference for low-friction media, lowered cultural importance on intellectuality, laziness. The usual suspects. All valid, yet missing a critical component. There are deeper factors at play.

Seldom discussed is the startling, near exponential increase in the average person’s daily informational intake. At present, we consume an average of 74 gigabytes of information per day through the use of computers, cell-phones, tablets, and other technologies. This is the same amount of information that a highly educated individual would consume in an entire lifetime just 500 years ago.3 In the past, there were real constraints around how much information one could absorb. Information was scarce. Readers engaged with works over longer periods of time. The language had time to settle into the mind of the reader, helping shape their internal standards for the written word. Contrast this with our time: the age of information abundance. Information is cheap now, and we take it wherever we can get it. Our language habits reflect this shift: the quality of our words, thoughts, and ideas has fallen off a cliff. The human brain is adaptable, but a jump this substantial leads to an evolutionary mismatch, resulting in what some researchers are calling “the capacity challenge.”

Our brains evolved to efficiently process limited sets of relevant data and, as expected, run into difficulties when faced with seemingly unlimited amounts of irrelevant information. This is one of the main reasons we have seen an unprecedented rise in the number of mental health issues over the last decade.4 We are not machines, we are biological beings with finite stores of attention and linguistic processing capabilities. Yet, the world we live in is designed to bombard us with nearly infinite input, overloading our brains as a result.

The informational onslaught begins every morning with an iPhone-assisted awakening, followed by a carousel of stimulation. Consider a typical workday: You’ve responded to forty-seven emails, toggled between eight browser tabs for a single task, and spent your commute home absorbing a podcast at 1.5x speed. By evening, when it is finally time to relax, the prospect of sitting with a challenging novel feels less like leisure and more like another demand on an already depleted system. You’ve waited for this moment all day, yet can’t bring yourself to open up War and Peace, opting to reach for the remote instead. After a day of your attention being scattered, your brain is burnt, leaving you less likely to slow down, sit still, and silently read the book you said you’d finish months ago.

For much of human history, the written word was one of the most potent drugs we had access to. There was a stretch of time when books, magazines, and newspapers were the main medium through which leisure and novelty was had. Lively scenes were conjured out of nothing but ink printed on papyrus, telepathy made possible through the carrier signal of controlled hand movements and ink. It was magic. The transition from agricultural and industrial work being at the core of human society to administrative knowledge work only expedited the downfall of our reading habits. We labored and exhausted our bodies first, minds second. After a long day of physically demanding work, we relished the opportunity to finally focus our mental energy on the words of our favorite authors, resting our bodies and renewing our minds. Now, in the age of bureaucratic knowledge work, we spend most of our time exhausting our thinking minds. At the end of a workday, our mind has processed exponentially more bits of data than our ancestors did when working in fields and factories. The pace of life has sped up, the stimulation levels have multiplied, all while our brains have remained the same as they were before.

If we wish to have the requisite amount of energy needed to fully engage with a piece of text, we need to create space in other areas of our day. In creating space for our minds, we allow our energy, our attention, to remain stored for when we need to call on it the most. We must, on an individual level, decide to unshackle ourselves while we still hold the key: choosing high-friction activities like reading, reducing unnecessary information intake by learning to be bored again, and deleting the most damaging of the short-form social media apps.

Personally, I’ve struggled with this, as these apps often double as a way to stay in parasocial contact with friends and family, something that feels necessary in our increasingly isolated world. Yet this cheapening of human-to-human socialization is but another reason to free ourselves from these algorithmic grips. These applications are not suitable replacements for the social contact and creative input that we need most. I have rid the most damaging of the apps from my phone to avoid temptation, making mindful efforts to interact with the people and ideas I value most. Our minds are in the process of being depleted and commodified by technological innovations led by corporations who have made their intentions clear: profiting off of our valuable time and attention. Our brains are being digitally drained of the ability to sit in silent stillness, which is why choosing to sit with a book is liberating in a world tailored for stimulation.

We can choose to lead less digital, information-dense lives by disavowing the digital products whose main aims are to capture and hold our attention. The past can never be again, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t borrow some of their behaviors and lifestyle choices to help us reclaim our minds and our time, the two fundamentals needed to lead a fulfilling life. The future of literature, of educated society, rests in our willingness to reject the lifestyle that is praised as normal today, leaving behind the cheaper, less-fulfilling forms of entertainment in favor of the slower, but richer, mediums of the written word.

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The imperial idea cannot unite people with gadgets. The iPhone and the imperial idea are fundamentally incompatible. But feudalism and the iPhone—those can coexist just fine.

— Vladimir Sorokin

In the fourth century BCE, Zoroastrians establish a temple in the Altai Mountains at a deposit of native tellurium. The cave is called Maktulu — “The Glorious.” On the wall, an image of the sun is laid out in pure tellurium, a rare silvery, glistening metal. Forty-eight people hammer tellurium nails, forty-two millimetres in size, into each other’s heads. Then they seal the entrance from the inside. Much later, in 1782, tellurium is first discovered in the gold ores of Transylvania. Fast forward, in 2013, Vladimir Sorokin publishes the novel Telluria.

In 2022, Chinese archaeologists discover the Maktulu cave. Scientists from the Institute of Brain Research at Peking University and from Stanford University conduct research on volunteers: tellurium nails, hammered into a specific spot in the head, induce sustained euphoria and a sense of time loss. Lethal outcomes are not uncommon. In 2026, a UN convention bans experiments with tellurium nails. The nails are classified as a heavy narcotic.

In 2028, a military coup in the Barabin province of Altai happens, resulting in the establishment of the Democratic Republic of Telluria, which becomes the only country in the world where tellurium nails are not classified as a narcotic.

Over the following two decades, a succession of civil wars engulfs Russia, ending in its disintegration. Europe is struck by the “Wahhabi hammer” — a protracted and bloody war with Islamists, which Europe wins with enormous losses, but also collapses into a multitude of micro-states. Thus, in the 2060s, the era of the New Middle Ages begins — an enlightened feudalism with future technologies: smart gadgets, robots, combat exoskeletons, and so on. After all the wars, people are tired of suffering and seek happiness. To achieve it, they hammer tellurium nails into their heads to attend a séance with Sorokin and become characters in his novel Telluria, so that in 2013 he would actually publish it — because how else can you explain all this?

At the release, the novel immediately attracts attention, firstly of course because it’s a new Sorokin novel after a long break, and secondly because it’s not quite a novel at all. At the final debates for the “Novaya Slovestnost’” (kind of New Literature) prize in 2014–2015, the jury spends seventy percent of their time discussing Telluria specifically, hence contemporary literature at large, arguing over what matters more — its artistic language or the fact that it represented something greater than a novel, an attempt to explode the linguistic environment of the exhausted conservative forms. Some critics see Telluria as the pinnacle of Sorokin’s craft, others as too radical an experiment, but no one remains indifferent, and the novel resounds across the literary scene as an event that prompts a rethinking of genre boundaries and the relationship between literature and reality.

In interviews, Sorokin himself admits that Telluria can no longer be called a novel — it’s some other form of long prose for which there is no name yet, “a layered, scaly literary creature,” he calls it. The book, as we can surely call it, consists of fifty untitled and numbered chapters of varying length, each written in its own style, with its own language, telling separate stories about completely different characters: from conventional narratives to impersonal dialogues, plays, letters, chapters in invented languages, stream of consciousness without punctuation, manifestos, prayers, and much more. At first glance, Sorokin has no interest whatsoever in his characters, only in speech and their type of consciousness, and it seems he could have continued writing such chapters indefinitely, though he says he loves them equally and they are “free people who can make their own choices.” Yet the chapters themselves are also interesting, engaging, compelling, and often hilarious, but it is their sum that transforms them into something greater.

For this reason, it’s difficult to talk about Telluria as a book with a plot — such a conversation would devolve into listing chapters and ranking them (such lists probably already exist), or about particular chapters and the wonderful variety of linguistic and plot devices they employ — that would be pointless, take ages, and undermine the idea of the book itself. It is, in a sense, an encyclopedia of Telluria, a book of its lore, but told not by an omniscient narrator from above, but by its own characters, little people — from below. It has to be read to be truly experienced.

At the same time, we must note that the structural form itself — “a novel in stories,” “a novel in episodes” that may be unconnected — is something Sorokin himself started with in the ’80s, and many others have written such “novels” too: Ulitskaya, Bitov, Shalamov, Dovlatov, to name a few. For Russian literature, this has become the norm (pun not intended). Nor is it an innovation that each chapter is written in its own language — take, for example, Ulysses, a stylistic encyclopedia of English literature. (Joyce has, by the way, an immense impact on contemporary Russian literature, partially due to how late he slipped into it, partially due to his attention and obsession with language, so dear to Russian literary metaphysics.) The approach to world-building and many of the tropes Sorokin employs are not unique either; on the contrary, the book uses a mass of Sorokin’s signature devices: the description of society through the consumption of a certain substance from The Norm, the miraculous properties of a substance from the Ice Trilogy, and what he does better than anyone: taking fears, jokes, anecdotes — anything — and interpreting them literally, turning them into satirical and grotesque literary constructions that would simply fall apart in the hands of a less skilled author. But, in Sorokin’s hands, they become alive and paradoxically believable, even more real than the real. So why and how does the novel work? What makes it great?

The true achievement of Telluria is that it resolves thematic tension at the level of form alone. Here, Sorokin elevates to an absolute, transforming from merely experimental or unusual into the statement itself: the world is fragmented, so the book is fragmented, too; there is no single language (even within one language like Russian), and there should be no single style; people have ceased to be historical objects, and there are no protagonists any more, or, therefore, everyone is one. Each chapter is written in its own style, creating the effect of an encyclopedia of Russian speech and language, both real, parodied and imitated, or invented. Paradoxically, the book’s success lies in the absence of a unified tone. A non-linear, chaotic, and polyphonic world requires a non-linear, chaotic, and polyphonic novel. If in the XIX century it is possible to write a great novel — say, War and Peace — by the early twentieth century it becomes harder, after the Second World War — ever so harder, and with the emergence of the internet and the smartphone — utterly impossible. The classical novel, as Sorokin himself says in interviews, is doomed to archaization, no matter how vivid the feelings and story the author invests in it. What is needed now, he says, is a different language to describe reality, a new form, and Telluria is an attempt to find it.

In this sense, the book becomes a new utopia, both linguistic and literary. Sorokin builds and destroys his own Tower of Babel — showing how this could happen, again both metaphorically and literally (which he loves), in the present or near future. The world has begun to fragment, and describing it with a single language — single register — and linear development is impossible. If the world is fragmented, it must be described in the language of fragmentation, this is what makes both the form and the themes of Telluria increasingly relevant today.

If in the mid-2000s Sorokin’s novels looked satirical and grotesque, then with Putin’s third term, Sorokin’s metaphors began to reproduce themselves in reality. Everyone knows that life in Russia is built according to the laws of literature, but as it turns out, the whole world seems to live by Sorokin’s novels now too. At the time of the novel’s release in 2014, no one expected that fundamentalists would seize power in many Middle Eastern countries, that right-wing and far-right parties would gain ground in European elections, that the immigration crisis would loop and xenophobia would rise, that there would be a series of referendums on separation and independence of one from another, that there would be a series of terrorist attacks, that there would be a pandemic, that Russia would launch a full-scale war in Ukraine, and that the political arena would be captured by a primal-emotional, archaic-feudal rhetoric, as Sorokin himself describes: “everything is sliding towards medieval rhetoric, towards the confrontation of feudal lords: who has more servants, more lands, whose hunting is better.” The world of Telluria, with its cascading de-modernisation, neo-archaism, disintegration of states, and rise of religious fundamentalism, turned out to be far more real than it seemed in 2013. Globalisation, multiculturalism, and liberal democracy seem now far more fragile, as does faith in progress and ideology and the ability of the world to firmly stand in balance in general. But for all this grimness, Telluria is not a novel about catastrophe or apocalypse but about what happens after, and about what form that “after” might take.

The social phobias, pains, tendencies, and dreams of our epoch take on physical form in the book. Telluria becomes their manifestation, an answer to the question: what if everything that completely different people want were to finally happen? In the case of Russia and Europe, this means, for example, the disintegration of states, totalitarianism, Sinification, Stalinism, Islamism, the retvrn of the Crusaders, robots, bioterrorism, genetic mutations, and so on — there is nothing in it that doesn’t already exist around us in one way or another. Thus Eurasia disintegrates into city-states, micro-states, kingdoms, principalities, and each part goes mad in its own way, in its striving to distance itself from the others to emphasise its uniqueness and establish its own rules. At the same time, Sorokin deliberately ignores almost the entire world outside of Europe and Russia. Decentralization becomes the principle of world order, thus creating a global anarchy without a world police: no UN, no “international community,” no uni- or multipolarity. This is not chaos in the sense of complete disorder, but chaos in the sense of the absence of a single order. Telluria is not a global dystopia, but a local fantasy of Eurasian total “balkanisation” with a resulting hundred micro-utopias. Sorokin then mixes all of this with Soviet and post-Soviet aesthetics, folklore, science fiction, and even fantasy, which for the most part creates a uniquely cosy comic effect.

My house is on the edge [I mind my own business] — yes! The winds of the future smell like such a world. If you look into the Moscow metro or a European café, you’ll see people sitting, buried in their gadgets. The fragmentation has already happened, the world is atomising. Borders will be drawn where a person’s privacy ends. The world will fragment even more — into apartment-states, human-sized states. The idea of some common collective happiness linked to progress, to integration — is doomed. There’s no European who wouldn’t say that the EU is doomed. In Europe, states as such are on the periphery of people’s vision. People aren’t very ideologised, and the words ‘homeland,’ ‘state,’ ‘patriotism’ induce yawning. In Telluria, there’s nowhere left for a person to hurry: empires have collapsed, one must solve purely personal problems.

— Vladimir Sorokin

People in Telluria have ceased to be historical objects — they simply live their lives. This is the end of Hegelian history, but not in Fukuyama’s sense (the triumph of liberalism); rather, in the sense of the collapse of the very idea that people are material for the historical process, and that there exist a number of great empires that drive people somewhere and govern their fates. Instead, there are only little, ordinary people in a human-sized world. A person can once again take in their reality at a glance: know their neighbours, understand the rules, influence their surroundings. In the global, historical world, a person is a statistical unit; in Telluria — in a timeless, non-historical world — a person is once again a subject, which creates an interesting paradox: the world becomes smaller, and the person within it becomes larger.

In many ways this makes Telluria the most accurate rendering of an MMORPG in literature. There is barely a single plot, no protagonist — everyone lives their own story. The world exists as a sandbox, as a space for parallel activities. Lore is revealed not through a central narrative, but through quests, NPCs, notes — from below. The feudal structure is like guilds and factions. The happiness-granting tellurium nails are like legendary loot giving you exactly what you want. There is no endgame, no victory, just endless existence in a world where everyone optimizes their personal fun: some raid, some craft, some do PvP, some sit in the tavern and role-play. All of them are equally valid, and everyone is equally happy, because they all have tellurium.

Tellurium becomes the überidea, “the theory of everything” of the novel: a miraculous metal that brings happiness. Tellurium nails are hammered by specially trained “carpenters” into the heads of those who wish it, guaranteeing indescribable pleasure, enlightenment, and the fulfilment of dreams. Tellurium nails become both a universal aspiration and a universal currency — everyone dreams of the mythical metal mined in the Republic of Telluria. People want from tellurium what they once sought in the divine, the concept of religion and God becomes secondary and redundant, and finally the third psychedelic revolution occurs.

Tellurium, for all its miraculous properties, is non-addictive and has no side effects. This is crucial because hammering a tellurium nail into your head or not is not an impulse led by addiction, but a conscious choice for each sane person. A person does not become a slave to tellurium, does not become a degenerate, does not lose him or herself. Dying from having a nail hammered into your brain is, however, possible. There is some risk even if an experienced carpenter does it for you. You risk your life in exchange for absolute freedom. Despite all the differences between people (and also giants, gnomes, centaurs, cynocephali, and so on) in the fragmented and chaotic world, they all understand one language — the language of happiness.

Looking back, what is the world of Telluria — utopia or dystopia?

The proverbial secret third thing: a rejection of the very concept of an ideal world, and consequently of its opposite. It is simultaneously chaos and liberation: a dystopia for those who believe in a common monolithic future and the collective progress of civilization — in one überidea capable of uniting everyone, be it philosophy, religion, or even a grand common threat — and simultaneously a world of pluralistic happiness where everyone finds joy, a literal physical realization of humanity’s collective unconscious of our epoch — a personal monstrous utopia that everyone secretly wants but is afraid to admit.

And so the tellurium nail goes in.

Look at our Eurasian continent: after the collapse of ideological, geopolitical, and technological utopias, it has finally sunk into a blessed enlightened Middle Ages. The world has become human-sized. Nations have found themselves. Man has ceased to be the sum of technologies. Mass production is living out its final years. There are no two identical nails that we hammer into humanity’s heads. People have regained their sense of things, started eating healthy food, switched to horses. Genetic engineering helps a person feel their true size. Man has regained faith in the transcendental. Regained the sense of time. We are not rushing anywhere anymore. And most importantly — we understand that there can be no technological paradise on Earth. And no paradise at all. Earth is given to us as an island of struggle, and everyone picks their own struggle and how to overcome it. Themselves!

— Telluria, Chapter XXVIII, Vladimir Sorokin

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Outside the monographs of the academic historian—which, of course, are never read—every generation is reduced to three or four pictures that fade as time flees, until by the work of the world’s immanent compression algorithm, the most disparate groups of people are combined into an “age” or “period.”

Properly “capturing” a generation or particular period in time is then a quixotic and, naturally, exclusionary task.

It’s uncontroversial to say that The Great Gatsby was a generational novel but this is not because Fitzgerald captures what it was like to live in the 1920s for many different sorts of people. It is because his genius seems to peel back everything incidental and disposable and properly judge the entire age. The same could be said of the best novels by Updike, Wharton, Cheever, etc. This is what we should want from a “Great Millennial Novel.” We have not yet been satisfied.

Why not? Is it too early to estimate the lasting literary contribution of Millennial writers to this pursuit? I don’t think so. Bret Easton Ellis doesn’t think so.1 The oldest millennials are in their forties. Mailer was famous at twenty-five. Fitzgerald at twenty-three. Zadie Smith at twenty-five. Even Wallace, our last true literary celebrity, broke out in his mid-twenties. By their early thirties—certainly in the case of Mailer, Fitzgerald, and Wallace—they’d written generational works.

Before turning towards much-lauded millennial candidates, is there perhaps some systemic issue at play?

In his final book,Talents and Technicians, which the Washington Post called “a nasty little piece of work,” critic John Aldridge was happy to play the old codger and lambast the trendiest writers of the 1980s: Raymond Carver, Anne Beattie, and the minimalists for a nihilistic shallowness. Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis for substituting a muddled depiction of wealthy hedonism for a full-throated critique of the age.

Aldridge is cranky, overly conservative, and too certain of his conclusions. But his derisive attitude towards the contemporary fiction of the 1970s and 1980s sheds much-needed light on how the current state of literature will appear to posterity.2

The essential problem Aldridge raises is simple: there is a tension between being a great novelist and the sort of writer who would be called “the voice of a generation.” A tension between being the writer who can adequately describe the facts of being alive at a particular time in a way that is compelling to immediate readers, and being the writer capable of vivisection, the sort of writer capable of reading entrails and telling us what we do not already know about the age, or know but cannot articulate. It is not exactly a lack of talent: more a lack of nerve. Either too much love for the time you’re writing about—often a consequence of literary success, fame, or nostalgia—or a bitter sense that the period is ultimately unintelligible. You can tell Aldridge yearns for the days of Mailer and Roth as he blames MFAs, the academization of both criticism and fiction-writing, and all those other explanations you’ve been hearing about in bits and pieces for the last thirty years. But what he claims is still true. Many contemporary novels have succeeded in their verisimilitude, giving readers the sense of being trapped in the internet, making them pine for the days that preceded it. Yet none have made the reader aware of something fundamentally new. In other words, as Algridge argues, many lauded writers can reflect contemporary reality, but do not actually give us “a reality perceived, understood, and imaginatively transformed by an extraordinary mind.” They tie themselves too tightly to the times for the sake of contemporary success. This goes beyond book sales, as many of the writers he discusses did not sell well, to intangibles like MFA clout or status among the high-brow New York literati.

These writers produce accurate work but “treat personal life as if it were a phenomenon existing totally apart from society and without connotations that would give it meaningful relevance to a general human condition or dilemma—in the sense, for example, that Heller’s Yossarian or Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim become representative both of human types and of problems shared by an entire generation.” A generational novel should be able to lay out these problems and posit a resolution of some sort through the writer’s genius. This is what we would like to read.

For any writer born after the 1960s, the trade-off between contemporary “success” and lasting endurance has posed a grave challenge to so-called generational writers. Aldridge’s book was written in 1992. Raymond Carver, Anne Beattie, Jay McInerney, Bret Easton Ellis (though not necessarily for his literary merit), Louise Erdrich, and Mary Robinson have escaped the great literary oblivion for now (with a caveat for the minimalists who have benefitted from significant taxpayer funds and the wasted careers of their mentees). In spite of their prizes, residencies, and grants, who will be reading David Leavitt, T. C. Boyle, Lorrie Moore, Amy Hempel, Bobbie Ann Mason, or even poor Frederick Barthelme (overshadowed by his brother) in another thirty years? Am I wrong to think no one? To suggest that these writers have tied themselves too tightly to their times and sacrificed immortality for a bevy of prestige in their own little world of tenure, “Genius” grants, and Pulitzer nominations?

They were not wrong, per se, to do so. The tragedy of millennial writers is that many prostituted themselves for even less: status in irrelevant scenes, dead in a year, always ending in ridicule and a worthless heap of words. At least they built institutions and seduced college kids (not always a metaphor, unfortunately) into believing that the purpose of their lives was to get an MFA. In a sense they succeeded. Good for them.

But the contemporary writers that followed don’t even have that to count on. They have fallen back into Aldridge’s trap. We can pathologize and make excuses: the world is changing too quickly, we’re too disconnected from one another, there is no meaning to be found anywhere. If I was a millennial writer, that’s what I would do. I’d throw my hands up in the air. Who do you think I am, Flaubert? I publish in a small press. I teach college kids. I do coke with other thirty-five year-olds at parties.

In any case, while Aldridge’s diagnosis—that for various reasons writers would rather describe than vivesect—explains why so many of the once-lauded millennial writers and their novels have not had literary staying power, some of them certainly have. There are candidates. Sally Rooney is “the first great millennial novelist.” Tony Tulathimutte’s Private Citizens “[t]he first great millennial novel.” Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation “might just answer the cry for a so-called millennial novel.”3 Will these books last? I’m not sure.

Grading on a curve, the two books that come closest to being the “Great Millennial Novel”—by judging the period in a convincing way and not just describing it—are Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation and Tao Lin’s Taipei. This does not bode well for millennials. These two novels create such an atmosphere of nausea that I could not read twenty straight pages of either without starting to feel sick. Though formally different, these books converge on a judgement of sorts: the millennial subject was failed by childish parents and left to rot in a hollowed-out world.

Before giving these two novels a closer look, let’s consider some of the less successful attempts. Tony Tulathimutte’s Private Citizens, often referred to as the first “Great Millennial Novel” after its release, Sally Rooney’s Normal People (a shoo-in), and Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School.4

Tony Tulathimutte is a good writer. His 2016 debut Private Citizens is full of carefully organized facts about Bay Area life in the mid-2000s, passed through four narrators in a perfect free-indirect style worthy of a James Wood blurb. Realism with such a subtle touch, a book where the author is everywhere and nowhere, runs the risk of falling into Aldridge’s trap. But Tulathimutte, unlike many contemporary writers, does not describe without the faintest hint of irony. He invokes Balzac. His characters are attempts at loveable grotesques—a tech-nerd gooner, an ex-vagabond grad-student, a well-meaning but frustrated activist—over-inflated blimps off of which hang signs that say: “Something has gone wrong.”

But the problem, Tony, is that there are too many problems. Private Citizens is the novel equivalent of that infamous buzzword, “polycrisis,” where an intellectual attempts to show that everything wrong with contemporary life is connected in order to secure tenure. Car accidents, rape, drug addiction, cheating, racism, pornography addiction, homelessness, bad sex—Private Citizens has everything but, like “polycrisis,” the breadth confuses rather than clarifies. The reader is left wondering about the ultimate value of this impressive assemblage—a great tower of dated references and lurid, yet presumably relatable, scenarios.

Since he does not convincingly order the novel’s incidents, Tulathimutte leaves the reader to garner their pleasure from nostalgic recognition—of brands, fashion-styles, and fugacious speech-patterns. Writing for The Guardian, Sarah Ditum sums up perfectly what Private Citizens achieves:

What results is a time capsule rather than a novel. Private Citizens repeatedly spins you out of the fiction to check when smartphones became ubiquitous, or at what time the word “cishet” might plausibly have appeared in the vocabulary of the right-on, or when describing oneself as a “ronin” or “ninja” became a tedious habit in the creative industries. Tulathimutte reliably gets these details right, but details are all they are. They signify little more than nostalgia. In the absence of complex characters and a detailed social world, Private Citizens is less Middlemarch and more I Love the 00s.

“Time capsule” is no exaggeration. You cannot read a page of Private Citizens without sentences like:

“Day-Glo satin headband, all inked up like some community mural, high-waisted shorts like denim diapers.”

“Linda’s attention ran out across the dim loud bar. All was so douchey, so fug: the Roman sandals and harem pants, feather hair extensions, feather earrings, guys wearing T-shirts of the tech companies they worked for, or that guy wearing . . . cat ears?”

“He teaches her the Tao of the freebie—music off Soulseek, movies off BitTorrent, booze from house parties, furniture from Craigslist, craggy lemons from the bushes on West Campus.”

Without transforming the fleeting impressions of life in the early 2000s into something solid—a proper judgment—Private Citizens ties itself to the salience of these impressions, of which we forget more and more (and more are born who will never be able to “remember” them). And so the book was doomed to be a period piece at best, which is, of course, what it now is. No one is going around in 2025 and hawking Private Citizens as the Great Millennial Novel. Tulathimutte’s book best serves as a warning. While dense with gathered details, it is not an improvement on the “surface-level” minimalists that Aldridge critiques, because, despite Tulathimutte’s efforts, he does not effectively do anything with them.

On the other hand, in his 2019 novel, The Topeka School, Ben Lerner organizes his memories of teenage life in the 1990s and juxtaposes them against contemporary experience—with a clear sense of purpose, in shimmering workshop prose. Lerner is impervious to the complaints lodged against Tulathimutte and the hip minimalists writers of the ’80s and ’90s as read by Aldridge. Lerner’s problem is just that he’s wrong. He has the misfortune of judging the age through a framework on its last legs—a therapeutic NPR liberalism so hopelessly naive and out-of-touch that reading this book, published only seven years ago, feels like being thrown into an alien world.

There is subtlety and care in Lerner’s portrayal of Topeka, his younger self, and the flaws of his parents. But he cannot help using all this material (along with the awkward insertion of political rants) to tell a very simple fairytale. The guilty phrase in Lerner’s world, which he cannot help repeating again and again, is “boys will be boys.” For him, there is a straight line from the childish anger of male adolescence to Donald Trump. The implied solution? Therapy. Ben Lerner confesses his deepest secrets, and airs out his parents’ failures in graphic detail, all to write a millennial bildungsroman whose closest relative is a 2016 Slate article.

It feels trite to say in 2026, but the moral battleground of millennial life has not been misogyny. There is no simple causal chain stretching from the existence of privileged white “man-children” to the election of Donald Trump. Moshfegh, in My Year of Rest and Relaxation, treats history more fairly when 9/11 forces her narrator out of her stupor. The world’s chaos is not subdued for a moral lesson about how to be a “good heckin person.” Instead it becomes a drug. For the millennial, history is not a nightmare to be awoken from, but a stimulant that staves off eternal sleep.5 As the marijuana grew more potent, history’s value as a drug has inexorably diminished from the days of Lerner’s Boomer father:

Then there was the world: it was 1969, little improvised bombs detonating across Manhattan, perpetual campus protests; there was outrage, but also a sense of community, of carnival; we felt that history was alive. Jane and I were both increasingly active in the antiwar movement; my younger brother, who would prefer to be left out of a novel, was in the nascent Weather Underground; my father and I were barely speaking after our last fight over the war; all the orders, personal and political, were crumbling.

Today we read and can only laugh sadly at Lerner’s own whimper of a protest ending:

We found Natalia, and Luna hugged her and asked her to lift her up onto her shoulders, which Natalia did. One of the organizers stood on a stone bench and yelled, “Mic check,” and we all yelled it back. The “human microphone,” the “people’s mic,” wherein those gathered around a speaker repeat what the speaker says in order to amplify a voice without permit requiring equipment. It embarrassed me, it always had, but I forced myself to participate, to be part of a tiny public speaking, a public learning slowly how to speak again, in the middle of the spread.

What is so unfortunate about The Topeka School is how much of a missed opportunity it is. Lerner dwells on the conflict between successive generations; the effect of the parents on the child, which Moshfegh and Lin examine mercilessly, but he cannot see the irony of his parents’ generation’s experiences juxtaposed against his, or how the attitude of that generation might have immiserated his own. Tangled in his therapeutic frame, he can only blame them for not going far enough: for being unable to stamp out the noxious misogyny that—though Lerner can never quite explain how—singlehandedly holds up “the age of the angry white men proclaiming the end of civilization.” The Topeka School fails not because Lerner won’t judge the period from outside of itself, but because he only attempts to vivisect the times with the bluntest of instruments.

It is hard to talk about Sally Rooney because one has the sense both that there is little left to be said, but also that the powers that be have barely set limits on what one can say about her. For many, Rooney is a scapegoat. She is accused of writing MFA prose, this writer who famously does not have an MFA. She is pilloried for being political and for not being political enough. She is savaged for “pretending” not to work hard. “It’s fine,” ten thousand broke artists and graduate students say, smiling with wolves’ teeth, “she can take it.” Why? She has succeeded where all of us have failed, and in the impoverished space of contemporary letters, there is no greater crime you can commit than that. I will try for restraint in the face of this endless catty chatter. But, will the work endure? Does she succeed in cutting up millennial life and revealing something wholly original and lasting? I don’t think so.

To treat her 2018 book Normal People as a millennial novel, of course, requires that we find the heart of the times in a single relationship. It is not at all like Moshfegh’s grim parable, Lin’s autofictional eye camera, Lerner’s morality play, or Tulathimutte’s conjured nostalgia.6

Normal People is written like it is a romance. There is tremendous tension in the sparse believable sentences. There can be no doubt that her characters have absent-mindedly strayed into something called love. But there can also be no doubt that, with Rooney’s complicity, they grotesquely misinterpret the situation they’ve arrived in over and over again. The language they use to discuss their relationship continually crushes it:

“from the other room Marianne said: Imagine how bitter I’m going to be when you meet someone else and fall in love. She often makes little jokes like this.”

“Marianne hasn’t seen him since May. He moved home after the exams and she stayed in Dublin. He said he wanted to see other people and she said: Okay. Now, because she was never really his girlfriend, she’s not even his ex-girlfriend. She’s nothing.”

“Look, he says, I probably should have told you before, but I’ve been seeing someone. I’ve been with her for a while, I should have mentioned it to you.”

And yet the dichotomy Rooney sets up in the plot is not about overcoming the sheer poverty of these phrases culture has given them for grappling with love, but about treating love as “freeing” rather than “dominating” (crudely represented by the circus of abusers Marianne is made to deal with). This culminates in one final act of freeing love: the presumed sacrifice of a love they both know they will never feel for anyone else. Thus Connell goes to America to get an MFA:

She closes her eyes. He probably won’t come back, she thinks. Or he will, differently. What they have now they can never have back again. But for her the pain of loneliness will be nothing to the pain that she used to feel, of being unworthy. He brought her goodness like a gift and now it belongs to her. Meanwhile his life opens out before him in all directions at once. They’ve done a lot of good for each other. Really, she thinks, really. People can really change one another.

Lauren Oyler sums it up perfectly: “It’s so reasonable it’s almost absurd, though NYU acceptance as a happy ending is very millennial.” What betrays Rooney, is that there is not a hint of irony. This really is intended to be a happy ending. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I read this in The Guardian:

But what lifts it beyond Conversations is that there’s so much hope here. Marianne has “never believed herself fit to be loved by any person” but Connell has set her free from that place and, whatever happens next, it’s clear that this effect will be long-lasting. In fact, perhaps the question of whether these two will end up together isn’t even the real question. Love changes us, but it also frees us and, as Rooney asserts here so very triumphantly, no one can take that away.

Normal People is actually an anti-romance. In an age blatantly deprived of romance—where inimical values are raised in its stead (“self-discovery,” “independence,” “freedom,” and “financial well-being)”—how can it be anything more than a mirror of how we already think? How can it reveal anything we do not already find seeped into our lives? Is it cynical to wonder if the great financial success of Normal People and Conversations with Friends is because they affirm a way of life that we’ve sleepwalked into? That while Rooney avoids the trap of focusing on what will soon be dated exteriors, like Tulathimutte, or judging what has already passed as a naive moral fairytale, like Lerner, the lessons she extracts are so bound up with the shifting sensibilities of now, that they have already begun to rot?

In Normal People, Rooney performs a bait-and-switch: replacing (or perhaps apologizing for the replacement that has already happened) an older ideal conception of love with one fit for our times. This is why Normal People is both romantic and anti-romantic, and why any attempt to treat it as a generational novel is doomed from the start. Although it might appear otherwise, it is not clear that Rooney is taking up a critical attitude towards the times except in ancillary ways. No one has fallen into Aldridge’s trap more than Rooney has, and no writer has been more richly rewarded for reiterating how we’ve already been taught to feel about love. Rooney has picked out the wrong problems and proffered us the answers we’ve already heard.

There is a dearth of platitudes about learning from failure, but how much can we learn from literature that does not go all the way—literature that is destined to, and perhaps already is beginning to, fade from our memory with every passing year?

To give the most extreme example, in his book The Georgian Revolt, Robert H. Ross notes that:

In 1911 the future of English poetry seemed to rest in the hands of poets like Stephen Phillips and William Watson.

You could spend two hundred years analyzing the verse of these two forgotten poets and never come any closer to predicting the bounty of literary innovation that awaited English poetry over the next decade. Some projects, the age judges, are simply dead ends.

But is that really the case here? I’m not sure the issue is a lack of formal inventiveness or craft. Compared with the books I’ve discussed, the two novels that I think come closest to succeeding as millennial novels differ more in degree than in kind.

The three books above all fail to fulfill our central demand of a generational novel—to make the age answerable. Tony Tulathimutte knows something has gone wrong, but cannot find the root cause. Ben Lerner’s judgement is superficial. And Sally Rooney does not actually judge at all because she draws conclusions that were already received and commonplace.

Ottessa Moshfegh and Tao Lin are strange bedfellows. But their “generational” novels, unlike those writers, go further and converge on the same penetrating critique of millennial life from opposite directions. And so, it is their novels, if any, that most deserve the title of “Great Millennial Novel.”

How could anyone call Ottessa Moshfegh’s 2018 novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation (a “BookTok” staple) a great millennial novel (and I am not the first person to do so) when the main character was born in 1973—the same year as my Gen X parents?

This is Moshfegh’s wonderful trick, which immediately sets up the novel as more of a generational fable than a simple attempt to describe the times as they are. Setting the book in the 1990s lets Moshfegh avoid the tedious sifting and analysis required to keep a contemporary work from unduly focusing on what will seem ephemeral to posterity. She shifts the text’s background to an era that has already been excavated and highlights those elements that will later flower when millennials come to age. Hence the narrator’s references to a number of cultural markers that could have been common during her college years if she was really a little younger and a millennial, but actually were not. The narrator presumably goes to college from 1991 to 1995 and yet references “The Moldy Peaches” (who did not break out until the late 1990s), “Dogme 95”(there were no Dogme 95 films until 1998), and “black Moleskine pocket [notebooks]” (the company was founded in 1997). And even those signifiers that are plausible, like the reference to pretentious young men reading David Foster Wallace, only reach their full fruition in the early 2000s, when the oldest millennials had reached adulthood.

Moshfegh makes her generational transposition even more explicit with the narrator’s family. She is a generational hybrid—her father was born in 1942 (Silent Generation) and her mother in 1953 (Baby Boomer)—but it becomes clear from her remarks that she is more affected by her father’s absence, both in family life and by his early death, than by any sort of passed down worldview. And so she follows in her Baby Boomer mother’s footsteps—though far less radically—by trying to mollify her neurotic consciousness (a cue perhaps from her “mother in the hospital full of tubes, brain dead” after committing suicide).

Moshfegh has a pseudo-millennial subject in a pseudo-millennial world, but for what purpose? The world she evokes is disgusting and the narrator is a nauseating creation:

“You’ll be fine,” I told Reva when she said her mother was starting a third round of chemo. “Don’t be a spaz,” I said when her mother’s cancer spread to her brain.

She has a trash-can-shaped soul filled with whatever has been haphazardly tossed inside. Naturally this has a devastating effect on the way the world appears to her narrator and the way things come to be meaningful for her, which is to say that they don’t. It would be challenging to write a more gratuitously nauseating book than this. Yet what saves Moshfegh’s book from being a Less Than Zero pastiche and falling back into the sheer nihilism Aldridge decries is its superb irony (also perhaps the distance between her narrator and herself in comparison with Ellis) and the ridiculous ending.

Moshfegh is an unashamed moralist, more detached from contemporary sensibilities than Rooney and more grounded than Lerner. For her, the millennial malaise is wholly internal, a curse—the trash-can soul—passed down from the Baby Boomers—a generation drunk on new meanings who left their children to endure the next day’s clean-up without any help or guidance. And yet her narrator’s twisted deliverance can only come from that same drug so prized by her mother’s generation:

ON SEPTEMBER 11, I went out and bought a new TV/VCR at Best Buy so I could record the news coverage of the planes crashing into the Twin Towers. Trevor was on a honeymoon in Barbados, I’d later learn, but Reva was lost. Reva was gone. I watched the videotape over and over to soothe myself that day. And I continue to watch it, usually on a lonely afternoon, or any other time I doubt that life is worth living, or when I need courage, or when I am bored. Each time I see the woman leap off the Seventy-eighth floor of the North Tower—one high-heeled shoe slipping off and hovering up over her, the other stuck on her foot as though it were too small, her blouse untucked, hair flailing, limbs stiff as she plummets down, one arm raised, like a dive into a summer lake—I am overcome by awe, not because she looks like Reva, and I think it’s her, almost exactly her, and not because Reva and I had been friends, or because I’ll never see her again, but because she is beautiful. There she is, a human being, diving into the unknown, and she is wide awake.

A stale life, made only endurable by History’s occasional intrusion. This, to Moshfegh, is the millennial age.

If Moshfegh’s diagnosis is correct, a truly authentic millennial fiction writer—one who doesn’t contort fictional plots into being morbidly interesting or write as ironically as her—would not be able to sell any books. They would contort life into such a nightmare, the sequence of the day into a nauseating doldrum where one moment follows the next without any rhyme or reason—except perhaps when forced awake for a moment by the intrusion of “Events,” that the reader would feel too ill to finish, much less recommend the book to anyone else. This is what it feels like to read Tao Lin.

In describing the experience of reading Taipei, there is nothing I can add to the first line of Lydia Kiesling’s viral 2013 review: “When I began to read Taipei on my morning commute, I wondered if I had been lobotomized in the night.”

This is not surprising, considering that the entire novel is a series of paragraphs like this, mixed with tedious descriptions of parties and drug use:

The next afternoon, walking to a street market, Paul and Erin stopped to look at a two-story McDonald’s with five employees outside speaking into megaphones, sometimes in unison, waving banners and flags. Paul said there were fewer McDonald’s in Taiwan than fifteen years ago, that this was probably a “last-ditch effort,” which seemed to be working (the first floor— they could see through the glass front—was entirely filled with customers). Erin said they should improvise a documentary titled Taiwan’s Last McDonald’s or Taiwan’s First McDonald’s. They walked to the end of the street market and back, on the same route, buying and eating things, then bought and ate egg tarts from two different bakeries, then with nervous grins earnestly discussed eating however many egg tarts it would take for them to not want more, but resisted and returned to the apartment building, where they lay for an hour in the building’s sauna and dog-paddled, in a heated pool, to six different massage stations, including one—partly simulating a waterfall, maybe—where water fell eight to ten feet in pummeling, faucet-like columns onto the tops of their heads.

And yet Tao Lin does sell books. Why? Because of his central conceit, his submission to sterile millennial form: the events in his books have actually happened to him. Like a freeway crash, who won’t take at least one little peek? He strips the confessional mode so abused by millennials of its subject—replacing “I” with an impersonal protagonist, changing names, the usual autofiction schtick. Writers have to make a living and even great writers would like to be read, so Tao Lin paid his toll with dirty gossip and tedious revelations.

What is the sickness that Lin conceals beneath boring description, barely anonymized names, and debauchery that was only ever shocking to his parents and people in the “know” (“She got with Tao Lin, seriously?”)? As with Moshfegh, it is the grotesque state of the millennial subject.7

He roots through the trash-can soul—himself, stocked full of cliches about life: “He imagined his trajectory as a vacuum-sealed tube, into which he’d arrived and through which—traveling alone in the vacuum-sealed tube of his own life—he’d be suctioned and from which he’d exit.” Depressed and alone, he is without any guidance from society or his parents besides a kind of confused and hopeless love.

Lin, like Moshfegh’s narrator, reacts to his existence in a world where he can do anything by unconsciously attempting to become nothing: a sleepwalking zombie instead of a couch comatose.

(“Sleeping, waking,” he said frustratedly. “Is there a difference? Am I dead?”)

And while only the intrusion of History can jolt Moshfegh’s narrator from her slumber, at the end of Taipei it is Lin’s redeemingly facile attempt at love that makes him “[feel] grateful to be alive.” Yet, like Rooney’s characters, Lin lacks anything besides stock formulations to express his newfound state. The possibility of true redemption remains up in the air. The question left open is whether the intimacy between Paul and Erin is, like the intrusion of history, a temporary answer to millennial slumber. But it is still an answer.

Lin’s sincere autofiction and Moshfegh’s transparently constructed story start formally from opposite positions but converge upon the stark reality of millennial life, as well as potential antidotes (life with stakes—the intrusion of something overwhelming into the lives of these protagonists), that might wake the millennial sleepers, at least for a moment.

Lin and Moshfegh take the generational novelist’s task seriously and avoid the error of simply describing what it feels like to be a millennial without judgment or an imaginative transformation that lends the reader with a deeper sense of the period, beyond fleeting period details. My Year of Rest and Relaxation and Taipei, then, are the closest thing we have to “Great Millennial Novels.”

Putting these books up against the great harvest of 20th century American literature yields disappointing results. But, as Aldridge notes repeatedly in Talents and Technicians, given the conditions of literary production for the last several decades, should we be surprised that almost all of the books trumpeted by mainstream institutions as “Great Millennial Novels” reflect the experiences and judgement of an overeducated, insulated, and ideologically stifled class—largely unable to detach themselves from contemporary sensibilities to pursue something broader (regardless of how naive such a search maybe sometimes be)? Indeed, though they are insufficient, I think it something of a miracle that novels as incisive as My Year of Rest and Relaxation and Taipei exist at all, much less are well-known, widely read, and in the former case—part of “BookTok.”

And today, without a doubt, the literary world is continuing to loosen. With the decline of literary fiction sales, the drastic decline in relevance mainstream magazines that discuss literary fiction, and the diminished heft of the MFA everyone seems to have (along with the siloed academic position that no one has), we have evidently moved towards a “decentralized literary ecosystem.”8 I’ve already discussed in some detail how this happened as well as the boon it may prove to be. The gift, for both critics and writers, is that until institutions re-form and ossify, the millennial writer can swim freely in the ocean of facts and interpretations, no longer bound by arbitrary style guides and those preferences and incentive structures that were built up over the last half century and made the desperate plunge for greatness all the more difficult. To them I say: Good luck.

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The next time ayahuasca tastes terrible—so terrible that I can’t describe it because my mind has blocked out the memory. It is not uncommon for the advanced psychedelic hitchhiker to grab his bucket and puke as soon as he gets a waft of the smell. For many this is the most unpleasant part of the journey; it’s more difficult to bear than when the ego starts drifting out into the Andromeda three hours later. Though we’re always forgetting it—such is the strength of our subjectivity—taste is mere perception. There’s nothing objective about it. In the case of ayahuasca, five hours of throwing up will change what was a pleasant taste into a horrific one.

Proofreading is like ayahuasca. Unlike editing—the creative act of smashing two minds together to excavate treasures that were only poking through—proofreading is rote, boring, brainless, mundane, and maddening. It is like asking a golfer to put down his clubs and crawl through the dirt to find every brown blade of grass on the course. No one can enjoy searching through the same words 300,000 times, hunting only for typos, missing punctuation, and erroneous formatting. Words once adored start to taste like shit. At the end of his line, the proofreader cannot bring himself to read any more. It would take the effort of climbing a steep rocky hill covered cow dung. There isn’t even the glory or difficulty of conquering a mountain.

In the arts, I cannot think of many better functions for A.I. to serve. The algorithm would not be displacing a creative job, like novel writing, but one that would allow humans to focus on more interesting pursuits. A press that once needed to pay a proofreader could instead train and, hopefully, promote that person to writing or editing. Personally, instead of spending 47,000 hours trying to find missing italics in Coby’s piece, I could have worked on essays and fiction for readers to enjoy. While I wrote computer servers would, in this hypothetical, hum in the background, cleaning up pieces based on a style guide of my direction. Once the algorithm finished, the readers would have a more polished product.

There is not a strong moral case to be made against using A.I. for proofreading. One wouldn’t even be funding the development of LLMs because many platforms offer a free tier without any advertising. Even if magazines and presses were to resist the technology, there are thousands, if not millions, of less principled businesses that would continue to pay for them. Barring restrictive regulation or mass revolution, these companies will keep building whether you use their products or not. The best a widespread boycott, at the individual level, could do is slow their speed down. The cat is, frankly, out of the bag.

Some people may refuse to use A.I. for dogmatic reasons; others may refuse for reasons of identity (e.g. baristas in Portland). It’s easier to write the whole thing off or stick to a previously held opinion than it is to think critically or admit an error in judgement. Though I am against A.I. for many use cases, it is a mistake to not take advantage of the good parts while discarding the bad. Refusing to use Claude to better understand a cancer diagnosis would be asinine. Why wouldn’t you make use of an always-on, private tutor of the sort our favorite geniuses worked with during their aristocratic upbringings? Aren’t readers better off if A.I. helps writers embody new words? Doesn’t everyone benefit if A.I. can help people more deeply understand The Brothers Karamazov?

There is only one good reason not to use an LLM to proofread: Reader preference. Using ChatGPT to find formatting errors assumes that readers prefer a greater volume of perfectly polished products to a lesser volume of imperfect ones. At first glance, this assumption appears correct. But in a world where everything is moving towards computer generation, I am betting that there will be robust demand for publications that are entirely human-created. There is already so much content out there that volume will become less important than craft. Typos and missing punctuation will become valuable stamps of human authenticity.

And how much do small errors really matter, anyway? The Village Voice, one of the most influential newspapers of the twentieth century, was marked by a multitude mistakes twenty years after its circulation commenced. Would one prefer to see the David, with its various crumbles and cracks, or 5,000 robot-built statues without a single marble speck out of place? The computers may be playing yet another trick on us, making us believe that if “perfection” is on offer we should grab it. Yet, in reality, it may turn out that no one ever wanted perfection as much as they wanted to see how close humans could get to it. If Grok can start pounding out 1,900 “perfect” novels an hour, then maybe the mistakes in human novels become valuable.

Realizing this, if it is indeed true, unscrupulous publications could start having their A.I. manufacture faults. That’s why building and maintaining trust is so important. The reason I’m writing my entire thought process out—on a typewriter, no less—is because I want our readers to know exactly what we at Non Grata believe. Without further adieu, these are our A.I. guidelines:

1. Contributors cannot use computers to generate words. Every word must originate in a human mind. Writers cannot use LLMs to pen or suggest them.

2. Contributors cannot use A.I. to edit. Every piece Non Grata publishes receives in-depth editing from a human. It is a sacred, creative, collaborative process that we will not bequeath to the machines.

3. Non Grata will not use A.I. to proofread. As horrible a job as it is, we would rather publish imperfect, human-crafted pieces than “computer-perfect” essays and stories.

4. Non Grata will not use A.I. to generate images. Illustration and photography are the domains of human beings.

5. Contributors can use software to point out structural patterns. Websites, like Grammarly or the Hemingway app, are fine to use as long as they only reveal existing patterns (e.g. run-on sentences, filler words, etc.). It is up to the writer and the editor to determine what to do about them.

6. Contributors can use A.I. for research. Questions like “What’s the vacancy rate in Austin, TX?” are akin to Google searches; they do not detract from the creative process.

7. Contributors can use software for spelling and grammar. This functionality has been around since the advent of the word processor.

8. Non Grata reserves the right to update these rules based on feedback and learnings. We’re a new publication, and this is a rapidly evolving space. We will publish new guidelines as necessary.

The goal of these guidelines is to ensure the reader knows exactly how Non Grata and its contributors use A.I., if we decide to use it at all. Please leave us any feedback you have; we are always open to new approaches and compelling arguments.

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Also, if you want something to get you through the rest of this frigid winter, we still have copies left of the Winter 25/26 print edition. It’s available for purchase through a Substack subscription and on our website. Every copy sold allows us to support artists and host events. In the words of , “[i]t’s incredibly well put together and doesn’t feel like [the] Amazon self print trash that other Substack journals use.” Can’t beat that.

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mark william lewis - Mark William Lewis

Apple Music | Spotify

It’s tough to sum up mark william lewis’s self-titled record because there’s so much going on yet everything feels familiar. It’s dark, gritty, and atmospheric; it sounds how the album art looks. His husky baritone sets an ever-present tone, and he pairs it with a lot of interesting sounds and styles. He sounds a little like Neil Young when he plays the harmonica on “Still Above,” the opener and one of the stand out tracks on the record. His collage-like, springy guitar playing invokes Vini Reilly on “Socialising” and “Petals”; it generally seems like he can rotate through influences—which include T. S. Eliot, Allen Ginsberg, and James Joyce—at the drop of a hat while maintaining his own feel. “Spit” reminded me of Elliot Smith circa Either / Or, double-tracked vocals whizzing around the mix. Like a lot of my favorite music from last year, this album would rip in headphones alone walking the city at night just as much as it would in a shitty basement while you’re getting fucked up and partying.

mark william lewis - Still Above [Official Audio]

Wednesday - Bleeds

Apple Music | Spotify

Over the past few years, Karlee Hartzman has steered Wednesday into becoming an alt-country-rocking-doomy powerhouse. The group has evolved to be figureheads of whatever “guitar music” is today. Bleeds builds on 2021’s Twin Plagues and 2023’s Rat Saw God and further establishes Hartzman and co. as cut from their own cloth. One of the best world-builders around, Hartzman’s writing calls to mind some contemporary combination of the witty observational style of David Berman with the punchiness of Lucinda Williams. She is only getting stronger with each record. It seems like so many groups today are going for what Wednesday has made cool over the last few years (in more ways than just the fact that everyone wants to put a slide guitar on their tracks now). You can drink beers, go wild, and crank Bleeds. You can cry in your soup and crank Bleeds. That is a rare combination and one of the hallmarks of a great lyricist and songwriter. Hartzman frequently cites Drive by Truckers as an influence, which makes sense given the Southern grit and charm evident in both of the group’s lyrics and general atmospheres. Wednesday had already established themselves as one of the best and most exciting bands of the 2020s with their first two records. Bleeds is the one that’ll be cited and looked back upon for years to come as Wednesday continue to grow in stature.

Wednesday - Townies (Official Video)

Jim Legxacy - black british music

Apple Music | Spotify

Released in July on XL (Legxacy’s debut for the label after years of honing his reputation in the London underground scene), black british music puts Legxacy on the map as a leader of the next generation of rap and hip hop voices not only in the UK, but across the globe. Several tracks (“stick”, “father”, “i just banged a snus in canada water”, “new david bowie”) already sound like classics, toeing the line between contemporary chaos and a classic rap feel. The record feels of the moment with a tinge of nostalgia throughout. The hype man doing the track intros reminds of a bygone era of downloading mixtapes off of DatPiff. The whole record has an element of taking the best of the past and pushing things forward. Legxacy has a pretty yet gritty voice. He utilizes incredible samples. One could envision hearing the tracks in the grime of a basement party just as well as on the terraces of a football ground—it would make total sense in both contexts. black british music will continue to grow in stature as the rest of the 2020s roll by, but it already feels like an instant classic.

new david bowie

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One of the most frequent conversations surrounding contemporary literature I come across is the constant back and forth between fiction, autofiction, memoir, autobiography, etc. I have never understood the real importance of these distinctions and why they inspire such concrete, hard-and-fast rules. I have put some words down for consideration by the reader, and to clarify, hopefully, some things for myself.

I am not sure what autofiction is, what it truly means or indicates, whether or not the term is looked upon favorably by those who refer to it, or if there is any consensus on the genre or style it aims to describe. I assume the term suits me, or at least suits a book that I wrote, American Pleasure. At the time of the writing, I had no concern for these terms, these genres. I say this not out of rebellion, but out of ignorance.

For that reason, the novel is an amalgam of genre and style. What I did know then and do know now is that a writer has a story to tell, if they are either lucky or damned, and that writer must use every weapon in their arsenal to get to the truth of that story, and that, interestingly enough, may include a deception or two.

I don’t mean outright fabrication, although not off the table—what I mean is to get to the root of the matter, the heart of the truth, one should be free to contort words, phrases, dialogue, time, and so on. This could be construed as a lie, depending on the preciousness of the interpreter, but if the artist can contort plainly, purposefully-driven and always bend towards what is authentic, then they can get much closer to the truth than if that truth were simply laid out verbatim, as though spat out of a machine. If you are only interested in facts, then there are textbooks for that, but even textbooks struggle with the facts, much of the time.

In that way, the truth of a story is more like a warm poem. The cold, mathematical truth, if I can put it that way, is more like a cold calculator.

I believe the exactitude of truth is found in the sustained emotion of the prose. I believe every piece of fiction is also likely a portrait, and within every portrait are strokes of fiction. Even the most “factual” of all art—photographic portraiture—can only set out to capture a moment, a fraction of the subject’s existence. The art is choosing that exact moment, with the intention of telling the broad story. Although different, the same is true of film. Every memoir, autobiography could be considered autofiction—for there is really no other choice. Memoir is quantum-fiction—to observe it at all, is to alter it in some ways.

I do know that my book, American Pleasure , was born out of an evening that droned on so long it turned to day. Andrew and I had stayed out all night and I confessed to him, you could say, with bleary eyes, that I needed to write about this thing that was itching me.

Andrew, all too familiar with the subject matter, understood. Understood so well that when I mentioned turning my debacle into a short story, he immediately interrupted to force the idea of writing a novel upon me. And just like many ideas, once they are forced upon you, you can hardly wrangle loose of them. But come to think of it, I needed no forcing—once he said it, I knew it was what I had to do all along.Having only written poems, stories and songs, I set to write a book with little to no plan, no strategy, and no outline. Instead, I went right home and began typing until noon; until I couldn’t stay awake any longer…

As for the rest of that process, which took over several years to complete just a lousy draft, I won’t say much here—nobody needs a novel about a novel. Autofiction, truth, and honesty is the heart of the matter. Throughout the various reading(s) of American Pleasure, feedback and such, frequently comes around the question of whether or not the story actually happened. If any of it actually happened, or specifically whether or not a particularly extreme part of the story had happened. Again, the word “true” is simple enough. I don’t mean to make it out to be any more difficult than it has to be: Any fool knows damn well what true means, in common speak. But also, is a fool, the writer who would swear by every line of dialogue spoken in their “true” book. Of course, I did my best to match the words and phrases to either the best of my recollection, or with the aim and sincerity of genuine portraiture.

When I mentioned the contortion of time earlier in this essay, I meant that time is true, of course, but the feeling of time is not. To get the true feeling of time, one must be able to compress and stretch time as required. For instance:American Pleasure represents one year of my life, from summer to spring. These bookend seasons are relatively short passages, but they are required. It is the Fall and, even more so, Winter, that take up the bulk of the book. But, of course, this is not “true” in any strict measurement of time. Dedicating an equal number of words to each calendar day precisely would be tedious and, also, false—in the strict sense that each day does not typically carry the same emotional weight as every other. And so it goes often mentioned in discussions about truth, that there are lies and lies by omission. Only the writer will likely know what they have omitted, so we can only reliably poke at potential fiction by insertion. In that way, it is much easier to point at a passage and question its truth than it is to point in between the lines and question what has been omitted.

I set myself out to write not only what was true, but what was true and emotionally useful. In that way, the book is largely a factual document. Every event in the book is true, in the sense that it all happened the way that I described in the storytelling. However, I should say, as I mentioned it briefly before, that most of all, time is compressed where needed and stretched where needed, due to whatever emotional or descriptive needs I felt were present at the time. It could go without mentioning, but for clarity, many names and places were also changed to protect their anonymity. Also, many passages of the book can neither make a claim to be factually false or factually true—they do not exist inside the realm of falsehoods or truths, rather, they exist in a metaphysical context. For instance, when the book drifts into psychedelia, I would describe those passages as metaphorically, or psychologically true, rather than factually true. They simply describe a psychological state of mind. You would need to read the book yourself to get a sense of what I mean:

Her fingers curl in the curvature of the earth, graceful as gravity. When they hit the earth, they discover the mud of it; the deep flower roots and the soft beds and the redwoods big as towers. They discover the rock belly salt of this earth. And she walks, tall, in her heels, shiny black ones. Lady Iris is a conflagration of experience. She holds all these experiences; doles them out like candy. Trots them out like toys, prizes. She has, too, been in the garden with the filthy flowers.

As for the obscene or the pornographic, I wrote nothing pornographic for obscenity’s sake. The ongoing discussion about obscenity and pornography seems to neglect the fact that pornographic is not strictly a style, or a mode, or a description of an event, but pornography is also a subject in and of itself. Particularly in the cultural landscape of today, pornography has cemented itself as a mainstay—writers, one way or another, had best learn to write about it, or if not, become comfortable with others doing so. I stress the difference between the obscene and the pornograph-ic, and the absolute subject of pornograph-y, as a cultural phenomenon which requires some wrestling, by someone, somewhere, for the sake of us all. I don’t claim to be that person—of course, I wrote the book only for my very own sake, and for the sake of nobody else.

I wrote my own story as a means of confession; I don’t believe I wrote a novel where the characters (the city of San Francisco being a very active one) leap off the page but, conversely, are locked inside it. They are trapped in that time and place; in this way, I feel the tone of the novel is more like a tomb. A tomb that holds all that turbulence in between its covers. It was not meant to keep something alive, but instead, to kill something. To lock something away as a means of liberation—a birth of a document that leads to a death of a kind.The truth is, I believe American Pleasure is actually a very small part of my writing’s personality; my personality as an artist. I wouldn’t purposefully intend for any other book of mine to resemble the work in any way. For instance, my latest collection of poetry, Like A Bird Knows To Sing, is dedicated to my wife, written in the countryside of Minas Gerais, and has nothing obscene inside of it.

As far as the internet novel is concerned, I may have unwittingly penned one, being that I knew as much about that term as I did about autofiction in 2013. However, I make no direct mention of social media nor dive too far into the technical terms of internet usage or slang. Any electronic technology is inferred, as I preferred to focus on nature and the nature of things as a source for the character’s company. I am aware that many disagree with that decision—that a book written in this day and age should include the many technological aspects of our society, because they are honest. And this is true—people take Uber, they split dinner on cash apps, they use Instagram and Facebook, WhatsApp and Facetime and Zoom, etc., etc. But I chose to omit any language of that sort, even though I tried to make the internet a clear and present danger. Not because I find these terms ugly (I do), but because these things, their mere mentioning, could possibly destroy the organic nature of the story.To put it another way, they may jolt the reader out of a certain tone of a story and thrust them back to reality, which is a distraction from the myth of a given story. As Tolkien put it, “myths convey the essential truths, the primary reality of life itself.” I will add that there is perhaps no point in civilization where product names and companies have merged themselves with verbs through our constant use of them. Tweet-ing, Uber-ing, Google-ing, are not simply what characters in a story may do, but their usage also adds to the commercialization of our language. The artist has every right to use these words; it is also true that an artist can refuse them, in defense of nature, in defense of myth, and in some cases, in defense of beauty and concentrated truth. In my mind, it is only if a story wishes to provide some insight to the phenomena of commercialized product language, as a means of cultural critique, that I would ever consider them. Those who have their characters uber-ing and texting and facebook-ing are all well and good, and certainly may be celebrated with their insights into the usage of that tech, but they may sacrifice some future significance, for the success of the here and now.

As for the here and now and works of art, it matters little what anyone thinks of a newly produced piece of art. The significance of a piece of art is not betrayed by present day success, but requires outliving its own time, to be celebrated by a future audience beyond its prediction, beyond its comprehension. I may speculate that the now, more than ever, is representative of that dynamic; the culture is too fractured, the world is too chaotic in its speed and output, and the celebration of mediocrity too strong to give any credence to the reception of a current work of art. In that way, the artist can make work for the here and now, and hope for some cultural bread crumbs to fall into their lap, or they can make art primarily for themselves in concert with a future audience, if it may give them some company, some north star to keep them tethered to the dream that their song may one day be heard.

As far as “myths” are concerned, I am learning to grapple with them myself, as I approach another book project, Notes On A Full Life, a biography of my father, Henry Stacy Vereen. His life was certainly rooted in myth, not only because he was my father, but because of how he chose to live. I set out to provide a text, a document to avenge his death in a way—however, he nor I are famous. Who would read an unknown writer’s book about his unknown father? Too, because of our obscurity, I have found some difficulty in research—hardly anyone he knew or loved is particularly interested in such a book, and so their responses to my inquiries are blighted by disinterest, no empathy to the cause, no motivation to provide any insight. I will try more, try harder, but I may have to write the remainder of the book on my own—ever deepening the myth and mystery of my father’s life. He once kept a genealogy archive, a box full of family photos, correspondences, family albums, and memories. But, alas, at the end of his life he moved out of his home in a frenzy and left the box in the attic. The kind family who bought the home found it, and simply threw the contents of the box out with the trash. A whole man’s history up in smoke! I will avenge this insult if it kills them. With little reliable sources for painting his past, I must accept the mystery surrounding my father’s life, and inject that fact into the story. I must make use of the myth to bridge the gaps of the unknown.

In terms of autofiction, I don’t believe one has a choice. The artist tells their story in fragments—views themselves from the kaleidoscopic reflection of a mirror that has been shattered. Each sliver of glass tells its very own story. Through the studying, a picture emerges. The Japanese art of Kintsugi (repairing fragments of a broken object with gold), may be a useful metaphor. The cracks in our self-portraits are flawed from the beginning. Yet, how we bring them back together, through style and choice, will determine their ultimate worth. Within them, we may find gold. The reflection may never be complete, but neither are we—neither is a life’s work.

I think it would be better if we didn’t genre-icize ourselves to death over our writing or the writing of others. The downward spiral of the traditional publishing system is self-evident. Writers today must make room for new ideas, vague ones, bad ones. If the gates are to be truly open, let them open fully. If we can finally put down the utensils for cookie-cutting and try to embrace the text as it lays, we can dance with words and stories as poets, humorists, pirates, heretics, truth-sayers and liars, explorers, monkeys, vagrants, etc.

JSV

2025

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—What exactly do you understand?

She placed herself by his side, leaned on his shoulders and repeated:

—What exactly do you understand?

It was surreal to read this passage for the first time some three years ago. Few books have floored me like Pedro Paramo, which went so far as to push me to learn its original Spanish so I could read it as the author intended. On the legends of the past, the novel’s impact was even more powerful: Jorge Luis Borges lauded it as one of the greatest novels in not only Hispanic literature, but in literature as a whole. Gabriel Garcia Marquez credits it for pulling him from a writer’s block that paved the path for him to write One Hundred Years of Solitude, his magnum opus. Susan Sontag declared the novel “one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century world literature.” It is a novel filled with silence; I sometimes wonder, as I slave away at my own work, how Rulfo did it, how he made every page speak in whispers harrowed with sorrow and despair.

Call the book what you will: Mexican gothic, magical realist, surrealist. Pedro Paramo entwines Mexican folklore and culture with fragmented narratives, streams of consciousness, constant shifts from first-person to third. Rulfo blends it all masterfully, stripping the prose down to the bone so that it shines in your face yet leaves much beneath the surface. From the very first page we are wrapped in the mood of what this book will come to emanate, revealing to us its major theme, death:

I came to Comala because I was told my father lived here, a man named Pedro Paramo. That’s what my mother told me. And I promised I’d come to see him as soon as she died. I squeezed her hands as a sign I would. After all, she was near death, and I was of a mind to promise her anything. “Don’t fail to visit him —she urged—. Some call him one thing, some another. I’m sure he’d love to meet you.” That’s why I couldn’t refuse her, and after agreeing so many times I just kept at it until I had to struggle to free my hands from hers, which were now without life.

Thus begins the adventure of Juan Preciado, the abandoned son of Pedro Paramo. In the first few pages he goes from the room where his mother has died to the middle of a desert, as if in a dream. In this wasteland another man, Abundio, appears to lead Juan to his father’s town of Comala. In short, smooth sentences that read like an exhale, oppressed by the “dog days of August” heat, accompanied by ominous flocks of passing crows, Abundio reveals that he is also the son of Pedro Paramo. When Juan asks who Paramo is, Abundio answers: “Bitterness incarnate.”

All of this in the first four pages. On the fifth we come to learn, through Abundio, that Pedro Paramo has been dead for years. And when they finally reach Comala, which sinks down into the sweltering earth within the hills, Juan discovers the town is also dead, in the literal sense. Shortly after, he realizes that his guide is dead too, a ghost among many haunting the empty streets of Comala. Juan wanders into the town in a daze, searching for shelter, attempting to speak to inhabitants that vanish as if they were never there. Slowly the feelings of anxiety and terror increase as he becomes trapped in the town, doubting whether the people he meets throughout the narrative are alive or dead. The novel’s feeling of silence almost breaks when he is suddenly overwhelmed by the town’s whispers, which are scattered through perspectives divided by chapter cuts. One by one they piece together the story of the town, and how it came to be this way.

It is through these flashbacks and whispers—perhaps even from the ghost of Pedro Paramo himself—that we discover more about Juan’s father. With a name roughly translating to “barren wasteland,” Paramo is a tyrant landowner who held a heavy hand over the town. One who murdered and manipulated his way to the top, preyed on women, bore sons he never acknowledged save for Miguel, a monster in the image of his father. Paramo’s power looms even over that of the church and its priest, Father Renteria, another major character among a small handful. Torn within by doubts over his faith, he says he serves the landowner “All because I’m afraid of offending those who provide for me… I get nothing from the poor, and prayers won’t fill my stomach” (28).1

Paramo’s actions lead to the town’s decay and the death of its people. He is a cruel man who uses whoever he sees fit and discards them when they come of no use. Yet Rulfo shows us what little of a human side there is to the man, too. We first see the world from Pedro Paramo’s eyes as a child (9), already deeply in love with Susana San Juan, yearning for her when she leaves Comala bathed “in a reddish hue, in the blood red sky of dusk” (18). Her departure is not Paramo’s only loss. Everything in his life is taken away from him with the murder of his father and the death of his mother, after which rival landowners rob their lands, once proudly held, to collect on the family’s debts. His every waking day is spent working to regain the power his family once had and finding Susana so that they can be together. His scattered perspective is among the most striking, poetic, and beautiful:

“We’d laugh at the wind and find each other’s eyes as the string slipped through our fingers and ran with the wind before breaking with a faint cracking sound as if it had been cut by the wings of a passing bird. Then way above us that paper bird would flail downward, dragging its loose tail behind until it became lost in the green earth below.”

The beauty of his own words are rivaled by those of whose love he craves. Susan San Juan’s dialogue comprises some of the most beautiful passages on nature I’ve read. Her voice is that of a candle in the dark, every word a poetry of its own that I will leave you to discover.

Despite its beauty, this story is a tragedy, with the ghosts of Comala acting as a Greek Chorus. Within the ever-shifting narrative—sometimes on the same page—we glimpse the sad and tragic ends of the town’s inhabitants as it crumbles, conveyed in perfectly clean sentences; there is not a single loose thread anywhere in this novel.

You’d think a book of this caliber would have a writer with just as fantastic a body of work, but Pedro Paramo is the only novel Juan Rulfo ever wrote. Accompanying this slim book are two collections of short stories. What kind of man is able to write a novel that becomes required reading throughout Mexico, a novel that Carlos Fuentes called “The essential Mexican novel, unsurpassed and unsurpassable…” and then goes on to work as a public servant for Mexico’s National Institute for Indigenous People?

Rulfo was born in 1917, in Jalisco, Mexico, right in the middle of the Mexican Revolution. Though without memories of the conflict itself, he must have had a childhood abound with stories from that period. He came, after all, from a family of landowners who lost their lands and wealth to revolutionaries and the government during the war. Rulfo did, however, remember the Cristero War that followed shortly after. In this conflict, between the secularized government of Mexico and the Catholic Church, priests took up arms against an authority that stripped them of their influence and began killing them off. In the proceeding years, both sides committed murders and slaughters that bathed no one in a victorious light. Rulfo’s father and uncle were killed in this war, and his mother died soon after. At ten years old Rulfo was left to face the world alone, joining a class of orphaned writers, such as Edgar Allen Poe, Joseph Conrad, Jean Genet, who are known for their darker work.

In interviews, Rulfo notes that no one went outside often during those times. Bodies hanging from posts, put there by both sides of the war, was a common occurrence. The risk of being shot was great. Thus he spent much of his time reading indoors. Around then the local priest confiscated all the books in the area and hid them away in the church cellar, deeming them unsafe for faithful eyes. Later, when that priest fled into the bogs and hills to fight in the war, Rulfo wandered into this cellar and discovered the many books therein. This treasure trove of knowledge fused with the bleak history of his family and country; all mixed together to create the writer that he would become. For years, Rulfo carried Pedro Paramo inside him before he knew how to write it, as Susan Sontag notes:

[H]e was writing hundreds of pages and then discarding them. He once called the novel an exercise in elimination.

Considering the complex structure of the novel, which Rulfo described as “made of silences,” it should not be surprising the author took so many years to transpose it from his mind to the page. The non-linear narratives constantly shift from various points of past and present—sometimes going back a decade or more and back again in a single page. Leaping from one perspective to the next, the reader may lose whose perspective they’re looking through unless they pay closer attention.

Though one can feel the various influences on his work, from Elio Vittorini to Knut Hamson, it is Faulkner that casts the largest shadow over Pedro Paramo. The novel is reminiscent of As I Lay Dying with its shifting perspectives between an abundance of characters. The dreamy monologues of Susana San Juan later in the book gives me the impression of a reverse Addie Bundren, while also that of a Molly Bloom. While I have no idea if he could be an influence—it could be the translation—some of Rulfo’s characters also have a Dostoevskyian high energy, a boisterous bluntness, though they never reach the peaks of the Russian’s chaos. One can also see how works of the far past impact the landscape of the novel. Fog, for one, is brought up and used in the novel similarly to the gloomy fog of the River Styx, which souls must pass through to reach Hades in Greek myth.

Those that approach Pedro Paramo with an open mind—those interested in the gothic, the surreal, a vast cast of characters all with personalities of their own—will gather a lot from the first read. Written by a distinctly Mexican author, Rulfo layers his work with observations of the nation through dialogue, character names, and even the changing weather of the valleys. The bleak outlook of Rulfo’s work resonates with the current landscape of Mexico as it did when it was published in 1955—for the oppression depicted in Pedro Paramo, from the cruel feudal landowners to the chaotic revolutionaries bare little difference to the government death squads and roving cartels of today.

For anyone that may like the book but find it a challenge, a reread will only enrich the experience, as will a deeper dive into Mexican history and literature. The novel encompasses a tumultuous time in Mexico, from the dictatorship of feudal landowners during the time of Porfirio Diaz, to the resulting Mexican Revolution, to the proceeding Cristero War—a bloody and sorrowful history that hangs like a shadow over Pedro Paramo’s narrative. Novels such as The Underdogs by Mariano Azuela, The Power and The Glory by Graham Greene, as well as the works of Carlos Fuentes will deepen the reader’s understanding of the environment Pedro Paramo was born out of. For non-fiction, I’d recommend The Life and Times of Pancho Villa by Fredrich Katz or The Mexican Revolution by Alan Knight.

These books will help elucidate the many layers of this novel, which are as deep as perhaps your favorite classics, even down to the names of its characters. While Rulfo claimed he chose his names by reading off the tombstones of graveyards, Spanish speaking readers will be quick to catch the falseness of his claim through their own understanding of that beautiful language. To learn the meaning of these names adds further layers to the novel. I’ve already mentioned earlier that Pedro Paramo means “barren wasteland.” Comala itself comes from the name of a hotplate used to warm tortillas with, a term so aptly used in the first few pages when Abundio describes the town to Juan as sitting “on the burning embers of the earth at the very mouth of Hell.” To know the meanings of these names will allow one to look at a character and region under a different light. It may even lead one to doubt their true intentions.

Such attention to detail and a burning desire to the perfection of his craft should mark Juan Rulfo as a master in his own right that writers of today can learn from. He absolutely needs to be read. His style is perfect minimalism, breathing silence and tone in its own way rather than allowing the reader to fill in the spaces themselves. I’d argue that if Moby Dick is the great novel of America, and The Divine Comedy the great work of Italy, so too is Pedro Paramo for Mexico. He deserves more recognition in the West than he’s received and, if my word means anything, you won’t regret walking alongside Juan Preciado through the ghostly bowels of Comala.

There you’ll find the place I love most in the world. The place where I grew thin from dreaming. My village, rising from the plain. Shaded with trees and leaves like a piggy bank filled with memories. You’ll see why a person would want to live there forever. Dawn, morning, mid-day, night: all the same, except for the changes in the air. The air changes the color of things there. And life whirs by as quiet as a murmur...the pure murmuring of life.

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Magazine Non Grata was founded on a few beliefs: Rebellious writing is essential for prosperous art. Healthy culture is more physical than digital. Beauty is vital.

Last month, in service of these ideas, we held an in-person event for our first print issue. Since then we’ve published six of those pieces online, for free.

The remaining six pieces—as well as all of the incredible photography and illustrations featured throughout the magazine—will remain print-only until the next issue comes out in the spring. This includes short fiction from ; an essay from ; a story from ; an interview with ; and poems from and Will E. Sloan. On the photography front, we feature Marco Andres, Dan Bell, Madison Claire Baker, Diana Catinas, Benjamin Miller, Michael O’Donohue, Jamie Pearl, Clare Perry, , , and Manuela Ventura.

We’re getting Non Grata in stores, too, starting with Soho International News. The front of the place is currently painted with MNG magazines, and will be until the 19th. If you want to show people what this Substack thing is all about, send them there.

Each purchase helps us support artists, host events, and get in more stores. If what we’re doing resonates with you, please consider getting a copy from the store, from our website, or by becoming a paid subscriber on Substack.

Thank you all.

— MNG

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White Rice. The epitome of bland. Tasteless. Scentless. Colorless. There are plenty of ways to impress a woman and, on first thought, making white rice might not enter the top one thousand. Shit, in theory, it should barely crack the top one hundred thousand. There are places you can take a woman, things you can buy her, jokes you can crack, muscles you can flex, bank accounts you can accidentally show… Hell, if you’re a halfway decent writer you can even show her your Substack (yuck)! Yet you’d be surprised that none of the aforementioned acts will give her the same satisfaction as you placing a pot of rice over a burner and cooking up some of that “bland” goodness after a night out. Because, dear reader, cooking is just like sex.

I know what you’re thinking. What would making a bland, tasteless, scentless, colorless carbohydrate have to do with sex? Well, let’s be honest fella, you’re probably a bland bed partner right now. Your brain is probably so doped up on porn and YouTube videos that you think a woman wants to be pounded, for hours on end, until she’s screaming for you to stop. This, I’m afraid, is not what a woman wants. Hate to break it to you, but PornHub lied.

What you might not understand is that if you bring a woman home after a night out, and you head to the kitchen, fill the pot about half way with rice, mix it with a table spoon of vegetable oil, and then you fill the pot up with water just above the rice, and the water starts to take on a milky quality—what you might not yet understand is that the woman you’re lucky enough to be with is inferring a few things.

First, she knows you can listen and remember. Your dumb ass did not come up with this cooking method out of thin air. Someone taught you. Most likely a woman. And you remembered it down to the measuring of the oil, the color of the water above the rice. She now knows you can take direction. This is good.

Second, she knows that you have done this before. Not the sex, the cooking. You’ve taken time out of your life to acquire a skill that is geared towards pleasing others. Here’s another tidbit you might not be aware of—sex is all about pleasing the other person. Your porn-warped brain thinks you’re the star of the show, and this could not be further from the truth. If you want to be a pleasurable bed partner, concentrate on the pleasure of the partner you are in bed with.

When the rice is cooking over high flame, with the top off, the real magic starts to happen. White rice, as I’ve mentioned, is bland. If you don’t put any salt on it, when done, you might as well be eating papier-mâché. But when the water begins to boil, get your ass to the fridge and find something to add to it. Eggs, for instance. Crack two in a frying pan drizzled with olive oil. Cook them sunny side up and turn the heat off while there is still some gooey yolk. When waterless holes start popping up through the rice, and you hear the bottom start crackling, turn the heat on low and cover it for about ten minutes.

This last and final act, as you place the eggs over the bowl of rice, adding salt and pepper, will assure her that you, good sir, are not a bland bed partner. It will assure her that you can bring something else to the table. It will assure her that she has not made the biggest mistake of her life going home with the likes of you.

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Zane Fix has been a staple of the Manhattan arts scene since the 1980s. A professional architect, musician, and illustrator, Zane has operated out of galleries and street corners in just about every neighborhood below 14th street. Today, I find him in SoHo, selling his eclectic prints on Spring and W. Broadway. Zane is easy to spot, his white hair springs from his black hat, his icy blue eyes spot me from a block away.

Magazine Non Grata

You were born in New York?

Zane Fix

Yes, I was born in New York. In Brooklyn... Flatbush. Flatbush, back in the ‘50s, baby. I was rock and roll. Chuck Berry, Little Ricky. I grew up on that. That was what was on the radio, you know.

MNG

Were you an artistic kid?

Z

Yeah, I could always draw. I had a piano in my room by the time I was four years-old, taking lessons, and I did all I could. I would always copy pictures from books. I was really into Japanese art—my father turned me on to it. My parents were into Japanese woodblock prints, they had a whole collection of them. I was fascinated with them.

My father bought me books and, one day, my father and I sat at the kids table, and he said, “Go ahead, draw me”. And I drew and it came out great. It looked just like him. And he calls my mother, says, “Madeline, look at what he just did”. And that was it. I guess that kind of started it, because my parents then really started nurturing whatever I wanted.

My father painted. My mother was an artist. My father was a professional musician, a graduate of Juilliard. That’s the piano thing, which I still play. But they started nurturing my talents and sending me for art lessons at the Brooklyn Museum. And of course, I got into music, and I started playing guitar and bass and blah, blah, blah.

Then came time to go to college. I wanted to go to Juilliard. My mother wanted me to be an architect but I wanted to be, you know, Leonard Bernstein. So I get the test from Cooper Union, and I have to do it at home. They send it to you. They ask me to do this and that, and I mean... I did the exact opposite. I did the opposite of everything that they said to do in the tests. They come back and they tell my mother: “Your son’s a genius.” I was like, okay. So I did Cooper Union.

I became the best draftsman. You go to Cooper Union, there’s like 200,000 people applying every year from all over the world, and only twenty-five people get accepted. So by the time you finish the four-year run, there’s only five people in class. Everyone drops out or gets kicked out or just can’t make the grade. I became the top draftsman, and it was amazing because, you know, it was the days. Now they sit on a computer. I did it in the days where they had the big room with all the drawing boards. I had a drawing board at my house with the main line and the lights and the shit. And you do everything by hand, and you’re tracing and working out the stuff you’re doing, the measurements, final drawings are inked, you know, and I was the best when I got out.

I got hunted right away as a draftsman working at an architectural firm, big firm, and I did some work through the years. I didn’t really like it, but it paid good. And, you know, I was a kid coming out of college, and I got a job the day I walked out, just because of my drafting skills.

But later I wound up playing in bands at CBGBs and stuff, you know, at night, doing all of that, I got into the music business. I played with some big people. I did my own stuff. I was a side man. I was a front man. That was a great run. I did pretty good and I made some money. I wrote a couple of songs. I sold the rights to them, had a little place up in Westchester, had a Jaguar. I was living large for a while, and then, of course, I became a junkie, a drug addict, and lost everything.

MNG

When did you catch the punk bug?

Z

Well, the first thing that bugged me, that gave me the bug, was when I heard the Sex Pistols on the radio. It was “Anarchy in the UK,” or one of those big songs from their record. And I was like, this is fucking it. Because before that I was a Rod Stewart, Rolling Stones kind of kid, you know, with the shag haircut and the platform shoes.

And once I got that bug and I went—I don’t know how old I was, you know, teenager—and I went to CBGB, and I couldn’t get in, and I kept looking, and then I was able to get in one night. And I’ll never forget it. I still had the long hair because I was still into rock and roll. Face it, you can’t beat the Rolling Stones in the ‘70s. They were the best. But I remember going to CBGB’s the first time in my life, and it’s this long, narrow, you know, den of iniquity. And I remember they had the tables on the side, and they had columns and a plaque, a thing that blocked where the tables were but you could climb up, and the place was packed, and I climbed up, and I’m standing somewhere towards the back, and I’m standing up and the Ramones come out, and they do a twenty-five minute set, nonstop, 1-2-3-4. Holy fucking shit. This is fucking insane. This is not the Rolling Stones. This is not Led Zeppelin, this is like, Whoa. This is not even the Sex Pistols.

But, whatever, I honed my skills and dang I worked, really, for several years as a bass player. I guess I continued with music in my own projects into my forties, with Love Maker and Starr. Love Maker, we were big in the city, and then Starr, I was the front man. Starr became pretty big. We got signed to Geffen records. And I was singing, we were playing it at the Continental, which doesn’t exist anymore, the Continental Club, you don’t know, you’re too young, that was the hot club, right off the St. Mark’s Place on Second or Third Avenue. There was some people, agents, there, and there was a TV show that they were developing, and they needed an evil rock band. It was a kids show, and they hired us to be this evil rock band because we had the big hair and the makeup.

MNG

Is there a band that sonically compared to you guys?

Z

I would say we were somewhere between early Mötley Crüe and Kiss. Kiss with the makeup and the costumes and the boots. We had custom costumes. We had the red suits, we had the black, we had silver, we had gold, you know, everything. We had somebody making us costumes. And we had a guy out in Queens that made the boots for us. We did the whole thing, you know. We did the TV show, we did a song for the show, and then we were going to go into the second season. Things were going great for us. We were touring, we were getting ready to go to Europe.

And then we got dropped by the record label. We were working on the record, and that stopped. Then the TV show did not continue the second season. And it was kind of like, oh shit. It was the right thing at the wrong time. It was like we were doing grunge and then rap. Look, I always say rap killed rock. That’s it, when the rap came out, the early rap.

MNG

Beastie Boys?

Z

Well, Beastie Boys, but like, like Coolio and, you know, “Funky Cold Medina”. I mean, I liked it too, but it killed rock. And that was kind of it. We still played a little... Jersey was big for rock. We would all play the big clubs in Jersey for hundreds of people, stuff like that. But it was over. We just knew that that was the end of it.

So I wound up getting involved in the wrong thing, and I started doing heroin. Boom, done. So I lost my house, sold my car... I sold my Jaguar to make money. Yeah, it’s a crazy story, and I had the wrong girlfriend, and guess what? That was it. I wound up in rehab. So it was crack. First, it was crack and it was always crack. I used to do it with the heroin. I never shot heroin, but I used to put the heroin and the crack in the pipe and smoke it together like a speed ball. What a high baby.

Anyway, I wound up in rehab. I came out. I was destitute. God bless my parents. When I came out of rehab my father picked me up, and they got me a room at the YMCA up by Columbus Circle. They bought me food. They wouldn’t give me money. They brought me food, cigarettes. They didn’t want me to have those, but they knew I needed them. And they bought me all arts. And I would stay, and I would work, and I did all this stuff.

I started doing the portraits. I’d find pictures in books. I’d go to the library. It was a library a couple of blocks away from my place in Brooklyn, the public library, and I would find, shouldn’t really say this, but I’d make two books, and I’d find pictures that I liked, and I’d rip them out take them back, and then sit and copy them. The first one I did that with is the David Bowie, which I still sell to this day.

MNG

When you started making prints in the early 2000s, what made you adopt this style so quickly? Was it your upbringing and your parents being into Japanese prints? Want to pull up a chair?

Z

Yeah. My ass hurts, yeah.

Anyways, I could always draw anyone’s face, and I was into rock and roll, and it just came together. I was doing stuff on rice paper, which you can’t even get anymore, because twenty years later, it’s just different. I had some Japanese portraits, and I brought them to my old lawyer from the music business. He’s dead now, Jonathan, God bless him. He was great to me, and I brought him some. And he was like, “Dude, this stuff is amazing”. He said, “Take this, go to Washington Square or Union Square, make a setup and sell them and start building up clientele and a repertoire”.

And I went and I called my mom, and I told her, “Look, this is what Jonathan told me,” and she said, “He’s right, you should.” So I’m back in my little place in Brooklyn and I said, shit, I know all these prints. Try it. And I went for a walk. It was one night, you know, I was just thinking, and outside in the garbage were five beautiful, identical gold leaf frames in great condition with the glass. Brought them back to my place. I cleaned everything up. I opened them up, I put the prints in there, set them all up. I had one of those little ragged things, all bungee cord, went on the train, and I went to Union Square.

Near the Gandhi statue at Union Square, I hung them on that little semi-circle or something, hung them up there. It was the winter, and I had a big coat on, and I was standing out there, and the lady comes over to me and says, “How much for these two?” All of a sudden. I threw a number at her, and there was a bank right across the street on the corner. She said, “I’ll be right back. I’ll bring you the cash.” She gave me the money, I gave her the piece. I said, I’m a business. This is what I’m doing now. Good price, whatever. I don’t even remember. It was a couple hundred bucks, one hundred each. And I thought, I’m in business, and that was the beginning. I figured out displays, and built it up.

There was this one print shop few blocks up on 13th Street, Village Copier. And I knew the guy over there, John, good friend of mine for many years. And they would print canvases, so I give him the image. In those days, didn’t even have a USB or anything, you know. I just brought the print. He scanned it and we made a canvas, and I made a setup, and I hung the canvas, and I had my stands with my prints and racks. I had a whole fucking tin with big print in the back, and somebody bought the big print. I didn’t know, I sold it for $300, now I sell them for $3,000, okay? So I was like, This is it. Eventually I made some money, saved up, and I met my friend Stella. She said, “Let’s make T shirts. Should we get a heat press?” I said, “What? What was that?”

So, you know, started printing t-shirts in every size, and we started doing tote bags, dude. I mean, somebody came by with a tote bag a few weeks ago, from, like, fifteen years ago. I said, “I can’t believe you still have that.” It’s unbelievable. So we’re making t-shirts. We’re making money, hand over fist, selling t-shirts. I think we were making a couple thousand on the weekend, like on Saturday, just selling fucking t-shirts. Never mind prints. But then I developed pains in my shoulder. It was such a pain that I would be up all night. Stella would call me, “Hey, dude, somebody wants a Big City Girl in a medium and we don’t have any.” I’d say, “All right, I’ll make one. Give me 15 minutes. I’ll run it over. So I’d run home. You know, it was kind of a crazy business.

Anyway, one day, I’m in Union Square. And a lady, a girl, comes over, she’s wearing a t-shirt with one of my images that I never made. And I said, “Where’d you get that t-shirt from?” And she said, “Oh, there’s a store.” I said, “That’s my work, look!” I showed her the print of it, really. You know what she did? She took the shirt off and gave it to me. Said, “I feel really bad.” I said, “Hey, I’ll give you a print.” Then I went over to the store and I showed them the t-shirt, and they were the ones that had bought some prints from me. I remember the guy when he bought it. I mean, I’m saying years ago. And I said, “Dude, you can’t do this without asking me. I sold you the artwork. You can’t start making the same thing that Jack had done.” But Jack was cool. He was a nice guy. I said, “Guess what? I’m gonna have my lawyer get in touch with you with a cease and desist. Take them all off the rack. If they’re not off the rack by tomorrow morning, you’re gonna get hit.” Okay, that was done. Another lesson learned.

I can’t believe I’m remembering this, I haven’t thought about this stuff in years. That’s the weirdest part. But, you know, it’s this long and blinding road to success. Anyways, Stella and I were doing very nicely in Union Square. We moved over to Meatpacking, right across the street from the Standard Hotel. The whole street across the Standard Hotel was just abandoned buildings. There was nothing there. So what fifteen, twenty years ago, this is before Chelsea Market. So it has to be about... Jesus Christ. Oh, my God. I actually remember Chelsea Market is where we got our first gallery space. We rented, I guess, 2010, 2012. So we went to Meatpacking, and we were doing well, and Stella—this is the best thing we ever did—we presented Stella’s work. The story is not only about me. The story should be about Stella and me, Stella and I, you know, because without Stella, I would never... I don’t think I would have ever risen. Maybe I would have found a different way, something else... maybe.

MNG

How did you meet Stella?

Z

In Union Square. She was selling jewelry. She was a collector of all kinds of weird jewelry, and I liked her look. I always said she reminded me of a perfect cross between Johnny Thunders and Patti Smith. That’s what she looked like. And I saw her profile, and I walked over to her while I was selling, and we just became friends. And actually, I fell in love. We, you know, we became lovers and everything for a while.

But anyway, she made these things. I went to the hardware store, I got them varnished, and I fixed them up, and I took them out to Meatpacking one day with my stuff on the wall, and I had these leaned up against the wall. The guy in the Mercedes Benz drives up, pulls over. He said, “How much for that?” I said, “Well, that’s not my work, this is my work” (gesturing). He says, “Well, I know your work. How much for those?” (Stella’s.) I was like, okay, I threw a number at him, he pops the trunk, towel in the back, paid me $500 cash for it. I called Stella. I said, “Now you’re a working artist. Come and get your money, honey.” That started everything.

So then we started bouncing off of each other, and then we spent some time where I just gave my work a powder, because hers became very lucrative, because now you’re not selling prints for like, one hundred bucks. Now you’re selling paintings for, like, a lot more, you know, because she’s an abstract. She’s not a printer. She’s a painter. Yeah, she’s a real painter. I sold a painting for her, this past Saturday or Saturday. Over there—$3,000 in the street. That’s hard to get these days, you know? Yeah. So she sells good and over time we’ve developed her client base. And I’ll take certain days and sell only her work, and then I’ll have my days where I come and do my shtick. And we pretty much have been doing the same thing for the last fifteen years, you know, still have a partnership. Yeah, still Stray Kat Gallery. We did Stray Kat Gallery. That’s how it came.

MNG

I remember that one in the West Village.

Z

Before that we were in Chelsea Market. And we were killing it. Our paintings and my prints. We were making money. We were making money. Then that stupid Artisan Fleas thing came, and they wanted the space, and so they got it. But the people from Chelsea Market were like, “We have a spot on 14th Street right at the High Line. Tell you what. Give it to you. $6,000 a month.” We took that. So we did Chelsea Market after doing Meatpacking. No more street. Now we have gallery space. We have our first gallery space. We’re doing events. We’re doing the whole thing, you know, wine and whatever.

So when Artisan Fleas wanted that space and our lease was up, they were like, “You know what? We have a spot for you. Give you a great deal.” Now we were at the staircase of the High Line. Across the street there was another spot that was rented. It was interesting. We did okay at the first spot, but then the people moved out across the street—it wasn’t the Chelsea Market. I forget the company that owned it. This was an 8,000 square foot space with thirty-foot ceilings. It was insane. Wasn’t properly lit, but we found out who owned it and who controlled it, and they gave us a decent deal, and we took that. We moved right across the street. Wasn’t properly lit.

I remember we had fifty can lights, and I’ve gone ladder hanging, slipping into stuff with wires tacking into the wall with electricity. Made a fucking great gallery. We started cleaning up again right there. And it was just like, why did the chicken cross the road to make more money? We were here and we went there, and it was night and day. It was unbelievable. But the space had a certain... certain... it was just... It wasn’t really a finished space. It was really cool. Cool with the artwork, with the big posters and Stella’s big paintings. And then people from Europe and tourism. It was just the right thing.

MNG

What was the creative bond? So you guys met, you hit it off from a personal standpoint. But she saw your art and saw an opportunity to expand the way you do it?

Z

Yeah, she had the brain. And it was like, Look, if Jack could make t-shirts, why don’t we make t-shirts? And she’s very smart, very forward thinking, whereas I just run with the wind, you know? I mean, whatever. Oh, it’s working. I’m just gonna keep doing it. She’s like, well, this is working. She’s more—

MNG

She has the vision.

Z

Yeah, she’s the business. I will say that she has a great vision, very smart lady. I’ll never take that away from her. So that big gallery in the West Village, yeah, then we got the space on Jane Street. It’s a beautiful corner. Remember that corner?

MNG

Of course. That was a great spot. I went to your Gallery during COVID. Bought the Miles Davis. Pink and Blue.

Z

We had that for three years. Yeah, that fucking place. Whoa. We got it right before COVID, and then COVID hit, and then everything shut down. And you know what I did: I kept it open. I would go in the late afternoon. I’d leave the lights on all the time, and I would go in the late afternoon, stay open all night, and people would come out for their walk after the day of being in their apartment. They gotta walk their dog and take a walk after dinner, smoke a cigarette. And people were coming in and buying shit. I was making money right during COVID. I would say we won by default, because we were the only game in town.

I was open, and all of a sudden somebody complained: “Why is that guy open?” No stores were supposed to be open. Three cops came. They’re like, “Hey, what’s going on?” And I said, “Hey, what’s up?” “You have people in here?” I said, “Yeah, well, by appointment.” I had a sign on the door: By Appointment Only. I said, “Yes, you know, I have somebody coming over, so that’s why.” But it was a nice day. I didn’t need the air conditioning. It wasn’t cold. I had the door open, and they were looking around. They said, “Wow, this is some cool stuff. Listen, as long as you don’t have more than six people in here at one time, including yourself, you can stay.” So that was the end. I got to pass by the cops. Hell yeah. So I was in like Flynn.

The worst thing that happened was there was this Italian restaurant, which now has that corner spot, they wanted it, and they were willing to wait till our lease was up. Well, we were paying $5,000. We were saying, okay, maybe Bruce will charge us $7,000. He comes back to me with $14,000 because the Italian restaurant had the money. They took the space next door. That was his also. And that wasn’t it. They broke the wall, turned it into a giant restaurant, and I was out. And guess what? I wound up back in the street again. Ever since then, I’ve been selling the street. But I do commercial commissions. I do logos. I work all the time. I’m doing stuff. I get photographs. People want me to do portraits of their family. And I still sell, you know?

And I went back to Meatpacking for a while, was selling some canvases, and then I wound up coming to SoHo. Yeah, you know, now I’m in SoHo. I’m working solo, and I was selling at Chanel (a block away) until that construction came. That was my lucky spot. I can’t sell there because it’s noisy all the time. So I found this empty spot, and I’ve been working here, and I do do good.

So I’ve been looking, yeah. Couple of spots. Small. 450, 500 square feet. Six, seven, ten, twelve thousand dollars, still empty. I called the broker and you know what?—it is not the owners, it’s the brokers. You can’t even get to the owner. I’ve tried to find the owners of some of these and make a deal. “I’ll do a cash deal with you, I’ll give you $7,000 down.” You know what? VoCA told us that they didn’t take cash. Don’t take cash. Cash is king. Just say it’s not rented. And if somebody says something, you say, “Oh, that’s my nephew. I’m giving him the space for free just to try something.” So I haven’t been able to find secure space, because the rents are now double what they were.

MNG

Does this sour you on New York, this crazy rent battle that’s always going on?

Z

Fuck it. I make my own gallery in the street.

MNG

You pay zero rent right now. Is that almost more optimal?

Z

Of course. Is it free money? No, still gotta come out. I gotta set up, get stuck in the rain or something. It’s just a gig, but I’m used to it because that’s how I started. Yeah, I was inside for years, but now I’m back outside. Doesn’t matter. It’s the same thing. I’m the same guy, right? My hair’s white now. I got a little older, you know, that’s all. But people still come to me. People come looking for me. I had a guy the other day who came looking for me. I met some producers, and they shot a whole thing of me, and we’re doing a show now. I’m the host. I’ll give you the card. You gotta check it out. I host a show about artists that make their own work and make a living from it. Called “Welcome to My Gallery.”

MNG

I saw one of their Instagram posts, yeah. Are you active on Instagram?

Z

Not really. I have no patience for that. I’m active doing what I do, you know. So I love when people come and say, “Do you have an Instagram?” I say, “You like this print? You want my Instagram once you buy the fucking print? Okay, follow me on Instagram.” You know? Who cares? I don’t want you to follow me. Invariably, that’s the way I do it. Yeah. I really don’t care.

What counts is the sale. I’m in it to win. I always say I’m not out to make friends. I’m out to make money. I have expensive rent. I have expenses even to make friends and run my shop where I make everything and have everything done, and with the supplies and everything, it costs money. It’s a constant thing, like any business: You make money, you spend money. Of course, the more money you make, the more money you have to spend, because you have to replenish it. Of course, that’s pretty much where it is. And sad? No, I love this fucking city. I don’t know where else I could do what I do. I meet people from all over the country and all over the world. Everyone comes to New York eventually. And my work’s all over the world. Somebody said to me the other day, “Oh, your paintings, these pieces are going to Belgium.” Well, it won’t be the first.”

MNG

Didn’t you go to Japan? You learned a lot of the craft there.

Z

I did, traditional wood block printing in Japan.

MNG

Since then you’ve been clean?

Z

I did slip once or twice, until I met Stella, and I let it go.

MNG

So Stella was huge for you...

Z

Yeah, yeah. Because, like, even when I got out, I was like... I think Stella saved my life.

MNG

Did you ever consider settling with her? Where is the business you have together now?

Z

Stella. Oh, yeah. We were settled in a way, but we were so involved in what we were doing. And she’s selling, and we’re making money, and we’re gonna sell you (Stella’s work) today. We sell me too. It was an exciting thing. So you could come from the street, save $20,000 and rent a space, and all of a sudden you have a gallery. You came from nowhere, you’re selling in a park, and the next thing you know, you opened up your own space, just from hard work, being smart, just making it happen. And I credit Stella a lot for that because, like I said, me, I’m great at making money. I’m even better at spending it. Trust me. That’s really the story of my life.

MNG

Speaking of spending money. How about New York? Do you think it’s still a good place for young artists? I mean, you’re kind of a part of the old guard.

Z

I am the old guard—when it was great for all artists, when it was affordable in SoHo. In the old days, the streets were lined with the artists. Now, on a weekend, maybe there’s five or six people. Yes, it’s still a great place for young artists, absolutely a great place. But you have to have good work first. You have to know how to engage people and speak to them. You have to make a nice display, you have to keep your area clean. If you do that, and you have good work, and you’re persistent and patient, you can make money every time you set up.

And that’s really it. So it is a great place. What’s better than New York? Like I said, everyone from all over the country and all over the world comes to New York at one point, and they’re always looking for something. You just gotta be in it to win it, baby, you know, that’s it.

Gotta be in it to win it, baby.

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If you’d like to read this review in print, you can subscribe via Substack or purchase the issue on our website. The first round of orders will be arriving in mailboxes everywhere late December / early January. Happy reading and holidays to all!

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Earlier this year I was trying to think of the best ass I’d ever seen. It was impossible. Think of one and one hundred more come crashing over you like waves. By then I already knew that rankings, most of the time, are nonsensical. But I was ranking anyway because my mind was breaking down. There’s a reason Fitzgerald made lists, “hundreds of lists,” when he was cracking up. Lists are a cry for help. They give the anxious mind what it wants more than all else: order, the feeling of focus, the experience of thinking continuously.

But many of the most important categories have no order. There is no ranking. It’s fruitless to rate The Elementary Particles, published in 1998, against the twentieth century’s novels. All one can say is that Michel Houellecbecq goes the distance with Vonnegut and Carver, a jangled Céline, even an injured Hemingway. I don’t know about you but this came to me as a great relief. For years I’d been believing that all the great writers were dead. But now I know that there is one still kicking over in France, and if there is one then there is always the chance of multiplication. Good writing spreads faster than the clap.

As a classical novel measured against time-honored rules, Particles holds up well. Set in France during the second half of the twentieth century, the novel follows the lives of two half-brothers who share the same mother. Michel is a lonely, despondent, brilliant scientist who holds rationality sacrosanct. His brother, Bruno, is a sex-crazed high school teacher who pursues only pleasure. Both are unfulfilled spiritually and romantically; the novel’s dramatic tension arises from their last opportunities at experiencing love. There is plot, conflict, character, theme—enough to make Shakespeare’s skeleton hop out of the grave and do a jig on the casket.

In many other aspects Particles is terrifically modern. The language is new and colloquial, there are plenty of cocks and cunts throughout. In literature slang is not inherently good or bad, but it certainly is hard to pull off. I’ve read writers who’ve tried to imbue slay, goated, aura, brunch, fuck boy, vibe, bricked, giving, lit, sick, cringe, low key, besties, rizz, and edging with artistic integrity. They’ve all failed. They use the words too literally, in contexts that are too expected. Bushwick girls calling Lana Del Ray Mother is too on the nose. Houellebecq succeeds where others fail because he breaks patterns. Just as Tarantino gives cool a new gravitas in True Romance, the Frenchman transposes common expressions from their predicted settings into surprising ones. Through this metamorphosis, the spoken word becomes art. If modern writers insist on using “serving cunt,” they should do something new with it. The expression used in a eulogy, for a prostitute who died working a soup kitchen, fits better than in a teenage text chat. As Céline proved with his “little music,” the original use of familiar words can restore their vitality.

To create vibrancy and velocity, Houellebecq writes short chapters with many scenes. It is not uncommon for an entire movement to take place in one highly-detailed, vivid paragraph. He sets these scenes firmly on the page; one reads them with the focus short poems or paintings demand. In the twenty-first century, this might be one of the few remaining styles that can achieve both literary merit and mass-market accessibility.

If one considers the story’s vernacular and tempo safer contemporary bets, then its chronology is its greatest risk. Beginning with Michel’s departure from university in 1998, the tale then rewinds one hundred years back to the birth of his grandparents. For the next seventy pages, nearly thirty percent of the novel’s running time, the narrator interweaves the lives of the brothers before returning to where the book began. This much background is generally considered a big nicht-nicht. Fiction workshops, God bless ’em, state that there should be ten times more front story than back story. Hemingway’s iceberg theory depends on a conscious withholding of historical information. Vonnegut lived by the rule that every sentence should “reveal character or advance action.” The Great Gatsby is a much stronger novel because Fitzgerald cut the protagonist’s back story from the beginning of the novel (he later released this as the short story “Absolution”).

Houellebecq makes back story work because Particles is as much a sociological study as it is a novel. He starts by elucidating how society shifts during the twentieth century, so that he can later reveal how those shifts come to bear on the main characters. When the story starts moving forward again, their decisions, value systems, and modes of thinking become predictable—almost determined—while simultaneously taking on a greater significance. Houellebecq pulls the stage curtains back and exposes the machine that moves men and women. Strange as they may appear at first glance, Michel and Bruno are not outcasts in a vacuum. They are microcosms of the society that created them. More and more, the reader starts to see the machine that rules his own life. It isn’t natural to message twenty girls on Tinder after watching fifty pornographic Instagram reels. Our actions are not entirely of our design. We act as we do, to a large extent, because the machinery changed.

One of the predominant forces Houellbecq focuses on is the sexual revolution. The reader first understands it through Jane, the mother of Michel and Bruno. Born in 1928, she is in the vanguard of what will become the sexual liberation movement. At the age of thirteen, she loses her virginity, “a remarkable achievement given the time and place” (20). From there she is off to the races. The races result in two sons, separated until adolescence because she abandons them to different sets of grandparents. After ridding herself of the pests, Jane follows the hippies to California where she spends a few years participating in sex cults. Triumphantly, she returns to France to do more of the same.

Before Particles I’d always thought highly of sixties and seventies culture. I’m not as sure now. Houellebecq reframes the movement by exposing the lost values that made it possible (e.g. sex is sacred), and by explicitly stating the new beliefs that replaced them (e.g. pleasure is supreme). Undoubtedly, his view is slanted because of his own experience. Jane is based on his real mother, a woman even more self-absorbed, delusional, and callous than her fictional counterpart. But even if Houellebecq’s angle is personally tainted, his perspective is valuable because it is a true, uncommon counter-narrative to the prevailing story. Most people think of the sixties as a halcyon. Everyone loves Presley, Monroe, that picture of Jayne Mansfield’s tits on Minetta Tavern’s northern wall. Yet hardly anyone gives credence to the way in which they, and America as a whole, ushered in “the mass consumption of sexual pleasure” (21). Hardly anyone talks about the underbelly of sexual freedom, which has led to generations that have since sought it out obsessively.

These ideas are more relevant now than ever. The confluence of “sexual liberation” and modern technology has ushered in the pornification of everything and everyone. Social media platforms, from YouTube to Twitter, are filled with billions of images that countless men, this writer included, jerk off to. Millions of Instagram profiles, already verging on porn in and of themselves, are three clicks away from nudes, facials, and gangbangs. Women who never would have considered sex work ten years ago are opening OnlyFans accounts by the thousands. In June of this year, The Economist reported that eight percent of Swedish girls, fifteen to nineteen, had already prostituted themselves or sold sexual content online. Worse still are the nameless internet mobs that cheer these sexual champions on. It is now heroic to film yourself taking one trillion dicks in exchange for fame and profit.

Bruno’s life is the embodiment of a sex-based value system. As soon as his nuts drop they grab the wheel. During his adolescence he becomes a slave to his most base instincts; since he can’t get any, what follows is a string of perversions and sexual offenses that satiate his pathological craving—but only momentarily. Soon he needs more. He splits his time at college between fast food restaurants, pornographic theaters, and brothels. After miraculously marrying in his thirties, he starts lusting after his sixteen year-old students. The union was never destined to last:

“‘I met Anne in 1981… She wasn’t really beautiful, but I was tired of jacking off. The good thing, though, was she had big tits. I’ve always liked big tits . . . A WASP with big tits . . .’ To Michel’s surprise, his eyes were wet with tears. ‘Later, her tits started to go south and our marriage went with them.’” (142)

Though many of Bruno’s episodes are dark in nature, he is an overwhelmingly comic figure. The narrator’s detached, humorous, flippant voice paces the scenes perfectly, staying with them long enough to evoke a reaction, yet never dwelling on the darkness within them. Other parties’ reactions lighten the mood of Bruno’s obscenities, which are often so absurd that they’re impossible to take seriously. After becoming jealous of a black student’s success with his favorite teenager, for example, Bruno submits a racist manifesto to a literary magazine. Earlier on, as a youth, he takes to masturbating on trains:

“If it was possible—and it almost always was—he would find a girl on her own and sit facing her. Most of them wore see-through blouses or something similar and crossed their legs. He would not sit directly opposite but at an angle, sometimes sharing the same seat a couple feet away. He would get a hard-on the moment he saw the sweep of long blonde or dark hair. By the time he sat down, the throb in his underpants would be unbearable. He would take a handkerchief out of his pocket as he sat down and open a folder across his laps. In one or two tugs it was over. Sometimes, if the girl uncrossed her legs just as he was taking his cock out, he didn’t even need to touch himself—he came the moment he saw her panties. The handkerchief was a backup; he didn’t really need it. Usually he ejaculated across the folder, over pages of second-order equations, diagrams of insects or a graph of goal production in the USSR. The girl would keep reading her magazine.” (51)

If the novelist had written this story in contemporary times, Bruno would have turned out differently. Since the narrator methodically documents the influences on his life, the reader knows why. Instead of jerking off to fully-clothed women as a teen, Modern Bruno would’ve watched gangbangs. Instead of watching light porn in public theaters as a young man, he would’ve been in his basement getting off to murderous videos. Instead of visiting prostitutes as an adult, he would’ve been incapable of physical interaction with a real woman. If he’d grown up in France I don’t know exactly what he would’ve become. If he’d grown up in the US, I do.

The cultural chain of events that leads to Bruno’s despair is clear: Society’s abandonment of traditional values and religious systems leads to the sexual revolution, which leads to his endless pursuit of sexual gratification. Since he cannot satisfy his cravings, he becomes miserable.

His brother is wholly different. Michel has no sexual desire and little interest in pleasure. The chain of events shakes out differently in his case. What sinks him into an existential crisis is not ascendant hedonism but the loss of tradition and religion:

“There used to be a time when, late in life, a man would come home to feel a certain affection for his spouse—though not before she’d borne his children, made a home for them, cooked, cleaned and proved herself in the bedroom. That sort of regard meant they enjoyed sleeping in the same bed. It was probably not what the women were looking for, and it might even have been a delusion—but it could be a powerful feeling. Strong enough that… [men] literally could not live without their wives. When, out of unhappiness, their wives left them, they hit the bottle and died soon afterward… Children existed solely to inherit a man’s trade, his moral code and his property… That’s all gone now: I work for someone else, there’s nothing for my son to inert. I have no craft to teach him, I haven’t a clue what he might do when he’s older. By the time he grows up, the rules I lived by will have no value—he will live in another universe. If a man accepts the fact that everything must change, then he accepts that life is reduced to nothing more than the sum of his own experience: past and future generations mean nothing to him. That’s how we live now.” (141)

Michel is even more miserable than his brother, who at least has pleasure to chase. What is there for Michel? His despondence with an ephemeral, meaningless world goes beyond a personal depression. He cannot make sense of life itself. Nature is full of strong animals dismembering the weak. Humanity is a long series of horrors, which repeatedly feature rape, slavery, torture, and murder. There are bright spots during individual lives, but if one adds up the moments of suffering and joy, which way would the scale tip? This thinking leads him to the “unshakeable conviction… that nature, taken as a whole, was a repulsive cesspit. All in all, nature deserved to be wiped out in a holocaust—and man’s mission on earth was probably to do just that.” (29)

Those who closely follow tragedies may find this nihilistic worldview familiar. After a man blew himself up outside a fertility clinic in May, wrote a Pirate Wires piece on the philosophy, efilism, that inspired his attempt at murder. “While traditional antinatalists focus on the decision not to have children,” she writes, “efilists advocate for something far more extreme: the elimination of all sentient life on Earth.” Though efilisim is a radical ideology advocated for by a few thousand psychos—puny as far as creeds go—the movement is already linked to other horrors. One month before the bombing, another apostle convinced her boyfriend to execute her while she slept. Thirteen years earlier, the belief that life itself is malevolent motivated a monster to shoot thirty children at Sandy Hook. Thankfully Michel does not share the same interest in violence. His view is closer to that of other anti-natalists, like the rabid climate activists that believe it’s unethical to have children. The Modern Michel, however, would have been more extreme in his views.

Particles is prescient because it predicts behavior based on metaphysical mutations: “radical, global transformations in the values to which the majority subscribe” (1). Two such examples are Christianity and modern science, both of which “[swept] away economic and political systems, aesthetic judgements and social hierarchies” (2). Nearly thirty years on from the book’s publication, we are still living through the same cultural value system that shaped Michel and Bruno. The difference today is that the inventions of the colossal incels—Jobs, Musk, Zuck, etc.—have made the consequences more grave.

The novel predicts that society will continue along these tracks until a new technology or moral system shunts it onto different ones. Based on the current landscape, it is likely that A.I. will cause the next mutation.

Releasing this technology into the modern world is risky. We’ve already observed the catastrophic effects of layering less sophisticated inventions onto our crumbling moral landscape. Now, with A.I., it is possible to design avatars to meet your exact sexual preferences. After weighing loneliness against digital companionship, many have already resorted to subsisting off the latter. According to DemandSage, a reporting service, twenty million people chat with their virtual girlfriends on character.ai each month. With Musk’s latest invention, a $300 per month A.I. porn service, this number is sure to increase.

On the philosophical front, A.I. is already fanning the flames of nihilism. What’s the point of studying if algorithms will exterminate wide swaths of white-collar jobs within the next five years? What’s the point of slaving away on a novel if there is no way to prove that it was you—not a machine—who wrote it? What’s the point of having children if A.I. may eliminate human beings entirely?

The general public is not as excited about this “innovation” as the tech-lords. Most would prefer another metaphysical mutation to the A.I. ghoul Zuck is building. Through the novel’s central conflict—can the brothers overcome their programming and find love?—Houellbecq hints that there is another way out: a return to Romanticism. Recently, this idea has been gaining steam. In 2023 Ted Gioia wrote an article that describes how the original Romantic movements formed as a response to the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment. Just as artists and Luddites chose humanity over technology and rationality back then, we could do the same today. This idea is not as far-fetched as it sounds . How many of your friends are content with their relationship to technology? Zero?

As The Economist reports, this sentiment is already impacting the market. Vinyl sales are now high as they were in the late 1980s. Cassette tape sales in Britain are up two hundred percent year-over-year. The demand for film has doubled in half a decade. It is not a coincidence that the first edition of this magazine is coming out right as the computers threaten to take over.

Houellbecq is on the side of this new movement. Speaking to the Paris Review in 2010, he states that he is a Romantic, someone who has “a strong interest in the future… believes in unlimited happiness… [believes] in love… [and believes] in the soul.” Given his ostensible cynicism the interviewer is, understandably, incredulous. She doubles down, asking if he really, actually believes in boundless, permanent happiness. “Yes,” he replies. “And I’m not just saying that to be a provocateur.”

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The last couple months, with the creation and distribution of our inaugural print edition, have been thrilling at Non Grata. We couldn’t be more excited to open up the portal to all of the great readers and writers out there who want to contribute their piece to this project. Before getting into the various submission categories listed below, it’s worth pointing out what we’re looking for at a high level.

With a name like “Non Grata,” it should come as no surprise that we aim to publish rebellious writing. That does not mean we’re looking for a lunatic to argue the literary merits of Mein Kampf. Gratuitous, depraved, reactionary takes are as useless as the inane ideas they’re reacting to. What we’re looking for are courageous authors willing to offer their honest, raw perspectives. Great rebellious writing is the transposition of late-night conversations with friends onto the page. It is the unabashed expression of ideas or feelings the writer knows to be true, yet is unwilling to share at work happy hours or “polite” dinner parties in Portland. For certain, the writer cannot submit these ideas to , The Atlantic, or any premier university journal. As much as mainstream publications wish that Truth was ideological, it is not. With open arms, Non Grata welcomes the stories that have been gathering dust on your hard drive, and the scandalous ideas you haven’t yet put to paper. We’re also here for conventional essays and stories, too. The main thing we care about, whatever the content of a piece, is that it is exhilarating, stimulating, beautiful, and/or simply enjoyable to read. The best way to get a sense of what we’re looking for is to regularly follow what we publish: You’ll see what we’re up to pretty quick.

FICTION

Short stories that move quickly, generally five thousand words or less. (If you have a longer/slower piece, please feel free to send it along, too.) Almost all of our short stories will feature in a print edition because, online, the reading experience for fiction isn’t good enough yet.

NEW ROMANTICISM & THE LUDDITES

These categories are complements to each other: One inspires people in the art of living; the other directly critiques technology. We’re looking to publish the story that gets someone on the next flight to Brazil, and the ten thousand word pieces that kill ChatGPT and the iPhone once and for all.

BOOK REVIEWS

Great literature from any period, even better if it’s contemporary and/or independent. For now, we’re giving preference to excellent, layered, accessible writers: Think Carver, Hemingway, Céline, Didion over Faulkner, Joyce, and my much beloved Proust. Ideally these get readers, including those who are not aficionados, excited about the works. That said, we’re also cool with panning books—assuming they really do need to go down.

MOVIE / MUSIC REVIEWS

Similar to literature, we’re interested in movies and albums from any period with a preference for the contemporary and/or independent. Who are the most under appreciated directors? What’s worth seeing in cinemas? Why should we start listening to Bach again? What new album is worth hearing top to bottom? Who is putting on the greatest concerts in New York? What’s being hyped up without reason? That sort of thing.

POLEMICS

High-quality essays that question the predominant narratives. The two series we’re excited about are “In Defense Of” and “Against.” The former defends ideas and figures that have been unfairly derided; the latter revolts against conventional wisdom and the supposed illustrious.

Every piece we publish receives in-depth editing before it goes out into the world. We want you to feel proud of the work you showcase in Non Grata, as though it is a luminous reflection of your mind at a moment in time. To submit, send us an email at hello@magazinenongrata.com. Please include the category in the subject line and a short description of the work in the body.

Thank you to all of our readers and writers, we are so goddamn excited about this.

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Annalisa deserves all of it and more. Her vignette on sex and New York is beautifully-written and courageous, the kind of high-quality writing that “esteemed” magazines, like , would publish in spades had they any taste or valor.

If you’d like to support our mission of getting real, honest voices back into PRINT, consider purchasing the first issue of Non Grata. You can subscribe here on Substack, or buy a copy from our website, and we’ll mail it to you (shipping is included in all prices). This is a story that belongs in apartments across the country: For the owner to return to, and for visitors to pick up off the coffee table and read.

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The man on the J train platform at 3:47 AM asked if I was okay and I said yes, though we both knew I was holding someone else’s semen inside me like a secret I’d already forgotten the point of keeping. New Yorkers fuck the same way we take the subway: eyes averted, bodies pressed against strangers, hoping our stop comes soon but not too soon, always engaging in some performative act or another (mewing when a 7.5/10 enters the car, or else holding your ex girlfriend’s copy of The Body Keeps The Score up high enough that other people can see what you’re reading). The glitter from Nowadays still nested in my hair like dead stars when the man I had sex with last night said I reminded him of his ex. We were both masturbating with each other’s bodies—this was understood. Efficient. Metropolitan.

When I came to New York, I was a virgin. Not in the way that matters to gynecologists, but in the way that matters to girls who still believe their hymens hold moral weight. I was desperate to cling to it and desperate to lose it, but only to someone who would make the losing mean something. The loss came draped in abundance—in the arms of the man I loved then, on top of his guest bedroom sheets in his parents’ expensive New Jersey colonial, 2:30 on a Tuesday afternoon. Natural light poured through expensive linen curtains that hung from crown molding like surrendered flags. The suburbs peering at us voyeuristically through the window. I bled a little. He said it was normal. We never really talked about it again.

And once I lost it, I gained everything. The freedom I’d come hunting for in Manhattan’s electric maze. Because now I had the freedom of hiding in plain sight. The freedom to fuck—not make love, not have sex, but fuck—as both social currency and camouflage. Sex became my passport to rooms I’d only read about in magazines, my skeleton key to people I hated but needed to become. I learned to use my body like a business card, networking horizontally. If I could make them want my body, I could make them want my mind.

The thing about fucking strangers is that you never have to be yourself. That’s the whole point. To be touched by a city that touches nothing gently, by its sweaty and coked-up inhabitants who I would pass on South 4th outside the café and never acknowledge, though they’d been inside me forty days ago, though I could still map the terrain of their apartment ceilings.

I fucked everyone. I collected lovers the way other women collect perfumes—each one a different way to smell like someone else, to cover the stench of my own emptiness. Brazilian, bitter. American, cloying. Dutch, impossible. All of them evaporating by morning. Women who tasted like gin and ambition. Men who fucked like they were trying to win a prize they’d never accept. People who didn’t know which they were and liked it that way. I fucked them in Bushwick lofts with exposed brick that scraped my back, in Financial District high-rises where the windows rattled with possibility, in Queens apartments that smelled like their mothers’ cooking that I could never eat.

Against the sweat-riddled navy sheets of Jacob from college (who only mentioned his dead father when we were drunk, who never asked me anything that mattered) I thought of my own father. Italian immigrant, raised Roman Catholic in a village where his uncle built the church by hand after promising god that if He brought him back from the war alive, he’d build the only church in the town by hand. My father, the man who wouldn’t let me sleep at friends’ houses because boys might climb through windows and impregnate me before I’d even begun bleeding. If he could see his daughter now: spreading herself across Manhattan like spilled wine, staining everything. He would crawl to the Pope on his knees, not praying for my salvation but for his own reputation, begging forgiveness for raising such a spectacular slut.

I had sex with Matthew from the internet (rape kink, breeding kink, a collection of damage masquerading as desire).

I fucked Tyler and Julianna, a practiced couple I met fittingly at 169 bar in the Lower East Side, on their shared private rooftop, and I lectured them both on the differences between ideological Marxism and practiced communism while Tyler ate me out underneath the oversized American flag blowing above us as Julianna watched from the couch, masturbating absentmindedly.

I made love to my ex-girlfriend Emily as I subconsciously started listing in my mind all the reasons we could never be together.

As I bruised my body against a Brazilian stranger (Lucas, whose name I may have invented, who I had met on Feeld, and about whom I knew little and cared even less about), I smiled gleefully against the teachings of my conservative seventh grade sham of a “sex ed” teacher who made us sign forms promising we’d all practice abstinence until marriage. If we signed the form, we were gifted a gift card for a small, $10 personal pizza from the local Dominoes. I picked up my Tacandoroga #2 pencil, freshly sharpened, my twelve year-old hands wrapped around it like a sword. The pizza tasted stale and hot, like it knew I’d acquired it through deception. Like it was punishing me for what was to come.

The first time I went down on a woman from my poetry workshop, I thought of every Florida classmate who’d spit “lesbian” at me like a slur. She wrote terrible poems about moon cycles. I let her read them to me afterward.

Each encounter was a small death, practice for the grander disappearing act I was perfecting. Nine years of revolving doors and borrowed beds, of lying about love and loving the lying. In the velvet-dark rooms of Manhattan, I became an expert at being whoever they needed me to be for exactly as long as it took.

But the last time—the last time was different.

We drank negronis and spoke of real things until the air between us grew thick with something dangerously close to honesty. His gray polyester couch held us like a confessional. I wondered how many women had received this exact choreography—the negronis mixed just so, the jazz playlist titled “Mood,” the practiced lean-in after the third drink.

It didn’t work. Despite what our souls wanted, our bodies staged a rebellion. The sex collapsed like a failed soufflé. He was embarrassed for all the obvious reasons: here was a woman at her physical peak, breasts still winning their war with gravity, and he couldn’t perform the one act men measure themselves by. But my shame cut deeper: I feared that nine years of fucking had corroded my capacity for true communion. How could it not? I had spent a decade hiding in New York’s most beautiful hiding places—clubs that promised transformation but delivered only hangovers, dark rooms where identity dissolved into strobe lights, rooftop parties where you could float above your own life until the drugs wore off.

The city taught me early: there are only seven good places to cry in public. My friends kept lists in their phones. The infrastructure itself supports emotional avoidance—turnstiles that won’t wait for your breakdown, subway cars where you must hold it together for forty minutes underground while advertisements for better lives flash above your head.

After the man I couldn’t fuck falls asleep, I lie on his gray couch listening to the fake fireplace loop. I search for my underwear in the dark, a scavenger hunt for dignity. On the 4 AM subway home, I watch my reflection in the black window and realize I’m wearing the same expression I use when strangers watch me cum.

The next weekend I stand before my mirror, applying lipstick in the shade of red I was always told was befitting of a woman. The ritual feels like preparing a corpse. I can’t remember the last time I had sex sober. Can’t remember the last time I cried during it. Can’t remember the last time I said someone’s real name in bed without it sounding like it was coming from someone else’s mouth.

I realize I haven’t said my own name during sex in nine years.

In the fluorescent bathroom light, I look exactly like what I am: a woman who fucked her way through Manhattan looking for freedom and found only more elaborate cages. My father was right to fear for me, but for all the wrong reasons. It wasn’t the boys sneaking through windows he should have worried about. It was his daughter sneaking out of her own life, one orgasm at a time.

The virgin I was when I came to New York—she’s still in there somewhere, preserved in amber, watching me through the mirror with those same desperate eyes. Still believing that somewhere between the leather banquettes and the bathroom stalls, between the rooftop views and the morning shame, she might find what she came here looking for.

In New York, we learn to call our emptiness freedom. We learn to mistake movement for progress, fucking for intimacy, being seen for being known. We learn that the city will let you be anyone, which means you never have to be yourself. This is what we call making it. What do we think we’re making?

Tonight I’ll go out again, to some new place that’s exactly like all the old places, and I’ll meet someone who reminds someone else of someone they used to know. We’ll perform our little death in the dark, and, afterward, I’ll take the train home alone, counting the stops like rosary beads, praying to no one in particular that this time… this time…I’ll remember my own name when I come. That was the deal. You gave your body to the night, and in return you got one pure moment where everyone seemed beauteous.

Of course it doesn’t work.

I try again tomorrow,

and tomorrow,

and tomorrow…

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I first found out about Andrew’s debut novel, Victim, when sent me off on that mission to find good, contemporary, rebellious literature. It was the best I came across during my hunt. If the literary renaissance really happens, its author may well become one its brightest stars.

The following interview, though short and straightforward, has significantly changed my life. The simple act of Andrew detailing his writing routine, which begins each morning at five a.m., transformed my own. After we chatted earlier this year, I too began writing every morning before work, hardly ever missing a day. For the first time I started treating writing like the most important thing in my life. My hope is that you, dear reader, also find one or two (or three) gems below, which you can use right away.

If you’d like to get your hands on the print issue, you can subscribe via Substack or buy on our website. Shipping is included in the price; we’ll also have them primed and ready for pick up at the ever-growing launch party this Saturday.

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Magazine Non Grata

I saw you were boxing the other day. Are you taking that seriously?

Andrew Boryga
I love boxing. I’m Puerto Rican. I grew up watching Tito Trinidad, Miguel Cotto. I have a couple friends here in Miami that are only friends because we watch boxing together. I love it as a sport. I’m gonna write a boxing novel at some point. and , who wrote the novel, Fuccboi, were saying they want to set up a boxing match.

Magazine Non Grata

There are a couple guys at Non Grata that would love to fight Sean Thor.

Andrew Boryga

He’d be down for it. I’m down for it, too. If you set it up we’ll find somebody for me and do a few matches.

Magazine Non Grata

Deal. Moving onto fiction: Did you always want to be a novelist?

Andrew Boryga

No. I didn’t understand how you became a novelist. As a kid all I knew was that I liked reading books. My mother used to take my sisters and me to Barnes & Noble on the weekends. Usually we couldn’t buy the books, but we’d read them and remember the page we were on. The next weekend we’d go from there. I read a lot of my first books that way. We’d just be there all day at Barnes & Noble.

In seventh grade my teacher, Miss Stein, pulled me aside and told me I could do something with writing. It happened again in high school with another teacher, Mrs. Negrin. By that point I was voracious, going to the library, fifteen or sixteen, carrying around Dostoevsky. All my friends in the Bronx were coming up to me like, “Bro, what the fuck are you doing?” It was weird to be doing that in my neighborhood. But I was into the shit.

Around that time I started thinking about journalism because it made sense to me. There was a guy outside the subway and I’d buy the paper, see the pictures of the columnists. They were real people.

At sixteen I started writing for a newspaper in the Bronx. Then, when I was about to graduate high school, I won a scholarship with the New York Times. Usually they don’t give interns anything of significance, but I already had two years of journalism experience, so I talked my way into writing. Suddenly, just out of high school, I was getting bylines in the Times. I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing, but I was holding my own at the top level. That gave me a lot of confidence.

Magazine Non Grata

When did you start writing fiction?

Andrew Boryga

In college I took creative writing classes. I liked writing short stories and won some awards. After I graduated I went down to Miami to do this MFA thing. Five months later I dropped out. I had all this time to write but I didn’t have anything to say. So I came back to New York and got a job as an assistant at the Times. On the side I started writing a novel, which eventually became Victim.

Magazine Non Grata

How long did it take you to write it?

Andrew Boryga

A long time. From twenty-three to thirty I wrote about five versions of the novel. I tried getting agents with each one but no one was interested. So I just kept searching for a configuration of how to make the story work. I knew I wanted to write about the Bronx. I knew I had these two characters that are friends who grow up together—who take different paths and want to reunite—but I needed a plot. It took me a while to identify that.

Magazine Non Grata

When did it click?

Andrew Boryga

As I’m going through the journalism industry, I’m experiencing this wave of diversity and identity hype. And I’m in the center of it because I’m writing for these places and I’m a brown person and they don’t know how to deal with me. I don’t know how to deal with them. So there’s a lot of weird shit going on and I was just internalizing it.

The summer of 2020 my son is born, and I’m realizing I don’t want to be a daily journalist anymore. That’s when I locked in and finally stumbled on the idea of a character, like myself, who was getting these opportunities as a person of color to write.

In real life, as I satirize in the novel, agents would sit across from me and be like, “You’re so authentic, you can… blah blah blah.” They were saying all these words, but I’m a street kid. I could read somebody, and I knew they didn’t really fuck with me. I could see the dollar signs in their eyes. They were thinking this is hot right now, I could jump on this and make some money. My close friends told me it was fishy. I thought the whole thing was weird. So I backed out.

But then I started thinking: What if I created a character who did the opposite? Who leaned into it, who treated it as a hustle? Once I stumbled on that, everything clicked into place and the book was born.

Magazine Non Grata

Anais caught my attention because, when I was reading Victim, my friend was dating a girl like her. She was with him, to a large extent, because of his “marginalized identity.”

Andrew Boryga

Yeah, I worked hard with my editor to make her more dynamic. What is she getting out of this? Javi is spinning his wheels making his own hustle, but I liked the idea of everybody having an angle, so she had an angle too.

Yeah, she liked him, but she also was trying to portray an image to the world by being by his side. It happened to me in college. There would be girls who would date me and then they’d be like, “Oh, you’re my little ghetto boy.” And I was like… What? It was weird, you know? It was cool too because we were hooking up, but in my mind I was thinking that that shit is fucked up. With Anais I wanted to play with that idea and give her her own agency.

Magazine Non Grata

In Anais, in all the characters, in the plot: Your novel is one of the few successful, contemporary pieces that doesn’t toe the party line.

Andrew Boryga

I wanted to convey a message and write a book that wasn’t out there. I was reading a ton about identity, race, media, and publishing, but I wasn’t seeing my version of it. I wasn’t seeing the blue-collar working-class version of it. There was a lot of stuff coming from people who were swimming in these worlds already. I wanted something from an outsider.

Magazine Non Grata

Were you worried that no one was going to publish it?

Andrew Boryga

No, I was just having fun. Before I had kids the idea of becoming a novelist was the center of my world. I still care about it, but it was everything back then. After my son was born my world went from I need to become this famous writer to I need to parent this child. All of a sudden I’m in dad mode.

That reorientation was powerful. I no longer cared about being a famous writer or when I would get published. And, well, if that’s the case, then I might as well just have fun with this, you know?

I was writing Victim in secret, on my own, at five in the morning. I didn’t know if anyone was gonna read it or if they were gonna publish it or if I was gonna get canceled. But I didn’t care because I’d decided that I was going to write it the way I wanted to write it. If it doesn’t get published, it doesn’t get published. It wasn’t until I was ready to shop it around that I started wondering what people were going to think about it.

Magazine Non Grata

Do you ever worry about how hard it is to make money as a novelist?

Andrew Boryga

We grew up poor and I had a great childhood. I didn’t even know I was poor until I went to Cornell. So I knew you didn’t need a whole lot of money to live well. But I’ve never been of the mind that I’m going to make a career only writing novels. One day that’d be great if that happens, but that wasn’t what I was aiming for. I was trying to write the best book I could. That’s partly why I’ve always had a day job. I’ve never not had a day job.

Magazine Non Grata

I’ve noticed that your voice sounds the same in the book, over email, on Substack, over text, in person. Did your voice come naturally to you?

Andrew Boryga

The first story I ever tried to write was my version of On the Road. But it was dead on arrival because I’d never been anywhere. I’d only been on my block. I didn’t know shit. I didn’t even know Manhattan that well. The Bronx was my world, you know? Trying to write about this guy hitchhiking didn’t work. I don’t even fucking drive. And mimicking Kerouac’s voice felt so foreign to how I actually think and speak.

But then I read Drown by Junot Diaz and Bodega Dreams by Ernesto Quiñonez. That was the first time I saw somebody expressing meaning and beauty in a vocabulary, in a syntax, that sounded similar to my neighborhood. It opened up a world for me. These guys were doing beautiful literature, but in their voice, in their language, in their swag. After reading Drown I wrote forty pages in one shot, single space, just writing shit about my neighborhood. Writing about my friends, family members, stuff I experienced. I wrote it how I speak and it came so easy.

When I showed it to people their reaction was: Oh, wow. This is different. People appreciated the difference, like I was giving them a look into a world they didn’t understand or know. I’ve never looked back since.

Magazine Non Grata

With the growth of self-publishing on Substack, there’s been a lot of talk about “the death of the editor.” Do you think that’s a possibility?

Andrew Boryga

My journalism background has helped me understand the value in editing. At first I was like: Damn, you chopping my stuff up, this is crazy. But as I got older and more experienced, I started to understand the value of edits. There is tremendous value in having somebody who reads words for a living—who tries to identify beautiful sentences on a daily basis—help you make your work stronger. My editor at Double Day, Cara Reilly, was excellent. We had a few people interested in the book but I went with her because, from our first conversation, she made it clear that she didn’t want to fundamentally change this novel. Working with her it just became more propulsive.

I love the energy on Substack, people finding their own audiences, getting around the gatekeepers, making their own path. I do think you need editors though. I don’t know if you know —

Magazine Non Grata

He has a piece in this magazine, a recipe on how to make white rice.

Andrew Boryga

Oh, yeah? That’s awesome. He’s a great guy and he wrote a phenomenal novel, Hell or Hangover. You could tell he not only put the time into it, he also got outside readers to help him on it. When we spoke he told me he got two or three editors that he paid with his own money. And you can tell. It sings in a way that’s difficult, dare say impossible, to make happen on your own. You have just so many blind spots as an author.

Magazine Non Grata

What do you think about Substack for fiction?

Andrew Boryga

I’ve never finished a Substack short story. The whole scrolling on the screen—it’s hard for me to read. I don’t put my ambitious work on Substack. It’s not a great reading experience for short fiction.

Magazine Non Grata

What’s your writing routine now?

Andrew Boryga

Even before I had kids, when I was at Cornell, I’d wake up at five and write. First thing in the morning has always been best for me. I haven’t read the news, nothing’s infiltrating my mind. It’s all downhill after eleven o’clock.

Once my son settled into a good sleep routine I started doing the five a.m. thing again. Sometimes I cheat a bit and do four forty-five. Then I’ll write until six-thirty or seven. I’ve done it for so long that I’m used to it. If I go to sleep at twelve, I’ll still wake up at five.

I’ve only gotten to where I am because of consistency. I think I have talent, but you have to be dedicated and consistent. It’s important to show up every day. Even if I don’t write a lot I still got up and sat down. That feels significant to me.

Magazine Non Grata

Do you try to hit a word count each day?

Andrew Boryga

When I’m drafting I try to hit around a thousand words a day. That allows you to produce a draft in four or five months. I’m not super militant about it, but I try to get at least a few pages in.

Magazine Non Grata

What do you do if you’re stuck?

Andrew Boryga

I’ll vomit something out. Sometimes I’ll write blah blah blah, or I’ll start asking myself questions. You’d be surprised by what you put down subconsciously. You step away from it thinking, there’s a sentence in there. And then you build everything around that sentence.

Magazine Non Grata

How do you revise?

Andrew Boryga

I focus on higher order characters first. With each successive pass I try to make sure that everyone else is feeding into them and the main story. A smaller character, for example, might start to clash with the protagonist because they have different perspectives on the core premise.

It’s a long process. I drafted Victim from 2020 to 2021 before giving it to my agent. She gave me notes and I did another pass on it. She gave me a smaller set of notes. I did another pass. We sold it and then did probably four or five passes, trying to drill deeper, drill deeper, drill deeper until it’s singing and there are no extraneous parts. I wanted everything to feel that it’s there for a purpose.

Magazine Non Grata

Is there someone you write for?

Andrew Boryga

I try to make sure I’m enjoying it. With Victim I was laughing when I was writing some of the shit. Even today when I read it it makes me so happy. But I also thought of some friends I have from high school. They’re not huge readers, but if they read my book I want them to think that it sounds like me. I don’t want them to think, Who wrote this shit?

Magazine Non Grata

What’s your relationship with technology like?

Andrew Boryga

I’ve been dying to do the dumb phone thing. Right now my computer and phone will block all these apps at certain times of the day. I have a thing called The Brick that locks your whole phone off. When I’m in revising mode, I don’t take my laptop with me to the table. I take my manuscript pages, my notebook, try to leave my phone out and just focus on the novel. I’ll bring a book with me, so if I get bored or distracted, I’ll at least read a book. But it’s a daily fight, man. It’s a daily fight. And it’s becoming harder because there’s just so many apps and notifications and shit, pinging at you all day.

I really hope there’s some countercultural revolution where we all get fed up with this shit. We see it happening again with the A.I. shit. They sold us a bill of goods around the internet, around social media, we’re going to be connected and blah blah blah. Fifteen years later you take a step back—what did this shit actually do for us? Did it make us any better?

Magazine Non Grata

What are your ambitions as a writer?

Andrew Boryga

I want to keep publishing books that I feel are important and valuable and entertaining, but that make people think about something differently, in my own flavor, you know? Books that will do what Junot’s book did for me. I’m OK with taking a long time between books. I’m not focused on being a career novelist because I don’t ever want the pressure of publishing a book every two years to keep my lights on. I’ll have a day job, you know? I don’t mind having a day job. The main goal is publishing stuff I’m proud of.

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The entire essay is posted below. But as the image gallery shows, it looks more beautiful and feels better in print. If you’d like to get a copy, subscribe via Substack or buy on our website. Shipping is included in the price, or you can pick yours up at the launch party.

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How New York Killed Culture

And What We Can Do to Save It

by

American culture has stagnated, and New York is to blame. This is at once a provocative statement and an obvious one for those who follow such things closely. Nationally, there seems to be a critical alignment on this belief—at least for the former of these claims.

From the late 1970s to 2000, as the Substack Experimental History reports, around a quarter of the top-grossing movies at the domestic box office were sequels, spin-offs, or adaptations. By the late 2010s, this number had tripled to more than seventy-five percent. The takeover was complete by 2024, when no original films cracked the top twenty. In TV, spin-offs now command more than a third of viewership. The percentage of best-selling books whose authors had previously published a best-seller has gone exponential, rising from near zero in the early ’80s to consistently north of thirty percent.

As the music critic and historian Ted Gioia has continuously noted, old songs are increasingly drowning out new ones. Catalog music (older than eighteen months) enjoys almost seventy-five percent of total consumption, a figure which has sharply increased in the age of streaming.

This is not just a cultural trend. Concentration by the largest actors in myriad markets has become ubiquitous. The ten largest firms own seventy percent of the video game market, ninety percent of the automobile market, forty-two percent of the home-building market, and twenty-five percent of the restaurant market.

If these forces are as pervasive as they seem, we’re forced to ask a thorny question: Is this just what the market wants? Perhaps. Do you really care about the 1,000 body soaps that advertise their varied, yet chemically identical, branding? Does it make sense to spend $2 more for spices at the local South Asian grocery store as opposed to ordering them online? Does it really matter who supplies our water, so long as it’s clean, reliable, and cheap?

These are, of course, all commodities. Is the same utilitarian paradox—where the abundance of, and demand for, a superficially-high-quality product increases while its actual quality decreases—true of culture? Though they may not be as exalted as Fellini’s work, the baseline production quality of a Marvel movie is undoubtedly higher than its equivalent four decades ago, to say nothing (yet) of its artistic merit. Likewise, the quality floor of new homes, restaurants, and ironworking have risen meaningfully, even if the ceiling on their greatest representations has lowered. One is more assured of the standard quality of Shake Shack than a mysterious greasy spoon in some unknown town. If this is true of culture, it spells even more discomfort for many (this writer included) who glamorize novel pluralism while supporting its conquerors.

I don’t think this is the case. There is still genuine, robust demand for new perspectives in art, film, literature, and music. Otherwise, these questions wouldn’t be so pervasively asked. The defining question, then, is why are we seeing a cultural stagnation borne of concentration when there is broad demand for dynamic pluralism?

This essay does not dwell on mediums of production. I don’t blame TikTok for this trend (literacy is another matter), though it is doubtless impacting society in meaningful ways. Culturally, it is an evolution in the same vein of radio, television, and early social media. If anything, TikTok is one of the few places where promotion of new ways of thinking, creating, and doing is most apparent.

Perhaps it’s about distribution then? Sure, there are many voices on TikTok, but what does the algorithm boost? Similarly, there is more art being created today than at any time in the past. Why does nobody care? Is extreme decentralization washing everything away? There’s some truth to this. The greater truth, though, at least in America, is that most means of cultural production are just not very good.

And it’s New York’s fault.

For some who live in the city, or visit, this may seem deranged. How could you possibly believe that? Look! at all of the shows, galleries, pop-up events, content, creators, vibrancy, fashion! Culture. I would agree, there’s much to gaze at. But do not mistake preponderance for meaningfulness. Look a little deeper. There’s nothing under the surface. What new stories have been told in the city that have gripped our collective imagination? What work has not only resonated, but taken permanent residence in our psyches? What’s the last great band to come out of the city? The last great piece of art? I’m not talking about people who have come here after they have seen some success, but those who were grown, nurtured, and then platformed here. I also don’t mean critically acclaimed (as it’s the critics’ job to always acclaim something), nor what some coterie of self-anointed tastemakers believe should receive recognition. But actual, near-universally admired, “capital A” Art. Go on. Try. New York is a potemkin veneer of culture. And as culture spreads from the city, it has gotten the entire country stuck.

How do we turn this around? As it happens, this is difficult to do. Not because there aren’t many thousands who actually have something interesting to say, and can capably represent that message in their medium of choice, but because they are given neither the opportunity of promotion, nor creation in primis.

A Rock Wall

In the twentieth century cartoon series Looney Tunes, Wile E. Coyote is a brilliant painter. With quick work of the brush, he composes hyper-realistic landscapes in attempts to catch the elusive Road Runner. In one of the more famous scenes, Wile E. paints a road that cuts through a mountain. Road Runner speeds through, defying the laws of physics. When Wile E. tries to follow, however, his dreams are crushed, as his body slams into the rock wall.

For many artists today, New York is that rock wall. From around the world, creatives are seduced by the scenery of the city, visions of enormous success. Magnificent horizons on the other side of the mountain, if only they can get through. Who can blame them? Especially because others, like Road Runner, have taken it so swiftly and successfully before. If she could make it in New York, surely I can! The issue, as in the cartoon, is that this image is illusory. We are but coyotes running into rock. Where some are able to break through the Concrete Ceiling (or never even knew it existed, such is their privilege), it remains closed off to most. Set aside the inconvenient fact that Wile E. paints to eat Road Runner, and that artists approximating the coyote’s talent just want to eat in general, the analogy is apt.

New York is a self-constructed, imagined reality. The city of Walt Whitman, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ella Fitzgerald, Bob Dylan, Joan Didion, Martin Scorsese, Madonna, Jerry Seinfeld, Basquiat, Leonard Bernstein, Keith Haring, Edith Wharton, Duke Ellington, Mark Rothko, Langston Hughes, Spike Lee, Fran Lebowitz, Toni Morrison, and many hundreds of others. I will come to New York and be the next Lady Gaga. The MOMA will do a retrospective on my career. I will write the defining work of American literature in a basement on West 83rd street.

It is the great magnet that attracts talent not just from all over the country, but the world too. By their thousands, creatives flock to New York in hopes of achieving their dreams. Even just a moment will suffice. An order or two greater than their number are their productions: performances, shows, readings, interpretive dances, thought pieces. We are flooded with exciting culture, are we not? Look deeper. Not big budget Broadway productions, nor readings from best-selling authors; New York has long excelled in these areas, but they’re for people who have already made it. I mean truly novel, thought-provoking work from unknown voices.

How much of the city’s culture is just transposing what has already proven successful elsewhere? Are we living in a Times Square billboard? Absurd, there’s great art all over the place! people will cry. The public just doesn’t know them yet, they sneer. But markets are efficient. If there really was a preponderance of such important culture, surely it would be more deeply felt—most of all by those who shape it. Yet the several dozen interviews I conducted for this piece, with filmmakers, writers, artists, musicians, designers, and more, all converged on the same idea: there isn’t any great art in the city right now, despite all of the bluster from the public-relations-industrial-complex.

Why? Because the rent is too damn high. The sorts of people who take the sorts of risks to produce the sorts of art that form a compelling sort of culture are either forced into a soulless job, where they watch their dream die, or they have to take on several part-time gigs just to make ends meet. They are sacrificing their fullest potential. Do not mistake this for lamenting our lack of Epicurean gardens, or a belief that work is an indignity to the higher realm of creation in abstracto. People must work; culture is a luxury acquired downstream of subsistence needs being met.

Thankfully, New York is as prosperous a place as humanity has ever known. Our subsistence needs having been met many times over, our greatest challenges are largely of our own making. But they are real challenges. The median rent throughout New York City is $3,500 a month. In order to afford this (measured as paying no more than thirty percent of gross income on rent), a household would need to make $140,000 a year—nearly double the city’s median household income. What about the city’s heart? Median rents in Manhattan are north of $4,500, and the average is $5,400. Households would need to earn $180,000 and $216,000 respectively to not be rent burdened. This is simply too much to afford while also having the freedom to experiment with ideas that may not be readily accepted.

That’s because we only build for the rich! Not so. Nearly a third of housing built in the last decade was targeted at low income households. While not sufficient, it’s important to note this wouldn’t be enough for anyone. We’re more than half a million homes short of meeting current demand, across all income levels. The rent is so high because we don’t build enough housing—for anyone. How can you say that? There are cranes everywhere! Similar to perceptions around cultural production, this is a fallacy that feels right but is wrong in practice. Dothan, Alabama builds more housing than New York on a proportionate basis (housing units authorized per existing 1,000 residents). We’re in league with Little Rock, Arkansas and Allentown, Pennsylvania. Despite having a population one third the size of New York’s metropolitan area, Houston builds more units in total.

Why can’t we build housing? Because our zoning is shamefully restrictive. Outside of Manhattan, ninety-two percent of buildings within a kilometer of a subway stop are three stories or less. Sixty-three percent are two stories or less! On fifteen percent of the city’s residentially-zoned land, it’s illegal to build anything other than a single family home. The promises of “New York being a city for all” are categorically untrue. The city refuses to grow to meet the needs of new and old residents alike.

Rent is not high because of “late-stage capitalism” (anyone who invokes this phrase should be regarded with deep suspicion), or the avarice of landlords. In Austin, rents have dropped for nearly two years straight (or more than twenty percent from their highs) to about $1,200 a month for a one bedroom, and less than $1,500 for a two bedroom. Are maverick Texan landlords simply more beneficent than their New York counterparts? Risible. Rents dropped because the city produced four times as much housing as New York on a proportionate basis. The academic literature is definitive on this point, as are the meta-analyses. Austin’s vacancy rate, the closest approximation for satisfaction of demand in a market, stands at ten percent, while New York’s is less than two.. This is not an issue of political economy. It’s about regulations, NIMBYism, and a misalignment of theory and practice. If our politicians truly cared and understood the nature of the issue, they would simply change our land use regulatory environment to accept more growth. But they don’t. This is how our crisis is artificially imposed.

New York’s rent stabilization laws are another salient example of the city’s regulatory failures. In 2019, under the aegis of the de Blasio administration, New York passed the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act (HSTPA), which stabilized rents for all residential buildings constructed before 1974 with more than six units. The upshot was capping rents for about a million apartments. Sounds like a great idea! What could go wrong? In practice, it cut apartment supply in half, while demand stayed constant (or increased a bit), without marrying it with any new housing. Rents then accelerated the next six years, rising nearly twenty percent since the passage of HSTPA.

Worse still, based on Rent Guidelines Board data, operating expenses have outpaced rent by more than three times. This is a dire situation. According to NYU’s Furman Center, hundreds of thousands of rent-stabilized units are now facing severe distress (read: risk of falling apart). These conditions are concentrated in the most marginalized neighborhoods. Freezing rent will only accelerate this process. Prior to 2019, around four percent of multifamily buildings in New York had a Class C Violation (the worst category of violations). Now, that number is nearly twenty percent. When half of the city’s rental stock is no longer able to be maintained because operating expenses dramatically outpace income, the inevitable result is a further deterioration of the housing supply. Contrary to the present flow of popular imaginations, buildings need rent to be maintained. Net operating margins, in the best of times, are somewhere in the three to five percent range in expensive coastal markets. Housing costs are expensive. Ignoring this reality not only denies the potential for the city to function as a creative hub, but more importantly, to function in general.

High rent has distorted New York’s magnetism into a black hole, sucking in talent, squandering it, and then spitting it back to the provincial realm from where it came. Unable to deal with the (unnecessarily) exorbitant costs, people leave, fragmenting the creative industries they might otherwise have formed. Arts need agglomeration effects, or people clustering together to create more positive advantages than if they were isolated. In order for new ideas to form, different sorts of creative, risk-inclined people must be able to live close together, along with patrons that can support, nurture, and broadcast their work. Under this telling, a key reason why Hollywood has run out of ideas is because the same people are talking to one another, insulated from the gritty realities and serendipity that lives outside of their production lots. Without offering the conditions for new entrants to proffer their ideas, new ones cannot form.

On the other end of the spectrum, rents may be cheaper in Philadelphia, Tulsa, or St. Louis, but none of these cities have the critical nexus of talented creators (as most go to New York), nor associated supporters, to usher in a meaningful cultural movement. Reconstituting creative scenes in Chicago or Portland could, theoretically, raise us out from this stasis. But that would require New York to lose its hold over the imaginations of creatives worldwide. Though I am disillusioned with the city, asking the same of the country is unrealistic. And so, until New York either loses its cultural crown to enormous competitive forces, or opens its gates more fully, culture will continue to stagnate nationally. There is nowhere for it to emerge at the local level.

But the city has always been this way, right? It’s always been difficult to break through, to afford to even try. If you can make it here, they say, you can make it anywhere. Again, I’m unconvinced. To borrow from Ross Barkan: “Elite, mainstream culture has stagnated. There are still quality movies and books released by the large conglomerates and good music that comes from the major record labels, but, like [the] sheer number of cheaper neighborhoods, a lot less of it.” Things have changed. While the Rock Wall may have always existed, the Concrete Ceiling has never been so readily apparent, or crushingly low.

A Concrete Ceiling

Let’s say, miraculously, one is able to afford to live in New York and they have space enough to work on their craft. Though we may have lost many thousands who might have contributed much to the city (and ultimately the country) at the first phase of the funnel, at least we can still promote the few who have managed to make it. Were this only true!

In a meritocratic world, only the worthy would be promoted on the value of their efforts. But art is neither meritocratic nor objective. It is a game. One has to contort oneself to explain why, for example, mannequins tied up in string and strewn about concrete floors is something deserving of deep thought. Nothing worthy of emotion actually steals our words today. The general public knows this well; contemporary art is broadly reviled. That’s not borne of ignorance. It’s because the anointed in these circles are playing a very different and, to outward perceptions, confusing game.

The mist clears, however, if we reframe who the art they’re producing is for, and what its ultimate purpose is. Not for the public. Not even for the artist. No, it’s about the patrons and their aspirants, how they feel while consuming the art. The canvas, sculpture, film, etc. is secondary to the status one gains from being in these rooms. From the perception that one has been allowed, while others are excluded, to witness some profound statement reserved for only the most profound people.

With pursed lips, strained eyes, and a vigorous head nod, you are experiencing the culture viscerally, while others are not. They can only watch as they pass your fortress of glass, dressed up in the latest styles, standing next to good-looking people wearing cowboy hats and blazers with no shirts beneath, and others wearing sunglasses inside. You are one of these interesting people, in an interesting place, and that’s very interesting. The product the artist is selling is not on the walls. It is a story that uninteresting people can tell at their next dinner, across from someone who is not wearing a shoulderless blazer but instead a golf polo, crumpled slacks, and démodé top-siders.

Why does this sham continue? If the veil of exclusivity drops, those three lines dashed across a canvas are no longer an urgent commentary on post-colonial femininity in the global south. They’re just lines. The Emperor has never been wearing any clothes—and certainly no sunglasses. And so the music keeps playing; contemplating the vagaries of life in the quiet walls of one’s own mind is an unpermissible existence.

None of this is new. To some extent it has always existed in the vaunted realms of the Culturati. The difference is that aesthetics formerly played a salutary role. Beauty, virtue, meaning, and truth were attempted as noble offerings. But modernism eschewed them as frivolous, and post-modernism cemented them as having no meaning whatsoever. Still, as beings driven by the search for meaning, we’ve been forced to map these urges onto canvases where they don’t exist.

Who has stepped in as the new cartographic existentialists? Established forces, nepotees, beneficiaries of in-relations. Dilettantes and charlatans. Shiftily changing perceptions of what constitutes quality has elevated and instantiated those without much to say. They simply have access to the right people, or were lucky enough to come to prominence when conditions were much different.

Discomfort is a precondition for intriguing cultural production. Not struggle per se, but friction. The tension of one’s efforts crashing against countervailing forces requires reconciliation, going back to the drawing board. The temporarily-stymied are instilled with a determination that is deprived of those who never receive the discomfort of not having their work immediately accepted. Without feedback, systems become distorted. Uncritically praising a kindergartener’s sketch on the fridge is fine. Doing the same for a forty-five year-old is not. Especially when they never received a reality-check in their twenties, because they were free to create without consequence of their ideas not working, as “struggling artists” must.

This is clear in the work of those who have already made it. A musician’s ninth studio album is rarely as good as their second, but because they have a devoted following with far higher thresholds of criticism, they can continue reaping rewards far long after they, or more often, their writers, have run out of things to say.

More insidiously, but far more pervasively, is the impact by those who have not made it but are subsidized by kin and fidelity. These “creatives” don’t have to worry about not paying rent. Their needs will be met. That’s fine, as patronage has always existed. But they rarely have the burning flame of those who come from without. This inevitably brings down the quality of art. Instead of a relentless drive to give form to that which forms you, silver-spoon-Cezannes absently muse about “getting into water-colors” as casually as a normal person might suggest going somewhere for lunch. On its own, this is little more than insufferable. Harmless, if it can be avoided.

But it can’t be. Because space is scarce—especially in Manhattan. Their artistic dalliances are not as carefree as their ambitions would have you believe. This is a zero-sum game. They have crowded out the space for those who might have something interesting to say, but are silenced by the established players. And so we get only the sophomoric, at best, sporadic deepities in concrete galleries from people who’ve never faced any friction in life, and can only guess at what its shape might be.

These thespian philistines (cosplayers, for short) are manipulated by the art dealer who tells them what’s hot now (but doesn’t disclose she advises the seller, too), the latest post from some emerging media darling, or the vacuous think-piece that the right press outlets prominently feature. The seduction to fall prey to groupthink is too great for them to overcome. Moralization has usurped artistic merit in this condition (not dissimilar to the rise of Modernism) because cultural significance is lusted after as the end goal—full stop. Cosplayers, like water, will fill whatever fashionable form the Culturati milieu deems acceptable in a given moment. It is about the brand, not what’s inside the can. If you can sell the right dream, that’s all that matters.

The quality of cultural production is secondary to the value the dominant players, and their courts of sinecures, want to impose. Oh, I must not understand it. No one can understand it because the work is incomprehensible. This is the game in action. Those who validate it are also cosplaying; thus repelling the true shapers of culture with their performative graspings. Technology has scaled this charade up to unprecedented levels by dissolving regional perspectives and birthing a monoculture in its wake. We must reject the notion that Identity or Belief, by themselves, are more important than the quality of a work. It is not powerful to talk exclusively of race, or sexuality, or any of a hundred other immutable characteristics without any attendant story behind them. Moreover, many of these issues were adjudicated half a century, a century, or many and more ago, by people far more brave and elegant than the geist-shapers of today. Refusing to be even a cursory student of history is to deny James Baldwin, the Stonewall activists, or Elizabeth Cady Stanton of their monumental achievements. It is a disgrace to their memories, and those of the shoulders they stood on.

When what the work is trying to say is prized more than what it actually says, is it any wonder we’re in a stagnation? Proceduralism triumphing outcomes is not just an issue sequestered to the world of politics. It allows obvious falsehoods to become truths, represented by artists like Alec Monopoly. On the surface, there has to be something more than his gratuitous idolatry of wealth. Surely this is all some cultural commentary? He’s even said as much in early interviews, noting that he uses art to confront capitalism. Huh. That’s strange. $600,000 collaborations with Jacob & Co, work with Hermes, and posts showing off several Richard Milles sure doesn’t seem like a confrontation of capital to me. And yet the Culturati have run with it, because they have no strong beliefs or ideas themselves.

This is the natural result of what happens when everyone is lying to themselves, and do not have to live with the consequences of their indiscretions. When questions about how they can afford their apartment, who got them the role, or why their debut is the focus of a major solo exhibition go unanswered, anything is fair game. This is a satisfying answer. Ah! It’s the nepo-babies and the rich. Of course! If we just get rid of them, culture will revive!! I’m afraid, friends, it’s not so simple. For in the void high rents and exclusive gatherings have created, another group has washed over the entirety of cultural consumption and forced the market to respond to its demands via new means of production.

The Great (Middling) Void

Of all the possible forms New York could take, its present shape hews closest to the worlds that Sex and the City, Friends, Girls, and, to a lesser extent, Seinfeld depict. Not Bohemia, not the coterie of the mega-rich. No, it’s the upwardly-mobile, recently-urbanized masses that have emerged victorious. Digital marketing staffers, project managers, business development(ers?), and consultants. People whose jobs most don’t understand, even after careful recitation over multiple brunches. Returning to Barkan: “Cities today are wealthier but more sterile, hubs of global finance that, if they haven’t snuffed out art entirely, make it so those conditions for production become far more daunting and only those with access to enough capital can dedicate years of their lives to creative pursuits.”

This is only partly true. While New York is the global hub of finance, only eight percent of people in the region work in the industry. Citywide, it takes only a marginally higher share of employment, at ten percent, or 500,000 workers. It is simply untrue that a tenth of the city’s workforce can come close to exerting a majority influence on housing or culture, even if we assumed all of those people lived in the city—which they don’t! Many commute from their expensive enclaves in Connecticut, North Jersey, Westchester, and on Long Island, and thus have little influence on many of these conversations.

Stereotypes against the all-too-easy-villains of capitalism are the half-informed prejudices of people who don’t want to call out the true culprit (often because this would indict themselves as they are the beneficiaries of the systems they vociferously oppose). We’ve become a more sedate society as life has gotten significantly better for everyone. Yes, many still struggle, but nothing compared to the “interesting” ’90s or “wild” ’70s. Satisfaction of Maslowian needs is correlated with prosperity, yes, but it’s also correlated with dull domestication. The Great Middling of email jobs has swallowed everything into a comfortable Void.

The inconvenient truth is that the vast majority of New Yorkers—the very people who are the genesis of New York’s (and by extension, America’s) cultural black hole—work perfectly normal jobs. Jobs that make a decent amount of money, but cause no righteous outrage. Education and Health Services is the largest sector in the city, employing three times more people than Finance. 800,000 work in Professional and Business Services, which includes administrative associates, bookkeepers, account executives, lawyers, architects, salespeople, etc.. Even the Government employs 100,000 more people than Financial Services. I could keep going (e.g. nearly as many work in Leisure and Hospitality as Financial Services), but you get the point.

The issue is not the oft-derided yuppie bankers or tech workers marauding into town with their millions and pushing out the impoverished. They live in glass towers on the water, and in the downtowns of Long Island and Brooklyn that rose on parking lots and abandoned warehouses, displacing hardly anyone. (Many of these towers, in fact, give opportunity for lower-income earners to move into wealthy neighborhoods, and reduce rents meaningfully as older apartment units open up.)

While the median city-wide rent is indeed high, thirty percent of households in stabilized apartments make more than $100,000 per year. That’s about 300,000 units with a median rent of $1,500 a month. Infuriatingly, many of these tenants are inheritors or members of the Great Middling, who secured these prized homes through connections if not chance. In the process, they ended up destroying the (well-intentioned, poorly-executed, unworkable-without-new-supply) intent of the program.

These are national elites by any name other than the one they’ve chosen for themselves. Like the Culturati, they play Halloween all year round. But in this game they cosplay as the working class, “community organizing” in neighborhoods they gentrified and whose operations their parents pay for. These people have actually displaced a disadvantaged family in Bushwick, Harlem, or the East Village. They project onto others the internalized guilt they feel. I have no issue with my comrades in Flatbush who are living The Cause. But please do not patronize us from your Upper East Side or Crown Heights apartment. You are not fighting The Fight as a tech project manager that pays $3,900 for a studio and drinks $7 iced lattes after four $45 pilates sessions a week.

These people are more interested in not saying something wrong, prostrating and contorting to be accepted by those whom they believe to be the arbiters of societal morality, than saying something right but controversial. They attempt to get at it through contrivance, but inevitably fail, because the market sizes them up immediately as frauds. No snaps for you at the poetry reading.

They must hide who they are in order to make themselves seem interesting—I live in East Williamsburg!—while their real lives are spent summering in the Hamptons and skiing in Aspen or Gstaad or, more often, Stowe, when it gets a bit colder.Carefully, they conceal the designer bags they received at Christmas , externally verboten but internally worshiped. They can’t talk about their private school education, which costs tens of thousands of dollars per term, and must nod with forced exertion and identification when one of the other members of “the community” talks about some experience they never got close to in childhood. No, totally, we did the same thing growing up. This is a sting operation where everyone is a Fed but no one knows it yet. This is why the magic that made a neighborhood compelling in the past to actual creatives, among other reasons, can rarely sustain its identity. It gets interesting, the Middling moves in; then it gets less interesting.

There is nothing wrong with the West Village Girls (or their lesser invoked, but no less invasive, East Village counterpart) nor the Murray Hill frat stars. I’m not arguing that the hypocrisy of Brooklyn Tovarisch’s is even a problem per se, as we all partake in our own favored form of it. (Though the world is in much need of epistemic humility.) Good cities make room for all, and the Middlers offer many worthy contributions. Homogenization, however, no matter what form it takes, is not a good thing. Cosplaying is the overwhelming cultural force in New York right now, and it is imperiling the health of the city. We have ceded complete control to this broad middle of cultureless-aspirants, and in so doing we’ve fundamentally reshaped the city.

Walk downtown today, and all one sees are row after row of the same type of person (though they all regard themselves as perfectly idiosyncratic). There is no longer diversity in Manhattan. Sure, there are different hair dyes and tones of skin, but everyone is more or less the same age (or attempting to be), makes the same amount of money, goes to the same restaurants, and thinks the same thoughts. Diversity is not a color swatch. Real pluralism is a rich tapestry alternatively woven by thick strands of divergence and convergence. Manhattan is only a simulacra of one. Thin, unsatisfactory.

Notice people who say they love the diversity of New York never go to Mott Haven. Or Brighton Beach. And only rarely to Flushing as some sort of fetishistic pilgrimage (if even they make it past the US Open on the 7 train, the True annual hajj). When was the last time a Republican was spotted in broad daylight south of 23rd street? How many children can be seen in Tompkins Square Park after school gets out? When they’re not busy working or taking their family members to doctor’s appointments, is there anywhere for truly working class people to feel comfortable in Lower Manhattan?

No. There’s no space for them. It has been cannibalized by trend-chasers that pick up a coffee at Blank Street (not even understanding the irony) before powerwalking towards ever more insipid hedonic transactionalism. Get in, have your fun, and get back to the suburbs of Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, New Jersey. There are few things that irk me more than those who wistfully recall how much “fun” they had in New York during their twenties. How is this any different than reneging on the covenant of bringing What Happens In Vegas outside of Sin City? It is a startling confession of extracting all one can out of a place where people actually live, without so much as considering the consequences of their actions, to say nothing of giving anything back.

While it has always been challenging here, the prospects of raising a family in the city have dramatically worsened in the last few years. Post-pandemic, the population of children younger than five has declined by thirteen percent. Kids under eighteen dropped by seven and a half percent. Children are the aquifers of tomorrow, and they are drying up. The groups that have seen the largest inflows are empty nesters and people in their early twenties: those who can afford high rent on one side of the spectrum, and those without financial responsibilities (and are happy to spend thousands on an overpopulated shoe-box apartment) on the other. These youthful packs have overtaken the market for large apartments, as four friends paying a quarter of the rent each is easier to stomach than one family paying $8,000. Downtown, you’re more likely to see someone you went to high school with in Colorado than a local kid going to school. We have severed connection with the older generations as well, whose wisdom goes unreceived to impressionable green souls. We don’t see kids, and so have replaced them with romanticized visions of ourselves as perpetual children.

As ever, it all comes down to math. The median household income of New York is about $80,000. Adjusted for family size across the entire metropolitan area, the median income for an individual is $113,400. Despite this being a HUD reported number, I understand that it may be a touch galling. While there isn’t quite an analogous metric for median household income for individuals, fifty-two percent of the city makes $75,000 or more. This is a reasonable assumption for an individual earner. At this income level, after taxes, our hedonic transactionalist would have around $57,000 to play with. Paying $2,000 a month for a rent stabilized studio ($24,000 per year), or splitting an apartment with friends, they would have more than $33,000 in discretionary income, or $2,750 per month, leftover to spend on groceries, going out, travel, and superficially-profound exhibitions. That’s a lot of consumption power. If we factored in a ten percent savings rate (more than double the national average), they would still be able to spend more than $80 per day. It may not be the millions a Connecticut banker is making, but, in aggregate, it is significantly more distorting (forty percent of households make more than six figures). Consumption has become the end in itself, a lifestyle divorced from subsequent meaning.

But it’s worse than that. Ask around and it becomes clear there’s a whole lot of subsidizing going on. It’s impossible to know just how much, but many of our ephemeral residents have their consumption power boosted by BoMaD (Bank of Mom and Dad), or FALG (Fund of Aunts Long Gone). So it’s not $80 a day, but potentially a multiple of that. The city has contorted itself to meet the needs of girls in their twenties because that’s where the spending power is. Again, this is no issue prima facie, but it becomes one when they leave just a few years on. The ship of commerce is too large to swiftly turn around to meet the next trend. When the brunch-stars vacate their spaces before the first year lease is up, they leave century-old institutions bobbing lifelessly in the water.

In this self-created void, shops have begun selling “community” because the need is so obvious. Yet the consumers of the very brands that advertise “community” on their sandwich boards are oblivious to the irony that they’re the ones fueling the destruction of the real thing. Community cannot be consumed. It must be experienced. It is pluralistic, not monopolistic. And yet.

I don’t want to seem embittered. This is not a Mossian lament for a New York of yore. Cities change, and that’s okay. When my grandfather’s family came to the United States and settled in Williamsburg, it was not the neighborhood it has since become. That’s a good thing. New York’s early 20th century Jewish ghettos (nor any ghetto) should not have been entrenched for all of time. The issue is when a city converges on catering towards one thing with nothing to replace it. The pillagers will soon move, bloodlessly, onto their next phase of life. Just like cars and Detroit, New York may soon be left a shell of its former self. This is not simply the end of Bohemia. This may be the epochal dusk of a once-great metropolis that wraps its arms around its own torso instead of holding them open for all, as it once did. That is, unless we do something about it.

To Cure The Country, Fix The Disease

The good news is that all of these problems are fixable. I am an urban planner by training so, naturally, I have a plan. Caveat emptor, no proposal is a panacea, but I think the simplicity (and lack of dogma) with this one gives it a good chance at getting close. Simply stated, it starts with building housing. A lot of it.

New York is in the middle of a housing emergency. This is not an opinion but a fact derived from the State of New York’s definition. If a Housing Vacancy Rate Analysis (for residential properties built before 1974 with six or more units) finds that a city has a vacancy rate below five percent, a public emergency may be declared. New York City’s vacancy rate, as mentioned earlier in this essay and repeated now for emphasis, is currently around one and a half percent, the lowest since 1968. In plain English, this means there is extreme competition over housing, which leads to equally extreme prices. The only way to get out of this emergency, and ease housing pressures, is to push rates back above five percent. While we could accomplish this by reducing demand by making the city so unpleasant that people leave and no one moves into their former homes, this strikes me as a bad idea. And as we’re around 500,000 units short of meeting current housing demand, it seems unlikely we can accomplish that much value destruction without inflicting iniquitous harm on those who remain and are unable to leave. So, we must build.

Just how to build is beyond the scope of this piece, but here are a few guiding principals:

• Liberalize zoning and land use codes city wide. No neighborhood should be exempt from housing production. Every lot in New York City should have a minimum Floor Area Ratio of 11 ( ideally more), and be allowed to build up to four units by right ( ideally more).

  • Everything within a mile of a subway line should allow for five stories with low minimum unit size requirements (i.e. allow for smaller apartments).

• The permitting process must be streamlined to quickly authorize the necessary construction to avoid adding years to an already cumbersome process (as is all too often the case).

• This new housing must not be stricken by the plague of everythingism2, where competing interests secondary to the need of providing roofs over heads weigh down projects with increased costs and longer entitlement periods.

• Build public transportation to access this new housing and spur investment. The Interborough Express is just one of many expansions we should be pursuing.

• Subsidize family-sized homes with generous tax credits as the economics of developing larger units can’t compete with studios and one bedrooms (and thus forces families out of the city).3

• SROs must be relegalized to reduce homelessness and provide cheap housing for those who want to minimize their expenses but still retain some autonomy.

With these policies, and a few others that are too long to explain here, New York can become more affordable and allow people the freedom to create, experiment, and live without subsidy or prohibitive compromise. But this only goes halfway to potentially reviving our stagnant culture. How do we break through the Concrete Ceiling? Partially, it’s a supply answer.

Jane Jacobs famously observed that new ideas require old space. “Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.” Part of the explanation for our cultural stagnation is we don’t have affordable old space, and the few new buildings that are constructed are delivered at an institutional scale ill-suited for new ideas. These retail spaces privilege established, high-credit tenants. Their storefronts offer no mystery, no sense of intrigue that might beckon the curious passerby in. Instead they reveal themselves completely through the large plate glass windows one associates with an Apple store. This does not inspire the passions of creatives.

I’d amend Jacobs’ observation to note that new ideas need cheap spaces (they don’t necessarily need to be old), which these Apple-esque shops are not. Yet new buildings can provide this as long as the development paradigm shifts. Narrower buildings, with many smaller apartments on the upper floors, is a great place to start. (This is currently illegal in practically all of America, and a surprising amount of New York as well.) In this way, residences can subsidize a smaller shop front. Ideally, a store wouldn’t be more than 1,000 square feet, but a couple hundred is more than sufficient.4

When spaces get small, not only will rent become cheap (how much can one even charge for fifty or three hundred square feet anyway?), but the spaces themselves will become ripe for experimentation. The cost of fashioning, refashioning, and rerefashioning a small space is far more palatable than another twice, or ten times, the size. Line many of these sorts of buildings next to each other, or scatter them throughout a neighborhood, and not only will there be an abundance of small spaces where creators can work on potentially risky ideas, but they will be close enough to rub shoulders with one another. Culture requires low cost density. A city so structured will be woven deeply with connections, charm, and serendipity.

This is the magic that the best cities in the world have figured out. Istanbul, Seoul, and Ho Chi Minh City are inundated with people doing compelling things in smaller spaces. Paris and Tokyo are near universally beloved because of their dizzying array of small businesses. While they exist in these cities, one doesn’t need to be accepted into one of five mega galleries to ensure career success. You can just form your own. When rent is only a few hundred dollars, owners can close on odd days and reserve the space for friends to write or paint. Pivoting concepts is not only feasible, but adds to the dynamic narrative of a place. At their core, these are unfussy spaces. Precisely what is needed to nurture a cultural revival.

The other part of breaking through the Concrete Ceiling, and thus making it as an artist in New York, is trickier to solve as it requires cultural changes outside of policy reform. This is admittedly an unsatisfying answer, but let’s see if we can draw it out a bit. What is needed is a group of patrons who care deeply about funding a ragtag group of screenwriters, sculptors, chefs, or novelists. The last thing we need is a Bill Gates wing at the Met, or another named building at Columbia. It isn’t for me to tell others what to do with their money, but just think how much more good might be achieved by investing $100m in talented New Yorkers than purchasing a few more Picasso’s for one’s private collection. (Or, more likely, stowing them in a Freeport.) If we must play into vanity, then name a street after one of these heroes of patronage.

This shift will require a move away from prizing in-group prestige as the ultimate currency (everything else can be bought), towards one that embraces the strange beauty of expansive pluralism. A world that eschews the latest trend for deep engagement, and agitating for better societal outcomes. A rejection of the Great Middling Void’s homogenization, reducing its reach to include hundreds of distinct subcultures. Quixotic though it might seem, a world where more idiosyncrasies exist and are highly visible can lead to this cultural shift. As the internet has shown us, optionality reigns supreme.

Despite an ever increasing share of our lives being hosted online, the real world still deeply matters. In many ways, more than ever. For culture, it doesn’t get more real than New York. This is where it all flows from. Though we’ve been sick and contagious for decades, we know what treatments to take to get better. As we convalesce, so too will the rest of the country. In salubrity, many unknown wonders await us, if only we have the courage to take the first step. New York killed culture. Now, it’s on us to come together to spark its renaissance.

Alright, we’ve been slaving away on this thing, but we are finally sending the first edition of Non Grata to the printer. We should get the first copies back in early/mid December, will start shipping them out right away. If you haven’t bought a copy, you can order on our website, or you can subscribe via Substack. Shipping is included in the price.

To celebrate the launch we’ll be throwing an event in New York. All paid subscribers are invited. We’re still finalizing the date and location; as soon as that’s locked in we’ll share it with you all. There will be carousing, cavorting, conversing, leaping, licking, etc. It’s going to be a lot of fun, worth the $20 in and of itself, if you ask me.

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With that out of the way, here’s a little more info about Vol 1. No. 1:

0. Cover & table of contents:

   

   

1. A short story, “Recovery,” from :

   

2. A short story, “Post-Nut Clarity on the J Train,” by :

   

3. An interview with New York artist Zane Fix:

   

4. An essay, “How New York Killed Culture (And What We Can Do to Save It),” by :

   

5. An essay, “Microplastic America,” by :

   

6. A short story, “Rosie Hernandez,” by :

   

7. An interview with novelist :

   

8. A book review, “One of Michel Houellebecq’s Many Prophesies,” by :

   

9. A poem, “Stay for Breakfast,” by :

   

10. An interview with filmmaker Meag Cherry:

    

11. A recipe, “White Rice,” from :

    

12. Photography throughout from Marco Andres, Dan Bell, Madison Claire Baker, Diana Catinas, Benjamin Miller, Michael O’Donohue, Jamie Pearl, Clare Perry, , Liam Stimpson, Manuela Ventura.

13. Illustrations throughout from Sam Kesheshian.

There you have it.

See you all in a little bit.

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With regards to new movies, I’ve become as skittish as a stray cat. For years I’ve been avoiding the cinema at all costs. I have a grave distrust of Hollywood, stemming from the duplicitous way they spread their propaganda. To me they’re like China, except worse, because they trick the viewer into thinking he’s free. America, the master of materialism and subterfuge. A nation that knows how to make people pay out of pocket for their re-education. At the theater the tuition fee starts with the ticket and increases, steeply, at the concession stand. I’ve been hit with those charges too many times. This time I brought my own popcorn, and a few beers in a miniature cooler. I cracked the first one right when the lights went down, and loudly at that.

One Battle commences with Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) and Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio) preparing for a mission with the French Seventy-Five, a left-wing revolutionary group. The two are caught up in some version of love or lust; together they’re fighting what they consider a fascist America. Their organization’s primary goal is to create a borderless society and aid illegal migrants. If they listed a longer litany, I missed it, but I imagine it would run along predictable lines: Decolonization, defund the police, etc., etc. The movie’s foil is Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn, not Sylvester Stallone), a U.S. Army officer that’s out to disband the group. His unit arrests Perifida after the rebels botch a robbery attempt, thus separating her from Bob and their newborn daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti). Sixteen years later, Lockjaw goes after them too. Without diving too deep into the details, he needs to reach them so he can gain admission into a White Nationalist group. Shortly after his return, his unit separates father from daughter. While Willa fights to escape from the solider, Bob struggles to rescue her from the danger he imposes. This three-way chase is the genesis for the furious, fast-paced action that makes up the film’s final two hours.

Anderson started writing the project in the early 2000s and wrapped filming during Biden’s term. Though he couldn’t have predicted the exact state of the U.S. today, the events of the last few years certainly shaped the movie into its final form. When he films cities on fire, I flash back to the BLM riots of 2020. When he turns the camera on border patrol, I see the inhuman detention facilities Trump is building throughout the nation. When he shows us a racist cabal, I think of Stephen Miller. And, when gun shots go off, I think of Luigi Mangione and Charlie Kirk. The movie is timely, politically charged, and speaks directly about the present moment.

I hate politically charged movies that speak about the present moment. The only way to not be sick of politics, at this point, is to be as devoted to it as the Puritans were to Christianity. Good Lord was I happy to spend much of this August and September in Europe. When Charlie Kirk got shot in the neck, I was eating fresh vegetables and drinking wine with my family in Paris. After the initial shock and dismay passed, I told them once again of my plans to escape the U.S. “Between the women and the political situation,” I said, “I just can’t do it anymore.”

And so I was unhappy during the first forty-five minutes of Anderson’s film. I thought the Rotten Tomato activists had hornswoggled me again. Everything struck me as another hoary Hollywood trope. Of course all the soldiers are white and tend towards malevolence and racism. Of course most of the leaders are black and female. Of course Bob Ferguson rears the child while his lover, Perfidia, shoots guns and robs banks. Of course one-third of Willa’s friend group is non-binary. Of course, of course, of course.

I used to not see the world this way. Before 2015 I didn’t think much about race or gender; when a movie forced me to, I usually found the angle fresh and new. But, since then, American producers, actors, screenwriters, and directors have been waterboarding me with identity and “morality.” I can’t get away from it. They’ve wounded me in the head. They’ve turned me into Bardamu from Journey to the End of the Night. I’ve been shot at too many times. Now I’m running around, screaming about bullets the reservists and the civilians can’t even see.

But then, around the one hour mark, everything about the film’s politics vanished from my mind. Why?

Through the centuries one of the most difficult questions for religions, cultures, and cults to answer has been: How do we successfully spread our morals and values? Story has almost always been the answer. Immersive narrative can function as a hypnotic spell. If it is strong enough, and the subject is willing, he will forget himself and open up to the storyteller’s ideas. But if the narrative loses its gravity or starts to feel false, the recipient will come back to his senses and say, “Hey, no, I see what you’re trying to do here.” He starts resisting the “story” because it is not absorbing but didactic. That sums up nearly every movie and show that Hollywood has regurgitated over the last ten years.

The first hour of Anderson’s film wasn’t engrossing enough to make me forget the L.A. clichés throughout. But when everyone gets off set and DiCaprio gets a call that they’re coming for him—in the midst of a THC-induced paranoia, no less—it’s impossible to think about politics. He is such a skilled actor, and the scene is so well-written, that he could’ve been sporting blue hair and a “Free Palestine” t-shirt and still I would’ve been lost in the moment.

From that point on the thriller never stops sprinting. The rest of the film consists of riveting escape scenes, high-adrenaline car chases, booming car accidents, wild shootouts—tension and excitement in every form imaginable. With the camera on the dashboard and the road roaring ahead and the car engine screaming, there is nowhere else you can be: You are actually there: You are flying down hilly one-lane highways in the desert with your heart racing.

Paul Thomas Anderson is not only a genius of conflict, speed, and stakes but a genius of perspective. True to life, every character is following his or her own story. When he centers the camera on even the most insignificant cast member, it is impossible to think of anyone else. Whether the shot lasts for a minute or an hour, the audience feels a complete presence created primarily by tension. There can be no thought of what came before or what will come next. Then Anderson switches to another character and the viewer is submerged in that point-of-view, in that character’s predicament. Suddenly the film has five or six or seven different storylines running at once. The director masterfully weaves all of them together; it takes no effort for the viewer to orient himself. Anderson is writing a novel and making a movie all at once.

Almost every single one of these characters is uproarious. Bob Ferguson—the stoned, aging revolutionary—keeps finding himself in trouble because he can’t remember passwords, run adequately, or show sufficient bravery. The aid that comes to his rescue—the sensei of his daughter’s dojo (Benicio del Toro)—does so through his own absurd antics. While the cops are hot on their tail, he’s handing out Modelo after Modelo. During one chase, he instructs Bob to hop and roll out the moving vehicle “like Tom Cruise.” Yet the funniest character of all is Steven J. Lockjaw. Torn between his racism and his appetite for black women, his determination to appear masculine and his homosexual tendencies, he is a conflicted burlesque soldier, hilarious in nearly every moment. Willa forms a great pair with Lockjaw and Ferguson in turn, amplifying their absurdities as well as a few of her own. Sharing the stage with the greatest actors of all time, the moment is never once too big for Infiniti. As the stakes get higher, her skill only increases.

I’ve read other reviews that tearfully talk about the beauty of the relationship between Bob and Willa, what it says about love, what it says about family. I felt some of that. But on the whole I felt that the movie was weakest when it became sentimental. With the exception of four or five scenes, I didn’t find it beautiful either. What it was was exciting, and that was plenty for me.

Well, I suppose there’s something more: The film also renders, faithfully, a part of America’s consciousness. Art, at one level at least, is supposed to proffer not objective truth but felt, psychological truth. One Battle does this marvellously. The America it portrays is a fictional nation where, if everything goes wrong, we might end up. But millions of citizens already see the country this way. To them America is a monster, malignant at its core. To them most, if not all, cops are racist. To them violent revolution is the only way out. If Anderson had made his movie more nuanced, it wouldn’t have been true to this perspective.

Over the past decade, a vocal part of the country has been cosplaying online as revolutionaries. They’ve taken to celebrating murder on Bluesky and Instagram for, what they consider, the greater good. Now they have a movie that speaks to them. They have their Batman and their Cat Woman. They have a fantasy of the lives they want to live, a breathing representation of how they view the world. For everyone else, One Battle After Another offers an opportunity to walk a few miles in their shoes.

But none of that would matter if it wasn’t a damn good movie, one that is worth watching in theaters to feel the fullness of its force. If I were a betting man, it’s going to be quite some time before I feel that way about a Hollywood movie again.

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