In book world, the summer of 2025 is officially the summer of Substack.<\/p>\n
Over the past few years, Substack has been slowly building a literary scene, one in which amateurs, relative unknowns, and Pulitzer Prize-winning writers rub shoulders with one another. This spring, a series of writers \u2014 perhaps best known for their Substacks \u2014 released new fiction, leading to a burst of publicity that the critic, novelist, and Substacker Naomi Kanakia has declared \u201cSubstack summer<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIs the Next Great American Novel Being Published on Substack?\u201d asked the New Yorker in May<\/a>. Substack \u201chas become the premier destination for literary types\u2019 unpublished musings,\u201d announced Vulture<\/a>.<\/p>\n Can Substack move sales like BookTok<\/a> can? No. But it\u2019s doing something that, for a certain set, is almost more valuable. It\u2019s giving a shot of vitality to a faltering book media ecosystem. It\u2019s building a world where everyone reads the London Review of Books, and they all have blogs.<\/p>\n \u201cI myself think of BookTok as an engine for discovery, and I think Substack is an engine for discourse,\u201d said the journalist Adrienne Westenfeld. \u201cBookTok is a listicle in a way. It\u2019s people recommending books that you might not have heard of. It\u2019s not as much a place for substantive dialogue about books, which is simply a limitation of short form video.\u201d<\/p>\n Three years ago, Westenfeld wrote about Substack\u2019s rising literary scene for Esquire<\/a>. Now, Esquire has slashed its book coverage, and Westenfeld is writing the Substack companion to a traditionally published nonfiction book: Adam Cohen\u2019s The Captain\u2019s Dinner. That progression is, in a way, par for the course for the current moment.<\/p>\n All the sad young literary men that are said to have disappeared are there on Substack, thriving.<\/p>\n With both social media and Google diverting potential readers away from publications, many outlets are no longer investing in arts coverage. The literary crowd who used to hang out on what was known as \u201cBook Twitter\u201d no longer gathers on what is now X. All the same, there are still people who like reading, and writing, and thinking about books. Right now, a lot of them seem to be on Substack.<\/p>\n What strikes me most about the Substack literary scene is just how much it looks like the literary scene of 20 years ago, the one the millennials who populate Substack just missed. The novels these writers put out tend to be sprawling social fiction about the generational foibles of American families \u00e0 la Jonathan Franzen. They post essays to their Substacks like they\u2019re putting blog posts on WordPress, only this time, you can add a paywall. All the sad young literary men<\/a> that are said to have disappeared are there on Substack, thriving. On Substack, it\u2019s 2005 again.<\/p>\n Substack is a lifeboat in publishing\u2026 or maybe an oar<\/p>\n Substack has a lot of big-name writers, some of whom the platform courted aggressively with advances<\/a> when it began scaling up around 2021 and 2022. (Substack was first founded in 2017.) Acclaimed literary icons like George Saunders<\/a> and Salman Rushdie<\/a> are on Substack \u2014 so are newer voices like Elif Batuman<\/a> and Carmen Maria Machado<\/a>.<\/p>\n Writers can offer Substack literary credibility, while Substack can offer writers a direct and monetizable connection to their readers. In a literary landscape that feels perennially on the edge, that\u2019s a valuable attribute.<\/p>\n \u201cAs long as I\u2019ve wanted to be a writer, as long as I\u2019ve taken it seriously, it\u2019s been mostly bad news,\u201d said the novelist and prolific Substacker Lincoln Michel. \u201cIt\u2019s been mostly advances getting lower, articles about people reading less, book review sections closing up, less and less book coverage. Substack feels like a bit of a lifeboat, or maybe an oar tossed to you in your canoe as you\u2019re being pushed down to the waterfall. You can build up a following of people who are really interested in books and literature or whatever it is you might be writing about.\u201d<\/p>\n Substack summer, however, is not about the established big-name novelists. Substack summer is about writers who are not particularly famous, who found themselves amassing some tens of thousands of followers on Substack and who have recently released longform fiction. They are the ones whose works are getting discussed as central to a new literary scene.<\/p>\n In her original \u201cSubstack summer\u201d post<\/a>, Kanakia identified three novels of the moment as Ross Barkan\u2019s Glass Century, John Pistelli\u2019s Major Arcana, and Matthew Gasda\u2019s The Sleepers. To that list, Kanakia could easily add her own novella, Money Matters<\/a>, which she published in full on Substack last November. \u201cNo other piece of new fiction I read last year gave me a bigger jolt of readerly delight,\u201d the New Yorker said<\/a> in May of Money Matters.<\/p>\n It wasn\u2019t quite Oprah putting Franzen\u2019s Corrections in her book club, but it was still more attention than you would reasonably expect.<\/p>\n When Barkan and Pistelli\u2019s novels came out in April and May, they garnered a surprising amount of attention, Kanakia said. The books were both ambitious enough to be of potential interest to critics \u2014 Glass Century follows an adulterous couple from the 1970s into the present, and Major Arcana deals with a death by suicide at a university. Still, both books were from relatively small presses: Belt Publishing for Major Arcana and Tough Poets Press for Glass Century. That kind of book traditionally has a limited publicity budget, which makes it hard to get reviewed in major outlets. (Not that coverage is all that easy for anyone to get, as Michel noted.)<\/p>\n Nonetheless, both Major Arcana and Glass Century got<\/a> reviewed<\/a> in the Wall Street Journal. A few weeks later, Kanakia\u2019s Money Matters, which she published directly to Substack, was written up in the New Yorker.<\/p>\n It wasn\u2019t quite Oprah putting Franzen\u2019s Corrections in her book club, but it was still more attention than you would reasonably expect. \u201cI was like, \u2018Something\u2019s happening,\u2019\u201d Kanakia says. \u201c\u2018This is going to be big. This is going to be a moment.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cHad this novel been released two or three years ago, it would have been completely ignored,\u201d says Barkan of Glass Century. \u201cNow it\u2019s been widely reviewed, and I credit Substack with that fully.\u201d<\/p>\n Pistelli\u2019s Major Arcana is even more a product of Substack than the others. Pistelli originally serialized it on Substack, and then self-published before Belt Publishing picked it up. The book didn\u2019t garner all that much attention when he was serializing it \u2014 Pistelli\u2019s feeling is that people don\u2019t go to Substack to read fiction \u2014 but after it came out in print, Substack became the peg for coverage of the book.<\/p>\n \u201cA lot of the reviews, both positive and negative, treated my novel as kind of a test of whether Substack can produce a serious novel, a novel of interest,\u201d said Pistelli. \u201cThe verdict was mixed.\u201d<\/p>\n The theory that Substackers have about Substack is this: As social media and search traffic have both collapsed, the kinds of publications that usually give people their book news \u2014 newspapers, literary magazines, book specific websites \u2014 have struggled and become harder to find. Substack, which delivers directly to readers\u2019 inboxes, has emerged to fill the gap in the ecosystem.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s very easy to talk to people and it\u2019s very easy to get your writing out there,\u201d said Henry Begler, who writes literary criticism on Substack. \u201cIt feels like a real literary scene, which is something I have never been part of.\u201d<\/p>\n While there are lots of newsletter social platforms out there, Substack is fairly unique in that it\u2019s both a place for newsletters, which tend towards the essayistic, and, with its Twitter clone Notes app, a place for hot takes and conversations. The two formats can feed off each other.<\/p>\n \u201cIt creates an ongoing discussion in a longer and more considered form than it would be on Twitter, where you\u2019re just trying to get your zingers out,\u201d says Begler.<\/p>\n The buzzy authors of the Substack scene are also all associated with the Substack-based literary magazine The Metropolitan Review<\/a>. Barkan is co-founder and editor-in-chief, and Kanakia, Pistelli, and Gasda have all written for it, as has Begler. \u201cBasically, we\u2019re just a group of friends online who read each other\u2019s newsletters and write for some of the same publications,\u201d said Kanakia.<\/p>\n For Barkan, the Metropolitan Review is at the center of a new literary movement, which he\u2019s dubbed New Romanticism<\/a>, that is \u201cproperly exploiting the original freedom promised by Internet 1.0 to yank the English language in daring, strange, and thrilling directions.\u201d<\/p>\n Barkan\u2019s idea is that the kind of publications that used to host such daring, strange, and thrilling speech no longer do, and the Metropolitan Review is stepping into the breach. He argues somewhat optimistically that the Metropolitan Review, which has around 22,000 subscribers, is \u201cone of the more widely read literary magazines in America.\u201d<\/p>\n The combined mythologies of Metropolitan Review and Substack summer have given these writers the beginnings of a cohesive self-identity. The world they\u2019ve built with that identity is, interestingly, a bit of a throwback.<\/p>\n The literary culture of 2005 is alive and well<\/p>\n Here are some characteristics of the literary world of 2005: an enchantment with a group of talented young male writers who wrote primarily big social novels and a lot of excitement about the literary possibilities of a nascent blogosphere.<\/p>\n Here are some characteristics of the Substack literary scene: a lot of young male writers, a lot of social novels, and a lot of excitement about the literary possibilities of newsletter essays.<\/p>\n Glass Century and Major Arcana are both big, sprawling novels that take place over decades, and Glass Century, in particular, reads as though it was written under the influence of Jonathan Franzen. That\u2019s a departure from what\u2019s been more recently in vogue, like Karl Ove Knausgaard\u2019s titanic autofictional saga<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cI think there\u2019s a lot of nostalgia for a time when the novel was maybe a more discussed form or a more vital form or trying to capture a lot more of contemporary society.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe big trend in the world of literary fiction for the last decade or so was really autofiction, the idea of you would write a slice of life first person narrated often in a kind of transparent, not very adorned prose,\u201d said Pistelli. \u201cI think there\u2019s been some desire to get back to that bigger canvas social novel that has been lost in the autofictional moment.\u201d<\/p>\n Literary Substack in general also seems to espouse a desire to return to a time when literature was more culturally ascendant. \u201cI think there\u2019s a lot of nostalgia for a time when the novel was maybe a more discussed form or a more vital form or trying to capture a lot more of contemporary society,\u201d said Begler. \u201cIt\u2019s partially just a shift from one mode of thinking to another, and it\u2019s partially a nostalgia for your Franzen and your David Foster Wallace and whatever.\u201d<\/p>\n This desire is, in its way, very Franzenian. Franzen famously<\/a> wrote an essay for Harper\u2019s in 1996<\/a> in which he describes his \u201cdespair about the American novel\u201d after the jingoism of the lead up to the first Gulf War. Franzen thought that television was bad for the novel; he hadn\u2019t yet seen what TikTok could do to a person.<\/p>\n While the Franzen mode pops up a lot with this crowd, there are outliers to this loose trend. Gasda\u2019s Sleeper is very much a product of millennial fiction (detached voice describing the foibles of Brooklyn literati), and Kanakia\u2019s work on Substack, which she calls her \u201ctales,\u201d tends to be sparse, with little attention paid to description or setting.<\/p>\n There\u2019s also the question of gender. The amount of men in this literary Substack scene is particularly notable in a moment so rich with essays<\/a> about the disappearance<\/a> of men<\/a> who care about and write books<\/a>. Some observers have drawn a lesson of sorts from this phenomenon: The mainstream literary world alienated men. They had to flee to Substack to build their own safe haven.<\/p>\n