Where Writers Go to Be Weird

Substack has become the premier destination for literary types’ unpublished musings.

- Emma Alpern

WHAT IS AN AUTHOR without an editor? Look to Substack for your answer. You'll find the novelist Garth Greenwell reflecting on a single paragraph from James Baldwin's Another Country for 3,500 words; Fuccboi author Sean Thor Conroe on “why Faulkner is goated”; a long post by Joyce Carol Oates consisting almost entirely of snapshots of her cats, Zanche and Lilith; and one by early-aughts alt-lit writer Tao Lin, who joined the platform after allegations of sexual misconduct had pushed him out of the mainstream literary sphere, photographed alongside various animals including a camel, a lizard, and a dog named Binky.

Part promotional platform, part socialmedia site, part venue for rambling journal entries, Substack is attracting an increasing number of people who write literature for a living: George Saunders and Roxane Gay, perhaps most famously, along with authors such as Mary Gaitskill, Nana Kwame AdjeiBrenyah, and, as of this past November, Miranda July. Every month, it seems someone else has joined up, and many haven't spent much time being publicly online before. “I don’t have any social media of any kind,” says Ottessa Moshfegh, who started her Substack, It’s Ottessa, bitch, in 2024. “I don’t know what people are doing on Instagram, but it just looks really addictive and toxic—like it was designed to hypnotize.” When she found out about Substack after a friend recommended Elif Batuman’s, its looseness reminded her of a zine: “It was very punk.”

There are serialized novels, such as Junot Díaz’s The Epic Gilgamek, a young-adult work-in-progress about a planet populated by metal robots, and The Seventh Wave