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Substack Is Where Writers Go to Be Weird
It has become the premier destination for literary types’ unpublished musings.
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 photographed alongside various animals including a camel, a lizard, and a dog named Binky. There are intriguing upstart literary magazines, such as The Republic of Letters, which solicitsessays on a new theme each week “in a spirit of fun-loving competition.” There are diaristic pieces about writer’s block, including one from Carmen Maria Machado last year that doubles, as many do, as a sidelong apology for not posting enough. Last year, the platform helped her hold an in-person auction with the writer and chef Eddie Huang in which paid subscribers could bid on things like a signed bottle of laxatives, a toothbrush used by Moshfegh, and a stack of VHS tapes.
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