new writing
!
Hello, everyone. If you’re new here, as a lot of you seem to be (not sure why so many people have subscribed recently? But welcome!), I rarely write actual stuff on here, for reasons I’ve gotten into extensively in the past and now know better than to rehash on this platform. The main reason is: as long as I have a job at a magazine and can’t charge for what I post here, I can’t really afford to devote a lot of time or effort to posting here; I write for a living, so it does not make sense for me to also write for free. (And that’s setting aside a) my reservations about the “influencer”—as opposed to “institutional” model of writing/my ambivalence about taking an Only Fans approach to writing, given my suspicion that it cannot sustain the future of the written word, and b) my aversion—albeit also addiction—to anything that feels like social media. There’s no way, when you’re on here, to avoid osmotically absorbing literary Substack’s consensus about any number of topics. You can still oppose it, of course, but you can’t help being aware of it, which means that you’re always writing in dialogue with it, which I do not like. I know that some denizens of literary Substack think that what distinguishes it from other platforms is that it has no consensus, but that’s not true. It’s anti-institutional, hates legacy media, regards contemporary publishing as unfair and corrupt, etc. I’m not commenting on whether those positions have something to them, I’m simply noting that they exist and worm their way into the brain. If, for instance, I had ever wanted to write an “I love Ocean Vuong piece” on this website—thankfully something I’ve never felt any temptation to do, since I do not love Ocean Vuong—I could hardly help being aware that Substack would yell at me for it. In this case, they would’ve been right to do so. Still, a consensus is always wrong sometimes, and it’s better not to know these things if you want to muster the courage to write stuff that pisses people off every now and then. The problem isn’t unique to Substack, by the way. It was just as bad if not worse on in-this-house Twitter in 2020, though the consensus view was obviously quite different, which is why I deleted my Twitter and haven’t looked back! Though I still recall being briefly cancelled in 2021 for an essay called “Sanctimony Literature” with a wince!) So if you subscribed thinking you were going to get essays in your inbox, sorry, you will not. What you will get, at totally irregular intervals, are links to pieces I’ve written for The New Yorker—and in this case, a piece that I wrote for another magazine before I started at The New Yorker but that has just been published now.
Without further ado, the links:
I wrote about the great, under-appreciated German novelist Wolfgang Koeppen: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/05/04/wolfgang-koeppen-book-review
I wrote about the not-so-great, much over-hyped Swiss novelist Nelio Beidermann (who is 22 and has a lot of potential! It’s totally normal to write a bad novel when you’re 22….I know I did it): https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/a-wunderkinds-best-selling-nostalgia
Finally, I wrote about the weird, amazing Austrian novelist Marlen Haushofer for the LRB: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n09/becca-rothfeld/mourning-the-houseplant
See you next time!
PS—a reminder: I do not check this platform very much! When I get a DM on here, I get an alert via email, but sometimes it goes to my spam. If you want to contact me, you need to email me or I will not see it in a timely fashion. I logged on here to find I had a number of DMs I’d neglected to answer for a month and I’m sorry about that. ilikenabokov [@] gmail