The New Yorker:

Professional writers and passionate amateurs are using the platform to experiment with new forms.

By Peter C. Baker

This past October, subscribers to Woman of Letters, the Substack newsletter of the writer Naomi Kanakia, received an e-mail titled “Why I am publishing a novella on Substack.” This novella, Kanakia wrote, was fifteen thousand words long. She was proud of it, and hoped that it might someday be the centerpiece of a book of stories that would be published in a more conventional manner. But that possibility felt distant, and obscured by all the uncertainties of the publishing ecosystem with which she’d become intimately familiar over years of releasing books and stories with conventional presses, sci-fi journals, and literary magazines. For now, she would e-mail the story to her newsletter subscribers and see what happened. “I expect that most of you won’t finish reading it,” she wrote. “And that’s fine.”

I’d signed up for Woman of Letters a few months earlier, and I had been enjoying its mix of prickly takes on contemporary literature, reflections on the Great Books, reports on reading through the Mahabharata, and short stories that Kanakia called “tales,” which felt like a crossbreed of classic parables, polemical essays, and literary fiction. Two days later, Kanakia’s novella, titled “Money Matters,” arrived in my inbox, and before I knew it I had read halfway through. The experience felt a little like getting unexpectedly absorbed in a trashy episode of reality TV, but also like suddenly realizing that a conversation that started in the shallows of small talk has at some point drifted into the deep waters of meaning. I reached the end in a happily disoriented daze. No other piece of new fiction I read last year gave me a bigger jolt of readerly delight.

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