Big Fiction - by Naomi Kanakia - Woman of Letters
Dan Sinykin's 2023 book, Big Fiction, is an account of the structural changes in the publishing industry between 1960 and 2000.| www.woman-of-letters.com
Dan Sinykin's 2023 book, Big Fiction, is an account of the structural changes in the publishing industry between 1960 and 2000.| www.woman-of-letters.com
For the last few months, friends have texted me about several viral takedowns of Ocean Vuong.| www.woman-of-letters.com
When Jack first got the house...| www.woman-of-letters.com
Once upon a time, there existed a set of journals that published primarily fiction and were extremely popular.| www.woman-of-letters.com
Andi had a very strong opinion about a particular issue.| www.woman-of-letters.com
Every year Penguin Random House publishes an anthology called The O.| www.woman-of-letters.com
Hello friends, this month I've been doing a final round of structural revisions for my nonfiction book, What's So Great About The Great Books?, which will hopefully come out from Princeton University Press in April or May of 2026.| www.woman-of-letters.com
Recently I hung out for a few hours with one of my readers: Arjun. This man, Arjun, is a twenty-three year old engineer who reads three literary newsletters: Woman of Letters, The Republic of Letters and The Metropolitan Review .| www.woman-of-letters.com
Substack summer has begun| www.woman-of-letters.com
One of the hot books of 2014 was a novel by Jenny Offill called Dept of Speculation. This was one of those wikipedia realism books that interspersed little factoids (in Offill’s book the facts were usually about animals or science) with short, descriptive passages about the life of the unnamed writer-protagonist—a mother who felt somewhat stifled and frustrated.| www.woman-of-letters.com
Closely allied to the question of taste is the question of genius.| www.woman-of-letters.com
Last year I wrote a series of posts about my dissatisfaction with contemporary literary fiction: I wrote about the literary hype-machine, about literary short stories, about Garth Greenwell’s Small Rain and Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake, about the lack of moral vision in contemporary novels| www.woman-of-letters.com
There is a large contingent of people in America who occasionally read classic literature for fun.| www.woman-of-letters.com
Most countries take their popular novelists more seriously than America has — Not preachy or overdetermined — Reads like the offspring of Dickens and Tolstoy — Yes, it has issues, beginning is uneven — The term “Great American Novel” was literally invented to describe this book| www.woman-of-letters.com
Between 2012 and 2014, I was enrolled in a graduate program for fiction-writing, even though my background and my subject-matter made me a fairly poor fit for this kind of program.| www.woman-of-letters.com
ALSO, every book I read in February 2025| www.woman-of-letters.com
According to my records, I read Moby-Dick for the first time in April of 2010.| www.woman-of-letters.com
After reading James Fenimore Cooper, I had some vague thoughts that I should look into Melville again.| www.woman-of-letters.com
Once upon a time, a high school sophomore was assigned to write a paper about the use of symbolism in The Great Gatsby. This sophomore was quite STEM-oriented, and she really questioned the premise of this assignment. Her understanding was that a 'symbol' was an image in the text that had some kind of meaning that wasn't directly obvious. But the question was: "Meaning to whom?"| www.woman-of-letters.com
My initial education as a writer came in the early 2000’s when I read a number of sci-fi writing guides.| www.woman-of-letters.com
Once upon a time, a young man read on Substack that writers like him were, if not discriminated against by the world of letters, then at least severely underrepresented.| www.woman-of-letters.com
The author is wondering if it’s a good idea to write more "takes".| www.woman-of-letters.com
