The 3 best writers on Substack, according to me

in order of how recently i became obsessed with them

In December I started thinking about posting on Substack more, and so I did a survey of the literature. These were the best ones I found.

1. Naomi Kanakia
   ’s
   Woman of Letters
   .¹ Discovering Naomi was a revelation, and the more I read, the more excited I get, as I see, in wild surmise, that the expanse of her mind has, to me, only begun to reveal itself. I started sharing Naomi’s posts with friends even before my estimation of her had climbed into the ranks of God-like. I first shared Naomi’s “Editors don't want male novelists,” which is the most surprising and fresh-feeling thing I’ve read in years, and the most exhilarating ‘this is what it makes sense for literature to be now’ formal experimentation I’ve read since the opening sequence of Shoplifting From American Apparel. It’s funny that “Editors don’t want male novelists” was my first exposure to Naomi, since really her reputation seems to rest on her criticism, and actually it is her criticism that I’ve come to be most excited about (though I will definitely read her novel, The Default World, soon). She has an expert-level bird’s-eye-view of contemporary literature of a sort that can only really exist outside ‘mainstream publishing’, and kind of, to my mind, singlehandedly justifies the platform of Substack. Unfortunately I am at a loss to think of any one critical essay to point you to—they’re all stellar—but you could try “It’s okay to take a book seriously.” The deep engagement with the ‘old’ (pre-internet) literary tradition, coupled with judgements as calibrated to the present millisecond as a quant’s high-frequency trading algorithm—this is a real “live player” at work, fueled by a mind that is arguably too smart for literature. Comparing this kind of writing to a normal critic is like comparing a Harlem Globetrotter to a dog. She explains her whole deal in this recent and apparently rarely autobiographical post.

   Editors don't want male novelists

2. Second in my list is

   Henrik Karlsson
   . He is 35 and lives on an island off Sweden with his wife and two kids. Like most of his fans, the first thing I read of his was this post about the early days of his relationship with his wife. I think a part of my recent obsession with him is an envy of his life that at first I resisted but that I’ve now come to believe is healthy: actually, I should listen to my feeling that I want his life, because it’s telling me something important, and I should change my behavior accordingly. I like Henrik for exactly the opposite reason I like more discourse-steeped writers like Naomi: for me it can be easy to forget that I’m not actually American, and Henrik’s bulletins from his Swedish isle remind me of the kinds of things I think are actually important, outside the discourse—basically, ‘family’. And yet the thing that sets Henrik apart, for me, is the vein of STEM-lordery that pulses underneath the veneer of the failed-poet-turned-family-man: like me, he is a one-time coder, and he references sama, PG, and talks about, e.g., steering his life according to a fascinatingly orderly decision-making process, in “Almost everyone I’ve met would be well-served thinking more about what to focus on”:

   Almost everyone I’ve met would be well-served thinking more about what to focus on

3. This is a bit sentimental, but after subscribing to hundreds of new Substacks, I can’t help but be excited when I see, nestled amidst all the dashed-off slop that now fills my inbox, one of

   Sasha Chapin
   ’s. I honestly don’t know if I have friend-tinted glasses here, but in terms of prose style, I don’t think Sasha really has an equal in living English writers (one of my runners-up is Hilton Als, who, amusingly-to-me, Sasha can’t stand). My inclusion of Sasha on this list was partly inspired by his latest, How to like everything more, which is both a catalogue of art appreciation and a record of a mind, and is virtuosic proof of his dominance in the field of sensory and aesthetic articulation. The piece also happens to function as a showcase of how every major strain of his life—mindfulness, perfumery, songwriting, and literature—have united, organically and surprisingly, to create something greater and more performant than its constituent parts, like one of those French perfumes he so charmingly flogs. Also, the prose is as acrobatic as his very first essay nine years ago that came out the gate so strong it won a National Magazine Award. I have known Sasha for 16 years, and about halfway through that time, after I’d been away in Alabama doing my MFA and we hadn’t seen each other in a while, he said, if I ran into you in a party and met you now, I'd still be excited to have met you and want to be your friend. I felt, and still feel, the same way about Sasha, and his writing: if I discovered him for the first time today, I’d be blown away that he can toss off a world-historically slick diamond every week, or sometimes every day, seemingly on command. When Sasha first started publishing these things on Hazlitt and the Toronto literati were doing comic-book coffee-spitting double-takes, I was as astonished as everyone else, and I asked him how he did it. He said, “I considered the aesthetics I liked and then I did the one I was able to do.” What the hell, man.

   How to like everything more

1. Naomi was reposted into my awareness by

sympathetic opposition

, whose

a newsletter

is also excellent.