how to expand the market for literature (and literary criticism)
the personal and social function of criticism ✦ and why the humanities are not dead, thank you very much
I’m emerging from a period of internet introversion to announce that, about 2 weeks ago, the National Book Critics Circle announced that I’m one of their Emerging Critics Fellows for 2025–2026. There are many reasons I’m excited about this—the mentorship! the peers I’ll be learning with and from! But the fellowship also feels meaningful because it’s an obvious, externally legible reflection of the role that literature has played in my life.
I’ve always liked books and liked reading. But about 4 or 5 years ago, I realized that there was a way to extend the excitement I would get from a great book—a way to relive the aesthetic experience, and even deepen it: I could read literary criticism. Which is to say: I started reading a lot of book reviews.
Reviews are typically understood to involve a little bit of description (what is this book about? what genre is it in? who’s the audience), and a little bit of judgment (is it good? bad? mixed?), but these utilitarian aspects seem, to me, both necessary and secondary to the form. The best reviews don’t just tell you what to read, watch, see, and buy. They offer, instead, a particular kind of lifestyle—one that is more alive to ideas, more attentive to beauty. The best reviews whetted my appetite for books I hadn’t read; they offered new ways to think about books I’d already read; and they were, sometimes, as satisfying to read as an actual book—or eavesdropping on a gossipy conversation.
About two years ago, I wrote my first book review on the Japanese writer Mieko Kanai’s Mild Vertigo. Writing the review helped me see the novel differently; it became even more interesting and elegantly written than before. And it felt good to throw myself into a creative project, instead of scrolling on my phone. So obviously I kept on going: I reviewed Sheila Heti for ArtReview; Lucy Ives’s essay collection for The Believer; a novel by a Brazilian new media artist for Asymptote; and nonfiction books about software and design for the LA Review of Books and the Atlantic.
All this was happening, of course, while I was reading about the literacy crisis, and the death of the humanities, and other depressing headlines that suggested that this thing I had just fallen in love with—literary criticism—was dying, dead, done.
I disagree. Not just because I like doing it, and want to believe I can continue to do it. But it’s also because I grew up, so to speak, in the non-literary world—the world of software and programming and technology. (I still work in that world; after I finish this newsletter, I’m going to spend the rest of the day in Figma and Cursor.) All of my experiences in that world have led me to believe that literature feels more important, not less, the deeper you get into technology. So in this newsletter I’ll take a stab at:
Explaining what it is that critics do, and the individual and social value this provides
Why I think the market for great literature, and great literary criticism, is much larger than people think
—and then I’ll close with some of my favorite critics and publications. I’m not really an expert in this world (note the “emerging” in the fellowship title), but I feel very passionately about it! The question, of course, is how I began to feel this way—and why I think others could, too.
What do critics do?
Unless you’ve had some exposure to cultural criticism—or an art/design education where critiques were a necessary, useful part of developing your craft—the word critic often has a negative connotation. “In the popular imagination,” the critic and novelist Christine Smallwood observed,
The critic is usually evil, sneering, vicious, or frustrated at their own thwarted artistic dreams. But the truth is, people who do this quite insane and marginal thing of writing criticism do it because they have a passionate attachment to literature. There’s little money or power in it, and no fame. Writing book reviews today is a vocation, not a career.
Critics evaluate works on the basis of technical excellence and artistic merit, yes, but the goal of this isn’t cruelty. It comes from a deep fascination with the medium (literature, art, fashion, design, architecture, &c) and an overwhelming urge to discuss it, as deeply and as rigorously as possible, in public. What does “deeply and rigorously” mean? To me, it’s that:
A critic acts as a deeply invested friend, or a generous teacher, when they introduce you to a work. Critics care deeply about you, the reader of the review. They want you to have a good time! They want you to know more about the world! They want you to enjoy yourself—but not in a Let people enjoy things way, which suggests that any difference in opinion is inherently bad, and any difference in knowledge (what if the friend/teacher knows more about a topic than you?) doesn’t matter. The trick, of course, is to inform and educate without demeaning the reader, and dismissing the reader’s intelligence, agency, and ability to come to a different conclusion. But it’s not bad, I think, when someone has the courage to say: I understand why you like or dislike something, but what if you looked at it from my perspective?
A critic teaches you how to read, how to see, how to listen, how to look. But don’t I already know how to do that? Yes, but it feels different—special, nearly reverential—to do it with a companion, someone who can help you notice the minute decisions, technical and artistic, that contribute to an aesthetic outcome. My model for this is Peter Schjeldahl, who was the New Yorker’s art critic before he passed away in 2022. I wrote a little about him, as well as the painter-critic David Salle, in—
A critic navigates the boundary between subjective and objective. Aesthetic experiences are inherently personal, inherently individual; two intelligent, discerning people can have entirely different opinions about a work. Yes, a critical consensus (or near-consensus) can exist around certain works; that’s usually when they become a part of the canon in art/literature/design/&c. But this consensus is never total! So critics need to always—always—be aware of their own subjectivity. The writing is often more compelling, and more interesting, this way. I love, for instance, the art critic Jennifer Krasinski’s review of the Pittsburgh-based sculptor Thaddeus Mosley:
Love isn’t a tenable critical position, and, most of the time, I think that’s exactly as it should be. Love makes us corny, blurs our edges, and (the worst fate for a writer) induces hyperbole. Yet there are occasions when a critic, so moved by an artist and their art, is made corny, feels the blurring of their edges, and tries to recompose the oncoming hyperbole into a more respectable rhapsodic form, all while squirming at the thought of maybe, just maybe, having to use that word. Alas, until I find a better one (I’ve still got 800-plus of them to figure it out before I hit this column’s limit), I will simply confess: I love Thaddeus Mosley’s sculptures.
This doesn’t mean, however, that critics should be timid. It’s fine and even useful to say that some works contain more technical sophistication and artistic ambition. It’s exciting when a critic makes a case for something, when a critic says: This artist is doing work that will, in its own small way, change the game for everyone else.
A critic historicizes and contextualizes. How does a critic make such claims? By situating a single work in a broader lineage, so that any claim is appropriately evidenced and well-argued. It’s like research; you need to understand the ideas and insights that preceded you, in order to offer any new ideas and insights of your own. As
writes in her 2-part investigation of “Criticism in Crisis!!”,I’m usually reading reviews because the perspective of the writer has some heft. I’m just gonna be much more curious about your perspective on a novel if you know something about the history of novels and what current books discourse is like.…To evaluate what’s intrinsic to the book or the art, you should be able to place it in extrinsic context, which means you have to do research.
A critic deepens your encounter with a work, and with all such works. A critic models how to live more richly and attentively alongside art, literature, design, theatre, fashion, and even software. This is, to me, one of the most useful and rewarding parts of reading literature—and reading literary criticism—in a world awash with attention-seeking content, much of it trivial, much of it forgettable. It feels different (and better, arguably) to spend an evening immersed in a single story, instead of scrolling through a thousand posts on your phone. (Look at your screentime. Then look at your local library’s online catalogue. What will make you happier with yourself? Seriously.) As the writer Vinson Cunningham said, in an old episode of New Yorker’s Critics at Large podcast,
A critic…is someone who loves experience. It is a disposition that comes even before attention to art, it’s someone that looks at any phenomenon…and wants to extend their life by paying attention, by analysis: I want to juice this aspect of experience for all its worth,. Someone who is, in one way, and not to be morbid, battling death by saying, I can extend this moment, and this one, and this one, by way of attention. And the best way of practicing that disposition happens to be on art.
The secret to longevity, it turns out, might be cheaper than whatever Bryan Johnson is up to. Look at art. Pay attention to it. Write about it. And maybe, even, make it yourself.
A critic offers portable conceptual and intellectual tools for the rest of life. It sounds exhausting and pretentious and a little excessive, perhaps, whenever anyone argues that the thing they do is actually what will help you understand—and/or undergo—the most profound parts of life. But I really do believe this! And one of the best examples, I think, is the psychoanalyst and literary critic Adam Phillips’s essay for the LRB, which reads Kafka and Shakespeare to reflect on what it means to give up—on life, as in suicide—or give up on your old ideals, your old way of living, in order to keep on going.
I should probably say, too, what critics are not. They are not PR. (It’s not a bad and cruel thing if they write something negative, even if it’s about an independent/experimental artist.) They are not stans. They are not haters. They are that secret third thing—trying hard to understand why someone could be a stan, or could be a hater, by carefully weighing the good and bad aspects of a work.
Simultaneously, they are not obsessed with judgment, of deciding whether something is Good or Bad, Virtuous or Problematic, The Future of _ or The Cause of _’s Destruction.
In general, I believe that the best book reviews will feel interesting, insightful, and worthwhile if you:
Have read the book and agree with the critic
Have read the book and don’t agree with the critic
Haven’t read the book (and may never read it)
A tall order? Yes, but it’s also an exciting challenge to take on as a critic! And if the critic pulls it off, that means that the potential audience for their review can be quite large—not just anyone who cares about this book, but anyone who cares about certain types of books, or certain ideas, or the state of intellectual/literary/artistic culture in general.
Which brings me to something I’ve been thinking about lately—about the audience for critical writing.
“If criticism is dead, why are we all still here?”
Here’s the fascinating–depressing–fascinating thing about criticism: The entire time I’ve been trying to write it—which, if you recall, has only really been 2 years or so—people keep on saying that criticism is in a crisis (bad) or already dead (also bad, with the added implication that things are unsalvageable and there’s nothing to do except grieve its passing). But other people—Ryan Ruby, for example—are arguing that we are, in fact, living in the golden age of literary criticism. So what exactly is going on here?
Because there’s a lot of criticism being written, edited, published, circulated. I’m a devoted reader of 4Columns, for example, which publishes 4 reviews each week—on their very beautiful website—on different subjects. Literature, film, art and music are mainstays; dance, theater and architecture show up occasionally. Earlier this year, they hosted an event that asked the obvious question: “If criticism is dead, why are we all still here?”
This is, obviously, a question I’m very invested in! And I’d like to add another one: If STEM disciplines have, supposedly, won the war against the arts and humanities, why are so many of the software people I know suddenly obsessed with literature and films? Why is it that my groupchats full of programmers and product managers and designers light up whenever there’s a new Andrea Long Chu review? Why are tech people starting Robert Caro and Roberto Bolaño book clubs? Why are they getting NYRB Classics mailed to them every week?
Expanding the market for literary criticism
In 2023, the same year I pitched my first book review, the academic Christopher Newfield delivered a speech titled “Criticism After This Crisis.” His audience was the Modern Languages Association, a professional organization that includes many of the literary scholars and graduate students in America. “Our profession is in trouble,” he said. But the problem was not just the lack of academic jobs, or the declining funding, at the federal and university level, for literature. “We’re trapped in a false narrative,” he argued, “and I’ll offer a better one.”
A key part of the narrative, Newfield explained, is that the declining number of humanities majors means that there is a declining demand for humanistic knowledge. But what he actually observed, when he looked at course enrollment numbers, was “a persistence of student interest in taking humanities courses, whether or not they are majoring in the field.” This led him to conclude that:
Undergraduate interest in humanities topics has not declined, while interest in combining these topics with knowledges from different disciplines has increased.
Anecdotally, I can see this happening in my own social circles (which, up until I began writing literary criticism, were primarily composed of people who had majored in STEM disciplines). The English professor Joshua Bennett recently published a piece in the Atlantic about the intense interest his MIT students have in poetry:
One of the highlights…of my 15-year career as an educator…has been the recent discovery that some of my students, past and present, formed an arts collective: The People’s Poetry…These engineers and scientists in training, hailing from across the world, were gathering to compose and critique poems outside the classroom.
Many of these young people were, in other classes, studying or even actively developing forms of technology that raise a range of questions about the purpose and power of human expression: why humans write or draw; what ethics govern our inspiration and training; how the creative act brings us together and alters our thinking. In the midst of a technological revolution, while taking on a notoriously difficult courseload, why have they chosen to devote their time to the ancient art of making poems?
I can also see this in the sheer quantity of newsletters, on Substack and elsewhere, that are essentially centered around DIYing a humanities education—creating your own syllabi, assigning yourself homework, replicating the kind of intellectual community that a liberal arts education has historically promised. Some of these newsletters have a wider readership than just about every famous writer on Substack (except George Saunders, whose Story Club is in a league of its own).
The most popular newsletter I’ve ever written (over 9,000 likes) is about pursuing your interests in a para-academic way: formulating hypotheses, digging into the history and theory of a discipline, and publishing your work. It resonates with people, I think, because people want to take their intellectual life seriously.
So I agree with Newfield’s narrative—that there is an enormous interest in humanistic knowledge, and that this demand is entirely separate from the present (and depressing) economic realities of the field.1
We need to be careful to distinguish these two things. I don’t, personally, believe that markets are maximally efficient and perfectly rational, and I also think there are certain commodities—and certain forms of labor—that the market tends to undervalue and under-compensate. Therefore, it’s entirely possible that there are forms of labor that are tremendously valuable, that people want to do and also want to benefit from, that are not well-paid at the moment! (Care work comes to mind.)
The most interesting—and inspiring—part of Newfield’s talk, to me, comes near the beginning, when he says:
A key goal of any profession…is that it doesn’t just adapt its supply but seeks to control demand. Strong professions don’t adapt to markets: to support their interests, they make markets.
Expanding the market for literary criticism
I have many personal goals for this newsletter—to practice my writing; to remember what I read; to be in conversation with others who are obsessed with art/literature/culture.
I wrote about why I write in public—and why I think you should write, too!—in:
But I increasingly feel that my social role for writing personal canon is—and this is going to sound very lofty—to expand the market for literary criticism.
Criticism, to me, is not a specialized form of writing that is only relevant to a disappearing minority of people. Criticism is not a specialized form of writing that can only be appreciated if you have a certain education or background. (Reading criticism is the education; regularly reading it becomes the background.)
If I can put this in tech terms: The total addressable market (TAM) of criticism is not “humanities majors”—people who spent 4 formative years learning certain names and theories and ways of thinking. After all, I love literary criticism, and I majored in computer science and design. I spent four years in college and wrote one—literally one—paper that required footnotes. Pragmatically speaking, “humanities majors only” would be a terrible TAM to go after in the present climate, since quite a few young people have followed the (sometimes useful, sometimes flawed) advice that a STEM major is the only way to make a dignified living.
To put it somewhat frivolously, somewhat seriously: The total addressable market for criticism is everyone who has a Goodreads or Letterboxd account. That is to say, it includes
Anyone with an appetite for consuming cultural works in a vaguely organized, strategic and intentional fashion. (Why else would they have a specialized app for keeping track of what they’ve read/watched?)
Anyone with a more-than-passing interest in having more, and better, aesthetic encounters in their everyday life. (Why else would they seek out recommendations on what to read/watch next?)
And anyone who is curious about their own judgments of the works that induce those aesthetic experiences, and also curious about other people’s judgments. (Why else would they read reviews or post their own, complete with ratings?)
I also personally believe that increased use of LLMs will only increase the urgency and relevance of key humanistic skills, such as:
The ability to articulate what you want to learn more about, and how that information should be organized for you to interpret and use (this is known as “prompting”)
The ability to, given an arbitrary text, determine whether it is AI-generated or not (we could describe this as a specialized form of “close reading,” which picks up on the particular stylistic tics of different models), and whether the knowledge in it is reliable (this has typically been described as “media literacy”)
The ability to create, and refine, a coherent, internal representation of what makes a complex artifact—such as a photograph, painting, novel, fil—“good” and worth paying attention to (this is what Silicon Valley has been describing, lately, as “taste”)
Which is why I spend my days designing software and thinking about the future of technology, and then I spend my weekends writing—in this newsletter and elsewhere—about the future of the written word.
Reports of the death of literature have been greatly exaggerated. It seems patently obvious to me that writing is one of the best inventions of humanity and a fundamentally valuable act. And writing about art, film, music—and even writing about writing—has great intrinsic and extrinsic value. So I hope that the critics I love won’t stop writing and publishing their work. And I hope, too, that this newsletter—in its own small way—contributes to a better critical and cultural ecosystem online.
Where can I read great criticism?
I’ll close with a few recommendations for critics that I read with great devotion/admiration—literary critics, yes, but also architecture critics, internet critics, fashion critics. (And I’ll skip the obvious names, by which I mean: the critics listed here by Ryan Ruby, though his list includes many of my favorites.)
Three critic-practitioners I admire!
In Better Living Through Criticism, the film critic A.O. Scott observes that:
Every writer is a reader…driven by a desire to imitate, to correct, to improve, or to answer the models before them…it does not seem to me inaccurate to say that all art is successful criticism.
This might explain why some of my favorite critics also write short stories and novels of their own:
Angelo Hernandez Sias is an exceptional fiction writer (I’ve written about his short stories twice!) and, unfairly, an excellent and perceptive literary critic. His review of the Chilean novelist José Donoso. The Obscene Bird of Night is also an excellent education in the complexities of translating literature. And his briefer piece on Roberto Bolaño’s literary legacy comments on the experience of showing up late to the party (as in, late to another language’s great writers):
In the 21 years since his death, his body of work has been handled a lot by Anglophone critics and publishers, who, like so many necrophiliacs, simultaneously consecrate and desecrate their subject…Of course we’re late. Lateness is the condition of reading, and especially of reading in translation. We were late to Hölderlin, late to Kafka, less late to Borges; we were late to Dickinson, late to Keats…“A person arrives at a gathering and is ignored,” the philosopher Ernst Bloch wrote. “Only afterward do those who were present, not having expected anything unusual, discover what transpired in their midst.”
I wrote about Angelo Hernandez Sias’s short stories in—
is a critic–essayist–novelist (with a new novel coming out next year from Graywolf!) who is so profoundly funny; I feel very cheered whenever I read her newsletter,
, or when I read her takedowns of artificial lighting. (Because we do need more takedowns of the deleterious effects of artificial lighting on our circadian rhythms and nonhuman compatriots!) Her essay “The Unbearable Lightness” is in the latest issue of the New York Review of Books.2
I keep on finding excuses to bring up in this newsletter, because her short story collection Ghost Pains was so incredible—please buy a copy and then talk to me about it!—and also because she regularly publishes excellent essays and criticism. I loved her essay on Vienna’s tradition of winter balls—which is both a party report and an analysis of Europe’s contemporary political problems—which was published in The Dial and Foreign Policy last year; and her introduction to Ernst Jünger’s On the Marble Cliffs is an exceptional discussion of what responsibility artists and writers have in a fascist political climate. (Jünger was, much to his—restrained—dismay, a favorite of many Nazi politicians.)
I also wrote about Stevens’s short story collection in—
Once I start listing writers I like, it’s hard to stop. But I’ll confine myself to just 3 more names:
Critics don’t just write about literature!
I actually came to literary criticism late; I was reading fashion and architecture and internet criticism first.
The fashion critic
is the reason I subscribe to the Washington Post. The spring/summer and autumn/winter fashion seasons are, for me, momentous occasions that require clicking through endless slideshows on Vogue, refreshing the SHOWstudio website, and sending a lot of texts to friends about “color palettes” and “silhouettes” and which designers are rising/declining/interesting/boring. This whole experience is heightened by reading Tashjian’s reviews. In Milan this spring, for example, she took careful aim at unbeautiful clothing—Everything looks like a mess: hair, graphic design, visual art, red carpet looks. In fashion, too many designers are doing things just to be weird, or “avant-garde” (which has become the melatonin of contemporary fashion, zzzz): fruitlessly funny Moschino, grim Ferragamo, vexing Versace (though that, admittedly, had moments of pure sleazy menswear gold). This is a drag, because if there’s one thing you are supposed to rely on fashion to do, it’s to create beauty. Now, with so many dumb and unlovely clothes, you can’t blame some people for thinking the whole thing’s a racket.
—and in Paris, she wrote about how size and scale—in silhouettes, and in business—are feeling a little passé:
Comme des Garçons has been doing sculptural masses of fabric for so long that when the lights went down at its Saturday show, and a model in a relatively lean pinstripe suit and hat strode out, people gasped. It was an antique delight, almost like a cheeky salute to the days when a new coat shape by Yves Saint Laurent was headline news. A fresh silhouette! And who does that anymore?… “Recently we feel that big business, big culture, global systems, world structures maybe are not so great after all,” the show notes stated. “There is also strong value in small. Small can be mighty.” Kawakubo’s clothes were still sizable by most standards, but her emphasis on shrinking was in line with a new guard of the fashion industry that is contracting, resisting too much growth and thinking smaller.
And Tashjian’s other articles—on the declining influence of fashion magazines, and how to shop secondhand (she’s resolved to not buy new clothes in 2025)—are a nice reminder that fashion isn’t just about new, expensive designer clothing. Fashion is also a set of cultural practices that relate to identity and sociability and self-expression, too.
is best-known for the internet’s favorite architecture blog, McMansion Hell, and for her architecture criticism at The Nation. (I’m always on The Nation’s website reading her articles—and everything they publish on books and art.) But in her newsletter,
, Wagner also writes about how to get into opera through influential works like Wagner’s Ring cycle. The market for criticism about 19th century opera, you would think, is not particularly large. But Wagner’s writing is one of the best examples of how critics—through the sheer energy and beauty of their writing—can make you care about something you’ve never evinced an interest in before.And although we haven’t reached the end of 2025, I genuinely think that her essay on how to write essays will end up being the best writing advice that anyone publishes on Substack this year. I’m a paid subscriber of her newsletter and every email is a treasure.
writes about the internet and girlhood and online culture, which—in some sense—everyone is doing. But I don’t think there are many people doing it as stylishly and rigorously as her! She’s written about the commodification of online girl culture for Lux, and writes regularly for ArtReview. (I also love her newsletter, which discusses everything from FKA twigs’s Eusexua to the philosopher Simon Critchley’s On Mysticism.) Her latest piece for ArtReview takes a look at the UK’s newly implemented age verification policy, which is intended to curtail underage access to pornography, but Cortés points out that this will be difficult to implement—and contradicts the original appeal of the internet:
Today, it’s socially unacceptable—often criminal—to misrepresent your identity, appearance or lifestyle on any kind of internet profile. Yet we all reinvent ourselves when we bring ourselves to the internet: the very design of platforms like Instagram or YouTube offer opportunities to remake ourselves with every post and have conditioned a generation of users to show up to the internet as our almost-real selves. We know that nothing on the internet should be taken at face value, that all assertions of fact should be taken with a grain of salt, that people only share what they want us to see, and it is this indeterminacy that makes the internet a worthy social endeavour.
(A related argument:
on how pseudonyms help you practice agency.)
And that’s it. Six recommendations for critics, a modest manifesto on the market for criticism. As usual, I’d love to hear your takes (hot, cool, lukewarm) on the state of criticism, literature, the humanities—
I’ve been quiet online lately because my day job has been particularly invigorating (and hectic!) lately. I’ve been spending an inordinate amount of time reading about international standards for reporting on CO₂ emissions…and drawing an endless succession of rectangles on a screen…which is, believe it or not, something I genuinely enjoy.
I’ll be back in your inbox soon with the usual roundup of novels, nonfiction, music, and films I liked in July and August. I will also take a stab at theorizing about The State of Contemporary Fiction—by which I mean: I’ve read 6 novels published in 2025 and have things (largely good!) to say about them…
If you’ve read something great from this year, please do comment below or email me back—I need to pick what to read next!
I won’t go into detail for this newsletter—though I just filed a draft that elaborates on some of the economic woes. Briefly: fewer traditional academic jobs for humanities scholars; fewer alt-ac jobs in industries like journalism and publishing; the alt-alt-ac jobs like copywriting at for-profit companies are potentially threatened by LLMs; and freelance writing wages haven’t kept up with inflation. Oh, and the cost of living is going up, and there’s a housing crisis in many major cities…
I recommend subscribing to the NYRA! In addition to the usual intellectual reasons (self-edification through longform content) and aesthetic reasons (the NYRA is art-directed by Laura Coombs, who always does beautiful and surprising and exciting work)…
I can offer a shallow reason: they will send you a tote bag, and you will feel cooler than all your friends carrying their groceries in a New Yorker or London Review of Books tote bag. These are overexposed tote bags! Why not have a niche one! Architecture is in!
Also, here’s a newsletter on Finnish architecture that I wrote last year—
Congrats Celine! Really enjoyed this piece!
Also, so grateful for your last Bill Beckley piece! I wrote a story inspired by it and it got featured by the Substack Post :) All thanks to you!
Congrats on your fellowship Celine!! This line exactly describes what personal canon is to me: A critic acts as a deeply invested friend, or a generous teacher, when they introduce you to a work.
Excited to see what's next for you!