There will be a pop star novelist. Soon.

The final frontiers of taste signalling. Will TMZ have to start a book reviews section?

Last year I wrote a piece about how the fashion-mongers are all reading books now, and just a few days later Vogue announced their own mother fucking book club. Fucking Marie Claire has a book club. LOOK AT THESE TRENDING STORIES FROM MARIE CLAIRE! They’re recommending Sarah Wang’s new book to people because they liked Love Island. I don’t think that book, about victims of botched plastic surgery competing on a reality show to win facial reconstruction, sounds like it’s for people who like reality TV. And they’re hawking it next to novelty tote bags.

More and more fashion brands are launching book clubs as well, and Chanel is even hosting “salons” now, and fuck, just look at this bag from Dior:

It goes further than fashion, even—Aesop now has its own “library.” What does that have to do with skincare? What is going on? It’s funny because chain bookstores like Indigo have been trying to rebrand as “cultural department stores,” trying desperately for years to pivot into being in the “lifestyle” lane, and now you have “lifestyle” brands pivoting into books. What is going on?

But I already told you what’s “going on” last time. In a world of instant exposure, very little can maintain a sense of cultural cachet. “Books” are the last bastion here because their absorption requires sustained attention, something which the public has in shorter and shorter supply, so unlike everything else books can remain “exclusionary” because they require skills that remain rare and become more and more rare all the time. Even avant garde films can be reduced to a series of images in the Meme Age, but books (helped along as well by the fact that they are not a visual medium) have a bit more resilience than that. Sure, books like Blood Meridian are being so hollowed out by memes that they’re practically jack-o-lanterns, but the process is slower, these things are less immediately digestible by the culture, like the wad of gum in your stomach according to urban legend.

I don’t like what’s going on here.

But I don’t know if “literary culture” as a whole, the packaging around the books, has the same fortitude. Why the fuck is Marie Claire trying to tell me about the “Risky, Wild Fun of Launching a Literary Publication”? Why was a preview section of Rebecca F. Kuang’s Katabasis featured in Cosmpolitan? Why is People interviewing Ann Pratchett? Why is Vogue recommending Rachel Cusk’s Outline in their vacation fashion guide alongside a Prada bucket hat, and why is it that the only thing the editor who recommended it can say about it is “the shell on the cover of the first book makes it feel like a book made for summer”?

One of these things is not like the others!

Did you read that interview with Zadie Smith in Harper’s? No, not Harper’s Magazine, silly, Harper’s BAZAAR. Rachel Seville Tashjian wants us to think this is cool or something, or at least has some precedent in literature. For instance:

For much of the 20th century, to be in Vogue was nearly as covetable as seeing your byline in the New York Review of Books. Joan Didion got her start at the magazine. (An essay she published as an entry-level staffer, “On Self-Respect,” is still widely circulated in writing courses and used as Instagram fodder.)

…Rachel, Didion was originally employed at Vogue to do merchandising copy. She did not seek the job out because it was a “coveted byline.” She often only got to do those editorials like “On Self-Respect” when other writers failed to submit their shit on time, and they were written specifically to fill space.

Perhaps younger writers simply have a more conflicted relationship with fashion. Clothing has largely disappeared from contemporary fiction

???? Rachel, what the fuck are you talking about? Tons of contemporary literary writers of all stripes talk a lot about clothing—Sheila Heti, Sally Rooney, Ottessa Moshfegh, the aforementioned Cusk, these are all very popular writers who write about clothes a lot. Even Lisa Robertson’s Baudelaire Fractal featured lengthy discussions of a whole wardrobe that was to me one of the book’s highlights (I’d certainly take it over the dull rehashing of Debord). And besides, is Virginia Woolf’s deep interest in clothing and fashion anything like Madeline Cash doing a marketing campaign for the fucking Gap???¹ Rachel Tashjian? More like Hateable Trashcan!!!

…I’m sorry, Rachel. I’m just playin’, dawg. We cool.

I saw not long ago that Meredith Graves was doing a short story reading at some lit event in New York. Am I missing something? When did Meredith Graves become a writer? She was for like five minutes the frontwoman for one of the most exciting (or possibly just most hyped up) punk acts of the 2010s, and then I guess she wasn’t, and then she was going to be the top VJ for a “renewed MTV” that I don’t think happened, or maybe she was going to be their new Kurt Loder or something, but also she worked for Kickstarter, and now she’s kind of cottage-core and knits and doesn’t have short hair anymore, but I guess also she’s a writer. Really, the truth is Graves is “an influencer” but for people who would balk at the suggestion that they follow an influencer. Much like what someone like Kylie Jenner does for normies, that sort of lifestyle envy baiting, Graves does for people who used to pretend they didn’t shop at Urban Outfitters (like me, for instance). But now she does readings, which means, by virtue of Graves’s job as an influencer, “doing readings” is something her audience identifies with and wants to project on in their ideal life that they live vicariously through Graves. When she got into knitwear it was exactly when all the trendy girls I knew were starting to get into knitwear, and she’s gotten eerily close to flirting with trad-wife-ism (ironically that’s sort of what her song “Inheritance Fits” was about), so she’s sort of a weather vane for this kind of thing—last year she was the ambassador for the New York International Antiquarian Book Fair. What the fuck? On the basis of fucking what? How does that make any sense?

Celebrities are taste-signaling all over the place. Lorde is talking up Annie Erneaux, Lady Gaga is reading Rilke. Hudson Williams of viral softcore gay porn series Heated Rivalry is calling Luigi Pirandello “the best thing ever of all time”! Do we even really believe any of these people? Do we believe all of them, at least? It was honestly kind of refreshing to hear Alison Oliver go on Inklings and blithely tell everyone with pride that she likes the unbearably cloying and uncool books of John Boyne, a man who has done so many stupid and hacky things in his career but we really need to highlight the time he read a recipe for an in-game item from The Legend of Zelda and thought an “Octorok” was a real animal. Like, yeah Alison, I bet you love that shit. I rather hear some well-meaning idiot earnestly express her appreciation for that drivel than hear another California vacuum-head with bad lip injections tell us all about smelly stupid hippy Olga Tokarczuk. You’ve never read The Books of Jacob! I don’t believe you!

It all puts a bad taste in my mouth. Doesn’t it put a bad taste in yours? Maybe this isn’t “bad” for literature, maybe it’s even “good,” but I’m nothing if not a natural cultural eschatologist. My intuition is telling me to run for shelter. I see bad omens everywhere. Indie bookstores are opening at an alarming rate, with 31% more opening in 2025 than in 2024, which is crazy. But surely we shouldn’t be alarmed. As one of Discordia’s biggest ops once suggested, big number = big good… right?

There will be a pop star novelist. Soon. I feel it in my bones. Rather than previous panned vanity novels from celebrities like Sean Penn’s Bob Honey (which we reviewed here) or Bruce Dickinson of Iron Maiden’s The Adventures of Lord Iffy Boatrace, these brats won’t have the gall to do it themselves, they’re going to get some down-on-her-luck former Booker-finalist to write a novel for like… I dunno, Adam Levine? Dua Lipa? J Blavin??? It’s going to come out via New Directions or something, and people are going to talk about how “surprised they are” by “how actually good it is” and then we’re all sons of bitches.

We should have known it was all over when Kaia Gerber, Cindy Crawford’s daughter, catapulted to immediate supermodel stardom, and simultaneously launched a book club called Library Science and started telling everyone to read Eve Babitz. Though an even earlier omen was supermodel Emily Ratajkowski, well ahead of the trend, talking up her love of Madame Bovary. Emily’s always ahead of the fashion trends—like that time she wore those Bermuda shorts!

P.S. I do find it very funny these people all love Babitz so much. Like that one I absolutely believe they all love dearly—Babitz can be great at times, but though she’s a good writer—great, even—she’s still ultimately a vapid ninny, and it’s funny to see people like Matthew Specktor try to pretend in the intro to Slow Days, Fast Company like Babitz isn’t a bimbo. What’s wrong with that? Why can’t someone be a dumb bimbo? Eve’s a Bimbo Savant, let her be what she is. Maybe we can find a little hope in that for our culture, honestly.

OR CHECK THIS OUT:

1. Richard Dickson, who was the CEO at Mattel and helped with the Barbie rebrand (a big part of which was the propaganda film he concieved directed by Greta Gerwig) was brought on to do the rebrand for Gap. I have much to say about his approach to marketing another time.