Diary of a literary debutante

Sat, 11 Aug 2012 14:01:00 +0000

New York is dead, and so is publishing. Record labels don’t know how to make money any longer, and the magazine industry is contracting (don’t even ask about newspapers). Now, all this may be true, but the lag time between the death of a beloved cultural institution and the romance surrounding that institution is vast and perhaps unclosable: Kids -- and by “kids,” I mean everyone younger than I am, which often feels like everyone -- pick up their degrees from Wesleyan and Kenyon and decamp for a summer in New York. They start bands. They intern at magazines. They write for websites that they hope will get them noticed by Vanity Fair. And mostly -- or so it often seems -- they try to write books: memoirs, novels, short stories, essay collections, poetry.

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Diary of a literary debutante