Jordan Castro

I don't care how much dark money Random House is giving to Anna Khachiyan to signal otherwise, alt lit isn't coming back and we're all better off for it. The book is a monologue about Twitter,"scene politics," and the nature of millennial narcissism in the social media age, interrupted by an eternal digression about shitting and emailing Tao Lin. It begs the reader to understand it as "Bernhardian" but it's not repetitive or demanding or rewarding enough to accomplish that. If you, a major publisher struggling to understand what 25-year-olds are up to these days, want to shoot for the "premature internet nostalgia" market, why not just make a bound copy containing every surviving Hipster Runoff post, supplement the posts with critical essays, and call it a day? You're not making the internet better, you're just making books worse.… (altro)