Substack & Acquisition

the unusual backstory to Belt's latest screenshotted deal

A few weeks ago, I read an interview with an author of a new novel on Ross Barkan’s Substack. Barkan’s called the book “a significant work of literature” and “perhaps…the elusive great American novel for the twenty-first century.” Huh! I thought, and kept reading.

The author, John Pistelli, who had been publishing this novel in chapters on his newsletter, in very cool retro-Dickensian fashion. fascinating things to say in the interview. For instance:

My main ambition was to restore ambition itself to the American novel, particularly the idea that the novel is a form perfectly suited to encompass the complexities and possibilities of the present, even if this present threatens, as Philip Roth complained in 1961, to outpace the novelistic imagination. This ambition necessarily includes writing about many different types and classes of people and milieux, of daring to use an omniscient narrator, rather than the consciously limited voice of the “I” that has become so prominent over the co…