By now we’ve all heard about author platform, even if we’re not entirely sure how to build or maintain one.

But in my everyday work with authors, I’ve noticed many writers aren’t sure how exactly to get started. What should you focus on when you’re being pointed in 20 different directions, and all roads are potentially huge time sucks?

How to start building your author platform

As I explain in this post, author platform includes these components: expertise, contacts, social media, previous media, previous books, personality, existing readership and ability to execute. That breakdown can function as a roadmap for anyone who’s trying to figure out how to get started, especially if you feel like you’re starting at zero.

Ready to build your author platform? Here’s how to start from scratch.

1. Expertise: Write an “I am fabulous” statement

The goal with this step is to pump yourself up. In what specific and particular ways are you awesome? Why are you the person to write your book? Why is it the case that no one but you could write your book? What unique experience do you bring to the table?

Even if your answer is simply that you lived the life you lived — and maybe it was a hard one —  you’re awesome for having survived it. If you write fiction, your book likely involves themes or situations you know a lot about, which makes you an expert.

Let your statement be free-flowing, but work hard to pat yourself on the back. While many of us tend to undervalue our abilities, the first step toward being an expert is believing you can be an expert.

You may have to fake it till you make it, and your “I am fabulous” statement can give you the motivation and validation you need to get there.

2. Contacts: Put together a “big mouth list”

Everyone you know is a contact. The more people you know, the more influence you have, especially if you know people in high places.

So what if those influencers are a couple degrees of separation from you? People are surprising in how they choose to support fledgling authors. I’ve witnessed seriously established authors supporting new writers just because it feels good, and they remember what it’s like to be in your position.

In addition to the list of people you’re connected to, create a list of people who might blurb you, from realistic to pie in the sky. Who would be your ideal reader? Who do you dream might one day recommend your book?

3. Social media: Pick just two social channels

That’s right: only two. Set up a profile on each and post once a day.

For most writers, I recommend choosing Facebook and Twitter, but if you’re into other channels or options, give them a shot. If you’re writing something that lends itself to images, join Pinterest. If your work lends itself to video, do YouTube. Experiment to find a social media channel that works for you and your writing.

The key to social media is posting regularly and engaging people. You want shares, because shares lead to more follows. Rather than spreading yourself thin across multiple platforms, focus consistently on the two platforms that provide the most value to you and your work.

It takes forever (seriously) to build up a following on social media, so don’t be discouraged. Celebrate a few likes a week. Manage your expectations. Keep going. Building an author platform is a marathon, not a sprint.

4. Previous media and books: Publish an ebook

If you’re starting at zero, you may not have any previously published books or media, like guest posts or podcast interviews. That’s okay.

If you’re working on a book project that you know is going to take some time to complete — a novel or a memoir that’s already been in progress for a few years, for instance — then write a shorter ebook!

It’s surprisingly easy to self-publish an ebook. You want it to be high quality, with great content, a compelling cover and a well-designed interior. Using Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, iBooks, or e-junkie you can promote and sell your ebook from your website. While marketing your ebook is a topic for another post, figuring out how to write an ebook is a fairly simple process. And voila, you have a book to propel future books.

Media opportunities will come, but any interview you do, blog post you write or opportunity to speak in front of people you come across qualifies as media. Don’t be afraid to showcase these successes on your website and social media channels.

It takes a major shift in consciousness to start self-promoting, but I’ve found the key is in the balance. It’s cool to self-promote if you’re giving your readership fantastic, smart and interesting content — providing value. And it will get more comfortable with practice, I promise.

5. Personality: Figure out your persona

Jeff VanderMeer’s Booklife helped me understand the value of figuring out who you are online.

Some people put it all out there and are wholly themselves online, while others choose to create a persona different from who they are in real life or only show a certain side of themselves. You get to decide, and you’re not wrong or weird or bad if you want to retain a little privacy.

However, being private or an introvert does not mean you should not have a website, or that you can get away with pooh-poohing the importance of an author platform.

It just means you get to set boundaries. Instead of holding technology in contempt, learn to work with what you might not like, and to figure out how to make it work for you.

6. Existing readership: Create an email sign-up form on your website

What? You don’t have a website yet? OK, the first step is to set up your new site. Here’s a guide on how to start a blog.

While you’re at it, create a sign-up form that connects to an email management system; here are a few of our favorite email newsletter platforms to choose from. Put it on your homepage to capture email addresses — and take a deep breath.

Authors often tell me that people they know already have too much email. Get over it. Seriously. Your job is to collect emails, and to send out worthwhile content. It may take a long time to build up your email list, and to figure out exactly what your message is, but you need to practice having a following.

It doesn’t matter if you launch your email list with 20 people on it. That’s exactly what I did, and four years later I’m publishing for 5,000 subscribers who want to hear from me. After all, if they don’t, they can opt out.

But don’t worry about the numbers for now. Just take the first step and set up the form.

7. Ability to execute: Stick to a schedule

The ability to execute, like personality, is sort of a “soft” aspect of author platform, but it matters. It’s about follow-through and the ability to stick to a commitment to create content. It’s about consistency, and showing up even if it seems like no one is listening.

Building an author platform is grueling work, but it’s truly rewarding when you see the occasional spikes in engagement or new followers, or the payoff in the form of positive feedback or sales.

This payoff can only happen if you execute a plan and stick to it.

I know it’s a long haul. I’m out there myself, working on my platform every day, sometimes wondering why I am putting so much effort toward all this personal branding. But if you want to publish, and if you want readers, you have to find a voice, write content, connect with your readers and put yourself out there.

Your hard work will pay off; it just takes some time. Give it time and figure out a schedule that works for you. I recommend blogging once a month and posting on social media once a day, to start. You might increase from there, but again, you can take it little by little and adjust your plan as you figure it out.

The best way to build an author platform is simple: start

Just like you don’t run a marathon without training for weeks or months, you don’t start your author platform full force. Building your platform takes discipline and hard work, but if it weren’t worth it, no one would be doing it.

The key is to find genuine value in your endeavors. Keep going, even when it feels like no one is listening. Eventually people will start to listen, and eventually you will get a comment to a post that makes you realize you’re making a difference, reach a milestone with your contacts that surprises you, or connect with a high-profile writer who supports you just because.

Have faith. Work hard. Don’t dismiss these ideas just because they feel like too much effort, or because starting from zero seems daunting. Everyone started from zero, even your literary heroes. And it’s only with hindsight and effort that anyone has the wisdom to promise that it’s worth it.

I promise, it is. Come on in and test the waters. Wade in slowly. You’ll find your way.

What was the first thing you did to build your author platform? If you’re just starting out, what’s your biggest obstacle?

This is an updated version of a story that was previously published. We update our posts as often as possible to ensure they’re useful for our readers.

Photo via GuadiLab / Shutterstock 

The post Build Your Author Platform: 7 Manageable Ways to Start From Scratch appeared first on The Write Life.

In this March 2020 interview, The Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist weighs in on altering the course of a novel to unfold plot elements more harmoniously and facing rejection from his publisher.

Andrew Sean Greer, winner of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for his novel Less, gave a keynote address at the 2019 Writer’s Digest Novel Writing Conference wearing a bright red suit and angel wings, happily joining in on our Halloween costume party for the evening. What Greer may or may not have realized was that as he spoke about revising that novel and discovering in it symbols like flight and birds, the wings of his own costume silently underscored his point.

A graduate of the MFA program at the University of Montana and author of five novels and a collection of short stories, Greer is deeply interested in the craft of writing and explained his willingness to speak at the conference, “Usually I don’t talk to a crowd of writers, and it’s boring for readers to hear about our problems. They don’t want to know about that and they’re not interested in any technical kind of question. And all writers want to talk about or hear about or [ask is], ‘how did you do it?’”

It’s a question echoed in the opening pages of Less as the title character prepares to interview an author: “What does one ever ask an author except: ‘How?’ And the answer, as Arthur Less well knows, is obvious: ‘Beats me!’”

Just as his enthusiasm for speaking to other writers was evident in his keynote, Greer was generous with his time and went beyond “Beats me!” in speaking to the magazine as he considered the challenges of his unique revision process, facing rejection, and the benefit of writing retreats. But we began with the big question: choosing what to write about.

Some novelists stick with a common theme among their books, but you tackle varying topics. How do you approach choosing a topic or theme out of all of the possibilities there are?

I think my editors would disagree with you, or my agent would say I write the same book over and over, but in completely different circumstances. And I would agree with that somehow. If I think I’m going to write a time travel novel, which I did two books ago, it’s not going to be about killing Hitler or something. I’m not as interested in history or politics as it turns out; it’s going to be about love over the passage of time. Every one of them seems to be about that. Even if I think I’m striking out somewhere else, it always comes down to that.

So, picking a subject, I have no idea. Sometimes I get it. Usually, what I know is, I know the setting that interests me. Never does a whole novel occur to me all at once. And usually the novel I start off writing, I end up with something completely different, almost all the time.

Do you like to be surprised in that way when you’re writing?

No! [Laughs] I do not like it! I have friends who, they’re like, “I have a great idea for a novel,” and they do their research and just write it from beginning to end. Then they rewrite it and it’s frustrating. It doesn’t come out perfectly, but it sure comes out the way they thought it was going to. And mine is, I sit down and write 200 pages and then have a nervous breakdown and realize the novel’s about something else and I start over. I find that a very frustrating experience, but I’ve done it so many times that I think it’s a process.

I read that sometimes when you get feedback from an agent or an editor about a work-in-progress, you take what they identify as the piece that’s not working and you refit the novel so that piece does fit. Is that how you approach revising in general, and would you recommend that to others?

It’s very hard. I have learned how to be good at this. It’s mostly what I talk about in workshop and it’s what a beginning writer has a hard time doing—seeing their own book—which is why you go to workshop and get feedback. At a certain point, you are the one who has to make the big decisions.

My friend, Daniel Handler, has the best advice and my advice comes out of his. He says the editor is the patient and you are the doctor. The editor says, “My arm is hurting.” Then they say, “I think it’s arm cancer.” And then you’re the doctor, you say, “There’s no such thing as arm cancer, but it is useful to know your arm is hurting. I think I know what the problem is.” Because they’re not in the book. It’s not in their head. You have to ignore their advice about literally what to do if it’s something big. You have to understand what they’re saying isn’t working.

Usually, we’ll be in a workshop and someone will say, “I love this story about a marriage falling apart, but you have to get rid of the mermaid at the end.” And I think it through, but usually I end up saying, “The mermaid is the special thing.” You have to change the rest of the story so that when the mermaid appears, it feels magical and important and the purpose of the story. So the rest of the story has to change because no one wants just the story of the marriage falling apart. What’s the point of that? But a mermaid in it is something! And that is hard to perceive and follow through on.

Do your editors or agents trust you enough at this point when this happens that they know you can pull it off, or do they get nervous when you turn something new in?

I’m sure they get nervous, but in my last book, Less, my editor, bless her, wanted me to change the ending because she said, “We don’t want some kind of trick that will throw people off. We’ve enjoyed the whole book. So it should just end.” I said, “I hear what you’re saying. I’m going to make it work. You’re going to see.” And she said, “I can’t wait,” knowing that if it really didn’t work, I could easily switch it back. But I thought, I know the ending is what I want. So I changed the rest of the book. It took a lot and [they’re] subtle things. It’s changing the way the story is told so that it lands naturally and I have written enough books and finished them that the editors trust me.

But I think even one of my very first editors, her sign as a good editor was that she refused to give me a line to replace another line or an idea. She would not do it. And I was begging. I was like, “So what should I say instead?” She’s like, “You have to do that.” She would not do it for me. Although she was longing to, she understood that it could not be her job. If she wanted to write a book, she should write her own but she had to get me to figure it out. Because I would come up with a better solution because I’m in the book. So that showed her talent, really. I was wanting her to write it for me.

While we’re talking about Less, in the first chapter poor Arthur faces some pretty harsh rejection from his agent about a novel he’s working on. Have you faced your own version of harsh rejection?

Over and over. I’ve had novel projects outright rejected. I’ve changed publishers because my own publisher wasn’t interested in the new book. I lost my British publisher with the book Less because they didn’t want it. No one wanted that book! [Laughs] I was struck by lightning, but my German publisher loved it. But other than that, there was no one else. Obviously my U.S. publisher was behind it. Little, Brown was keen, but it was devastating when my British publisher dropped me after four books. We sent it around to a dozen other British publishers. No one would take it. Which felt like I was going crazy.

How did you overcome that kind of rejection?

I don’t have a thick skin, but I have been in the publishing industry to know that it is very personal in a good and bad way. People, they’re judging it on their reading a few manuscripts that day and they’re in a bad mood, or they just lost their assistant or everything’s being reshuffled. In these businesses things are chaos. To get to a place where they actually sit and get something, understand it, and understand it in an early draft—that’s what’s hard. We think it’s in its best form but it’s not yet. They have to look and see the possibility of it. That takes a certain state of mind. Most of the time they’re not in that state of mind. They go for easy things. But once in a while, everyone turns something down and [then] someone loves it and understands it, and you just need that one person.

With The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells and The Confessions of Max Tivoli, your characters break the laws of time and physics by time traveling and aging backward. How did you create your rules for how that would work for them, what they could and could not do?

That does not come naturally to me. There are people who work in the fantasy and sci-fi genre who are more skilled at this. I love reading those genres and see how it looks so easy for people.

Maybe Max Tivoli was simpler because it seemed clear to me how it would go. The only decision I had to make was whether his mind aged backward or not with his body. It seems obvious now that it’s no fun if it does, but Benjamin Button, his mind sort of ages backward.

With The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells, it drove me crazy! She drove me so crazy that I had a giant corkboard and pins and string and index cards to chart every timeline and where she was and what characters were there and what happened. I bit off more than I could chew and it took about a year longer than normal because that part was so hard.

You mentioned that you like to read sci-fi and fantasy, and I read that when you were writing Less, there were certain books you read to stimulate your mind as you were writing. What are you reading now?

I read the same book over and over and over because I’m trying to figure out how they did it.

I’m not sure I hit on the perfect books for this [next] book, but I’ve also been on a camping trip for three weeks, a research trip. So I limited the books I brought with me, but I’ve been reading Gerald Durrell’s memoirs. He’s the brother of Lawrence Durrell, who wrote The Alexandria Quartet. He writes kind of jokey naturalist novels about the beginning of the 20 century and mostly because there’s something charming and there’s something about it that I like—like the voice and his level of detail. I know that’s a kooky one, but that’s me. I love to read odd books.

I love getting unexpected answers to that question.

What I used to do when I was teaching is, I would take my students to a used bookstore and I’d give them each $5. I would say, “Pick a book you’ve never heard of, by an author you’ve never heard of, just based on how it feels and how it looks when you open it. I want you to learn how to discover a book and give it a chance.” Because otherwise everyone’s just reading the latest bestsellers or prize winners. Though you should read all the prize winners. [Laughs.]

You’re just going to sound like everyone else and you need to pick the books that really—I think a voice means a cumulation of all the books that you love.

This is just the habit of being a broke young writer—reading from used bookstores—and that’s still what I do. I love a new bookstore, but a used bookstore? It’s more exciting ’cause there’s all these hidden treasures. It’s fun to have something that nobody else knows about.

It is. I like what you said about the voice of the writer being a cumulation of all of the books that they’ve loved.

Otherwise there’s too much pressure on people to somehow emit some psychic force and that’s not fair. Like any other field, we should feel free to be influenced by everything and imitate the things we love. ’Cause you’re going to do it anyway.

I became a writer, and a lot of people do, because I was such a reader that I wanted to be part of it. Writing is like fan fiction. It’s the same thing that, I want it to go on more, but they didn’t make more! So I’m going to make the next one.

You mentioned being a poor young writer and I read that you were a food and travel writer to make ends meet. Could you talk about that kind of work? Did you like doing it? Do you miss doing it? Do you still do it on occasion?

I loved doing it. I’m a very shy person and it was not natural for me to pitch myself, throw myself head long at magazine editors. But I did it because I needed the money.

I remember in New York I had my friend introduce me to the editor of the magazine where she worked, a travel magazine, and I wore a really bright outfit ’cause I knew I wouldn’t get to talk to him. He would just shake my hand and go away. But then at the next meeting when they said, “Who should we get to do this new project?” And my friend would say, “How about my friend Andy?” And he’s like, “Who?” And they would say, “You know, the guy in the yellow sweater.” “OK. Right.” Maybe it was that stupid.

But I loved doing it because I love to travel. I didn’t mind the solitude. And it turns out I was good at it, and the food writing, which I don’t get to do much of at all anymore. But I am still doing a trip—it looks like I’m doing a trip to Japan in a month.

You spent a lot of time at the Santa Maddalena Retreat for Writers. Talk about the role writing retreats have played in your writing and what other writers ought to consider when they’re thinking about doing something like that.

They should do it, first of all. I have friends and it doesn’t work for them. They work perfectly fine at home or in a café. But for me, these places are always where I get the amount of work done that I have had a breakthrough in the book. So I depend on them.

And there’s so many. If you look at ResArtis.org, there [are] writer’s retreats around the world and some you have to pay. I’ve certainly paid for them. Then some are kooky and irritating and have a lot of character.

My advice: There’s a lot in the U.S. There [are] often ones that are unexpected, even in your own town [where] there’s a few apartments somewhere.

If you can’t afford [a retreat], I used to, when my friends would go out of town, I would stay in their apartment for four days and that would be my writer’s retreat.

You’ve mentioned working on your next book and I read that it will have humor elements like Less did, but that it might also include some right-wing American political characters. How do you approach that topic in that style in today’s political climate?

I don’t know yet. I haven’t gotten to that part. I’m terrified about that because it’s not funny. I’m struggling with it. I have only written one humorous book. My go-to with that one was to make the joke on Arthur, always, and his misunderstandings. I may try to go that route in some way again.

Where I’ve been the last couple weeks—I rented a camper to go through the Deep South for three days and go to small towns because I want to talk to people and not about politics, but get a sense of a part of the country that I have a lot of judgments about and don’t know anything about—and back to where my family’s from. It’s made me do a lot of thinking about myself, and it makes me think the novel will go that way because it’s more interesting to me. I feel like a ridiculous right-wing character is something that I already have seen a million times. I’m trained not to write any clichés, anything I’ve seen before. So we’ll see. I don’t have a good answer.

How did you find your agent and what did that process look like for you?

I’ve had two agents and my first agent, when I was a young little thing, he was a young agent and had taken on as one of his clients my best friend, so my best friend recommended me. He read my work and took me on too, and I was just, I don’t know, his third client or something. So that was sort of luck and it’s why I’ve always recommended to people that it’s the young new agents who are looking—they have to amass material, right? They have to get a stable of writers. And they’re great because they’re full of energy and they’re dying to make a mark just as we are.

And how do you find those? I just think you talk to everyone you know. You talk to your writer friends who have agents. I think the one thing you don’t do, you don’t go up to your favorite writer and say, “Could you send my book to your agent?” It’s tempting to do but it doesn’t make sense. And if you don’t know anybody in the world, [agents] do read the cold piles, you know?

Especially with the new ones.

Their assistant reads it and their assistant will become an agent one day, too. So again, it’s so personal and you just need one person that loves it.

And you don’t have to send them your first page. If you send them your best pages, you don’t overwhelm them. You don’t send them a 10-page description of the book. You just try to make it really easy to read and enjoy, and they’ll contact you.

But like most things, there is an element of luck and networking in it. But, how did I do that? Back then, there were more places where you could publish—and agents read literary magazines because they’re looking for someone. So you could just have been published in these places and now there’s not as much of that, but there also wasn’t Google.

Do you have any other words of wisdom for our readers?

I think about writing a novel: The thing I’m always reminding myself is that the important thing is the novel and not your favorite scenes or characters, and it’s such a different way of looking at something than a short story. You are looking for a whole experience that comes together and feels like it has a pattern. You have to sacrifice a lot of things in order for the book to be great. I know that sounds abstract. It does when I tell it to myself, but, that’s the big lesson I learned. WD

Slavery has been much in the news and on social media lately, so we thought we’d do something that’s long overdue here at Interesting Literature: share some of the most powerful, damning, and emotionally moving poems about slavery and the plight of African slaves over the centuries, from poets writing […]

The post 10 Classic Poems about Slavery Everyone Should Read appeared first on Interesting Literature.

It’s been said many times already that the coronavirus pandemic has laid bare the dramatic economic inequality in New York City—which of course ties into deeper systemic issues around race. But to pretend those inequalities haven’t been obvious before this time—to pretend they haven’t always been part of the city’s history—is a serious fiction. I grew up as the daughter of a building superintendent on the Upper West Side. In a single morning my father might be asked to prevent a homeless man from stealing the newspapers out of the lobby to re-sell on the street, to manage a group of contractors who were re-tiling someone’s bathroom, and to massage the haunches of the cat in the penthouse while the tenants were away at their summer house. In the course of a very short time period and in a very small space, all sorts of examples of vast inequalities occurred in the building where we lived.

In my novel, The Party Upstairs, I wanted to draw on the setting of a single building on the Upper West Side to explore some of the complicated power dynamics that emerged between residents there. Throughout the course of a day, a building super and his daughter try to navigate between different socioeconomic worlds they must inhabit and perform in. They have to reckon with their own past mistakes, with their wildest hopes, and with the facades they must keep up in day-to-day life in order to survive in the city.

In writing the novel, I was drawn to other books that approached socioeconomic inequality in the city in a way that neither fetishized the wealthy nor seemed to exploit the suffering caused by poverty. I wanted to tackle my characters’ anger at the city’s inequality while also recognizing the many moments of joy and connection the city brings too. The following books helped me think with more nuance about some of these concerns.

A Lucky Man by Jamel Brinkley

A Lucky Man contains nine stories, set mostly in Brooklyn and the Bronx, all of which do a brilliant job of creating narrative tensions around the interlinks between race, class, and masculinity. The story “I Happy Am” is an especially strong example of this: It centers around a group of boys from the Bronx who are driven out to the suburbs, expecting to spend the day at some rich white people home and to swim in their pool. The story twists and turns in a way that beautifully reveals how a kind of performance of gratitude so often plays into power relationships between white people and people of color, and between the wealthy and the working class. At the same time, moments of unexpected tenderness also occur in this story and throughout A Lucky Man, making these stories deeply human even as they tease apart the systems that try to dehumanize many of Brinkley’s characters.

Go Tell It On the Mountain by James Baldwin

Baldwin’s first novel opens in Harlem on John Grimes’ 14th birthday. But Baldwin moves around in time and space, exploring the lives of several characters in the rural South before they move to New York City. Many of the book’s characters held onto hope that living in an urban center in the North would feel different but as the novel shows, police violence, racism, economic injustice, and segregation persists in the city, too. Baldwin shows this sharply when his characters’ look at cultural institutions such as the Museum of Natural History and the Met. One of the most moving moments occurs when John takes a long walk and winds up at the 42^nd Street New York Public Library: “But he had never gone in because the building was so big that it must be full of corridors and marble steps, in the maze of which he would be lost and never find the book he wanted,” Baldwin writes. “And then everyone, all the white people inside, would know that he was not used to great buildings, or to many books, and they would look at him with pity.” John Grimes’ resistance to looks of pity help lead to an unflinching look at the city itself throughout this novel.

The Friend by Sigrid Nunez

In The Friend, a writer in New York inherits a Great Dane from her recently deceased friend and fellow writer. The novel grapples with sitting with grief, but there’s also a real sense of financial strain and risk: In order to keep her rent-controlled apartment in a building that doesn’t allow for pets, the narrator must hope that nobody reports the dog to her landlord. “It’s not like you’ll be put out on the street overnight,” a friend assures her. The super warns the narrator about the threat of eviction, which the narrator understands: It’s his job on the line as well. Nunez’s book demonstrates the way that housing instability in the city and the weight of class don’t need to take center stage in a narrative to make their presence felt on a character in the midst of great loss.

Staten Island Stories by Claire Jimenez

Jimenez’s stories, both joyful and rageful, all take place on Staten Island and are populated with smart people with terrible bosses, including angry adjuncts, underpaid office workers, photographers at the DMV, teachers, and grant-writers at nonprofits. There’s a keen awareness of the city and specifically Staten Island’s socioeconomic and racial tensions in this collection, and the way those tensions manifest even in people who would eagerly deny contributing to those tensions in any way (in “The Grant Writer’s Tale,” all the narrator’s office mates are white and have “expressed polite concern in the past about police brutality;” Jimenez’s use of “polite” is quietly damning and devastating). Jimenez tackles inequality and political upheaval while holding onto a sense of humor and humanity—a sense that animates her book’s narrators so that their voices seem to launch off the page.

The Privileges by Jonathan Dee

The Privileges centers around “a charmed couple,” Cynthia and Adam. They start off in New York City as kind of rich and then—thanks to Adam’s insider trading scheme—get a whole lot richer, complete with penthouse overlooking the Museum of Natural History’s planetarium. But the two are so coolly observed, their life seems not glamorized so much as unnerving. As a reader, I was halfway waiting for the family to get punished by society in some way, to receive their comeuppance, but this kind of authorial move would, weirdly, feel cheap and dishonest, and Dee, in avoiding it, winds up saying something far more interesting about how class operates in America. The Privileges doesn’t feel like a voyeuristic look into the one-percent so much as a portrait that, in denying a too-perfect narrative justice, reflects the city’s own socioeconomic asymmetries. 

The Collected Stories by Grace Paley

Grace Paley’s New York is one where resiliency in the city is most tied not to affluence but to a lively curiosity: “All that is really necessary for survival of the fittest, it seems,” observes a Paley narrator, “is an interest in life, good, bad, or peculiar.” Inequalities in the political and urban landscape of Paley’s characters are not treated as mere background but as a key component of their reality. Her characters—single mothers, shouting children, activists, grocers, writers, social workers—speak out in voices that feel somehow both undeniably New York and undeniably Paley-ish.

Approaching Eye Level by Vivian Gornick

The essays in Approaching Eye Level are attune to class, power, and city life in all sorts of ways, but the collection’s opening piece, “On the Street: Nobody Watches, Everyone Performs” is itself a virtuosic performance—a close examination of walks in the city, the strangeness and the thrill of them. “The streets attest to the power of narrative drive: its infinite capacity for adaptation in the most inhospitable times,” Gornick writes. There are devastating inequalities to see in the city streets but there’s also a kind of storytelling power in the many ways people survive.  “Nothing heals me of a sore and angry heart like a walk through the very city I often feel denying me,” Gornick continues. “To see in the street the fifty different ways people struggle to remain human until the very last minute—the variety and inventiveness of the survival technique—is to feel the pressure relieved, the overflow draining off. I join the anxiety. I share the condition. I feel in my nerve endings the common refusal to go under.”

The post 7 Books About New York City’s Drastic Economic Divide appeared first on Electric Literature.