Naomi Kanakia

Nov 19, 2024 | arcmag.org | Naomi Kanakia

Every fall, the National Book Awards releases a list of books that’ve been selected as finalists for the award, and maybe every other year the list will cause a stir because there is a single book on it that isn’t one of the usual suspects—a book that wasn’t published by a big New York press or the subject of a serious marketing campaign designed to generate pre-release buzz.

Nov 14, 2024 | woman-of-letters.com | Naomi Kanakia

Once upon a time, a woman was hired to infiltrate a group of environmental activists who lived in a series of shared homes and apartments and trailers in the Pacific Northwest. With people like this group, you often want to be reductive and say they're rich kids, who are out of touch with the ordinary man, but it's really not true. Most of them were white, and most of them had gone to college, but some were first-generation college students.

Nov 12, 2024 | woman-of-letters.com | Naomi Kanakia

I've observed that there is a crop of recent awards-nominated literary books that draw heavily from commercial fiction, but are seen, by critics, as elevating or transcending the commercial elements they supposedly embody. The problem is that this transcendence often manifests through techniques that slow down the reading experience and break the novel’s implicit promises to the reader.

Sep 10, 2024 | woman-of-letters.com | John Pistelli |Naomi Kanakia |cultureBy John Pistelli

A friend has been texting me about the new Garth Greenwell novel. My friend’s like, it's so bad! What do people see in it? I'm honestly kind of bemused by the whole exchange. Of course it's bad. Aren't hype-machine books usually bad? Does it even matter if they're actually good or bad? At this point I'm happy if they're even readable! One wants them to be plausibly good, so it's not an overt embarrassment to American letters. But...obviously nobody is reading these books for fun. Like, why would you?

Aug 20, 2024 | woman-of-letters.com | Naomi Kanakia

On a recent visit to New York, I did a reading, and a lot of the chatter was about how something seems to be wrong in the literary star-making machine. Publicists keep pulling the usual levers and nothing seems to be happening. Journals ignore their publicity requests. Or if the articles get written, they don’t get shared. The books come out, and nobody talks about them. For instance, Taffy Brodesser-Akner has a new book out. I’m sure it’s excellent—nobody is talking about it.