Naomi Kanakia is the author of three young adult novels (Enter Title Here, We Are Totally Normal, and Just Happy To Be Here) and the literary novel The Default World (Feminist Press, 2024). Her short fiction and essays have appeared in American Short Fiction, Asimov’s, Gulf Coast, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Tablet, and LitHub. She holds an MFA from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars and was a 2015 Lambda Literary Emerging LGBTQ Voices Fellow. Her nonfiction book What’s So Great About the Great Books? is out May 19, 2026 from Princeton University Press, and a short story collection, The Payoff, is forthcoming from Random House in 2027 or 2028. She lives writes the popular Woman of Letters Substack (12,000+ subscribers…that’s doing the work!).
I brought Naomi on partly because I enjoy her Substack and partly because I’d recently talked with my friend Kat Rosenfield , another writer who came up through the YA trenches before pivoting into thrillers and criticism. I wanted to ask Naomi about her own version of that path and about what she sees from her perch as one of the more honest observers of the contemporary publishing scene. The conversation took us into MFAs, the Great Books, the Substack theorist-of-the-month cycle, post-literacy, AO3, and a recent dog-transformation novel (caninization? not technically the term, but…) that got people talking.
We covered a lot and, as always, the highlights and lowlights are below, organized by topic. Where my own remarks felt useful to keep, I’ve preserved them.
The path: sci-fi to YA without much of a plan
Naomi started in the science fiction short story ecosystem in college, wanting to be Ted Chiang. She did her MFA at Hopkins, kept writing science fiction, and then drifted into YA when her first novel arrived with a young protagonist during the John Green years.
“I never had a great plan. I started out in college writing science fiction stories. There’s this whole ecosystem where you write science fiction short stories and magazines with their own awards. I really wanted to be like Ted Chiang. And then at some point I did an MFA, and I just wrote a novel that had a young protagonist, and that kind of felt like a YA novel.”
Her actual model was Kelly Link, the rare writer who crossed from genre success into the literary mainstream.
“Kelly Link was really who I wanted to be. She had published in the Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy, she’d gotten all these science fiction awards, but she’d also done an MFA and would get some mainstream attention. Now she’s been nominated for the Pulitzer for one of her collections.”
I asked whether she’d been a YA reader herself before writing YA. The answer was no. She’d read Twilight (in her twenties) and Hunger Games but wasn’t part of the diehard adult YA readership that the trade press talks about. Her view is that group was always smaller than the marketing pretended:
“The degree to which YA readers were adults was kind of oversold. Most of the readers were and are teenagers. It was a category basically for young millennials when they were young [and some still read it].”
What the MFA actually does
In her telling, MFA workshops are mostly an acculturation device. The actual feedback is rarely useful.
“It kind of just acculturated me to this literary world that I really didn’t know anything about, which has a very genteel quality, very different from the science fiction world. You have to do this performance of your own talent and your own genius and your own seriousness. I never necessarily managed to make it work for myself, but I appreciated it. I got what I wanted from it, which is to learn how you become one of these writers who’s serious.”
On the actual feedback:
“When you’re sitting in your room writing something, you can convince yourself it’s great. But when ten other people read it, you’ll be like, okay, not everybody loves what I write. Then what those people actually say about your writing is usually useless. You can’t actually take their advice and improve your writing. But it keeps you honest.”
I asked whether the responses she got in workshop seemed driven more by relationships than substance, since that’s been my experience in graduate writing seminars and now in corporate review cycles. Her answer was qualified: you can usually tell whether someone genuinely likes the work, and that this particular bit of evidence is real enough and useful, but the analysis past that point tends not to translate into anything you can act on.
Reading the Great Books to become a better writer
When she was 23, she bought The New Lifetime Reading Plan and started working through it. Tolstoy, Euripides, Shakespeare, Chaucer, the Icelandic sagas. Out of that reading would eventually come her PUP book, What’s So Great About the Great Books?
“I do think you learn something. You get a lot of influences, especially when you read things that are not fully assimilated influences. I don’t know that you learn that much from Jane Austen, because she’s so much the ancestor of everything we write now. But if you read something really strange — older stuff, Shakespeare, Chaucer, the Icelandic sagas — you get a lot of ideas.”
The catch is that the further you drift from contemporary literary practice, the harder you make your own career.
“The more that stuff takes you away from the mainstream of what people are writing now, the harder it is to find a market for the writing. You see this a lot with people who really enjoy the great modernist works, like Ulysses or Gravity’s Rainbow. They’re like, yeah, this is what I want to do. But who’s going to read that? From the perspective of making a career as a writer, it could be better to not read those things!”
I admitted to her that my agents (I’ve had two, each very nice in their own way) always pushed comp lists at me — the 10 or 15 books that just sold in your category, and how they later performed — and that I’d never delivered on a book partly because I refused to read those comps when I should’ve been reading the comps the way a marketer reads them and pulling what works. She agreed:
“Over the last decade there have been these 25 books that have been super breakout books, like that Crawdads book. I do think from the perspective of making a career as a writer it would make sense to read those books and see if there’s anything in them I could be influenced by.”
Bateman: “I suppose the best plan would be to take those books, skim them, and think like a marketer. Maybe do a little bit of Philip Pullman — pull a few things from older work, slap them in at the right reading level, and get it out there. Nobody wants to talk that way. But that’s probably the plan that works.”
Defining yourself against books that secretly threaten you
Naomi described how easy it is to define your taste by what you refuse to read, and how hollow that refusal usually is.
“There are a lot of things we’ve defined ourselves by being against. In my mind I’m better than a big bestselling book. So it shouldn’t threaten my self-image to read one and ask, is there anything I can get from this? But it does. Similarly, for a long time I avoided reading trans books, because I was like, somehow I’m better than these books. Then I started to read them and I was like, oh, I actually really enjoy these books.”
I told her the same dynamic showed up in graduate school. A friend of mine, a fully assimilated American-born Chinese woman, was reading Chinese-American writers in order to develop a diaspora sensibility she felt she lacked. The books were doing the work of filling a gap of which she was already conscious.
The two-year theorist cycle on Substack
Naomi had recently been commenting on a recent issue of the Hedgehog Review, so I asked what trends she sees in the cultural-essay world.
“Every two years there’ll be another of these thinkers that becomes really, really popular. Two years ago it was René Girard. Christopher Lasch had his revival, too.”
“The latest one — and yes, I am up to date on these — is Walter Ong. I’ve been reading his book just today and yesterday — Orality and Literacy. Now everybody’s really worried about post-literacy.”
I’d seen the same pattern. Lasch had been on my comprehensive exam list in graduate school more than a decade before he came back, partly because my advisor’s primary reading was from the 1970s. Then The Culture of Narcissism got rediscovered around 2018-2020 and “everyone” (translation: hundreds of people on social media) was Lasch-pilled. Girard ran his own cycle. Now Ong is being pulled out of every Substack quiver to talk about post-literacy (he’s in that linked piece, for example), screens, and so on.
Bateman: “It’s just as trendy as YA. People in the literary essay world would never see it that way, but a couple of pieces hit and suddenly every essay has to drop the same theorist. It’s the cultural-essay industrial complex. I remember reading a piece years ago on the Walter Benjamin industrial complex and thinking, oh, that’s silly. He’s used a lot because he’s important. But it really is a thing.”
Post-literacy is not actually new
Naomi gave a more honest answer about the post-literacy panic than most of the people writing about it.
“I definitely group this under: most world problems are grouped under things that are not my problem. I can’t solve a literacy crisis. But if you’re going to do these intellectual or cultural review essays, you have to at least keep current on what people are worried about.”
I told her my own view, which is that the literacy panickers are getting the history wrong. People never read in the numbers we like to claim. My mom taught school for decades and would tell you that one in ten kids was actually prepared to make it through college, and that one had the family resources behind them. Even people cursed to existences as readers can’t get to everything. For example, I’ve read the first two big William Gaddis books, but I haven’t finished Ulysses (few such cases!).
Bateman: “The same critiques people had of television in 1950 just got rolled into social media. Social media is more addictive, dopamine-cheaper, faster. If TV could’ve done quick hits in 1950, producers would have. There’s always going to be a hard core of people who like to read. Like monks from the so-called Dark Ages, they maintain large components of the culture that are very boring to most folks.”
The dog book and the AO3 funnel
We started talking about a recent publishing controversy involving Shy Girl — a book picked up after self-publishing success that turned out to have used AI in places. I’d assumed it was some by-the-numbers thriller, but Naomi corrected me.
“It’s actually a really strange book. It’s about a guy who’s keeping a woman captive, and he treats her like a dog, and she slowly turns into a dog. I was kind of shocked. I was like, this is so over the top. It’s crazy sexual.”
What pulled readers in was the id. The book got picked up because it was already moving units. And it had come up the way a lot of breakout fiction now comes up:
“It started off in the fan fiction world. You have a site, AO3, with hundreds of thousands of these stories being posted constantly. Anything that rises to the top of AO3 is like a brutal gladiatorial competition of really hitting people’s buttons. Then they skim off that top layer from AO3 and publish it traditionally. For regular people, this kind of content is a virus they have no inoculation to. It just hits them!”
The 50 Shades pipeline, more efficient and at scale. I told her about another version of the same thing that had blindsided me — the orc-romance and goblin-romance subgenre that’s now selling to ordinary women’s reading groups. Books I’d assumed were nerd material are now sitting on my wife’s nightstand.
Naomi’s broader point was that this dynamic is exactly what separates highbrow writing from the kind of writing that breaks containment:
“With highbrow stuff, it really is all about pleasing authority. It’s about pleasing the critics. It’s about making your parents happy. Versus something like ‘guy holds you captive and rapes you and turns you into a dog’ — that is purely about pushing some deep buttons that you’re ashamed to admit you have. There’s an honesty there that you don’t necessarily get with highbrow stuff.”
AI writing as the supercharged AP-style hack
I asked what she’s seen of AI writing in actual publication. She’d just read a Slate piece by an immigration lawyer that was clearly composed with AI assistance. She said she didn’t hate it, but:
“I prefer not. This uncanny AI feeling is not what I’d prefer to experience.”
I told her my read on AI writing is that it’s basically an amped-up version of the AP style I learned in undergraduate journalism: five to seven paragraphs, scannable, structured the same way every time. It works for filing copy on deadline, but surely nobody reads such AP wire stories for fun.
What’s next: short stories about money in San Francisco
Naomi has a short story collection coming from Random House in 2027 or 2028 called The Payoff. Unifying theme: people in San Francisco who want more money than they have, “which is all the people in San Francisco.”
Burnout, and why she keeps writing
“At some point I really burned out on writing novels. I felt like it had just resulted in a lot of pain and feeling of rejection.”
I asked if she’d keep going with the Substack and her short fiction.
“I don’t know if I’ll be writing my Substack in 20 years. But there’s always something new to write.”
I told her I think that’s the right place to land, even for the people who fear the literacy panickers are right. If the audience for serious writing is shrinking, the people who keep doing it will do it for the love of writing as a practice. If reading isn’t your hobby, get a different hobby. The end of literacy is what it is, since there’s never been all that much of it and it isn’t the end of literacy for oddballs like me and you (I mean, it’s clearly quite odd to have read to the bottom of these notes, but thank you for your service).
If you want to hear another conversation in this YA-novelists-turned-essayists vein, my talk with Kat Rosenfield covers some of the same ground.
