This week’s digest was curated by Sam Kahn, who writes Castalia on Substack—a journal of essays, stories, and reflections. In addition to regular roundups of news and culture, his top posts include “What Does a Healthy Culture Look Like?,” the essay “218: A Thanksgiving Story (RIP Scott Jordheim),” and the short stories “Afterlife” and “Sexcapade.”
When I started my Substack in 2022, it was, really, out of a place of desperation. I loved writing more than just about anything, and the feeling was that there was no outlet available for me to write in the way that I wanted. What Substack represented was the chance to be absolutely free and absolutely myself, even if that meant (as I sort of assumed then) writing only for collateral relatives and the dummy accounts I created to keep the comments section warm. What I wasn’t expecting to find at the start was a gen-u-ine community of like-minded people who were equally infatuated with writing and interested in modeling a civil, expressive discourse on the web. What I’m feeling at the moment is a bit different—something like being a villager and going to the big city for the first time and seeing just how much is out there. It’s truly a dizzying amount of work, and of quality work, and—just so you know—making any sort of selection is impossible.
FICTION
“There’s been some concern that, as a form, fiction is a bit undernourished in the Substack-verse, so I wanted to start with it here—although to be fair, I don’t actually know if Silvio Castelletti’s gorgeous, lyrical letter is fiction or memoir or what exactly. I have to say I was pleased to see that the ‘half-baked’ line that Silvio is so pissed off about comes from a Shalom Auslander essay that I helped edit for Persuasion. Small Substack world”
—Silvio Castelletti in The Semi-Serious View, recommended by Alexander Ipfelkofer
Then, one day, after a whole year of epistolary back and forth, I received your final letter. You said that you met someone in your new life—the son of the photographer, as you called him—and found his company enjoyable. So our lives parted. It was only a matter of time before they would, and only fair they should. You vividly stayed on my mind for years, until you gracefully faded into non-existence.
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FOOD
“Let’s face it. There is no chance that I will ever make Domenica Marchetti’s Rhub-Apple Frangipane Crostata, but her post does what all good food writing (well, what all writing) should do and tells a deeply personal story about what the activity she’s pursuing really means for her”
—Domenica Marchetti in Buona Domenica
My grandpa was a fiddler. I have a sliver of a memory of him playing his violin and singing “Skip to My Lou,” though it is entirely possible that what I am remembering is my dad talking about my grandpa playing his fiddle and singing “Skip to My Lou.”
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BUSINESS
“There is about an equal chance of my cooking Domenica Marchetti’s frangipane crostata as there is of my one day being an executive soliciting opinions from each of my subordinates and then boldly deciding on a ‘bias for action,’ but Dave Anderson’s piece is once again a model of good writing: telling a very personal story and connecting it to the highly relatable point he is making”
—Dave Anderson in Scarlet Ink
I rolled my eyes. “We’ve launched things mistakenly before, we should just mistakenly launch it,” I said, laughing.
This was true, we’d launched things accidentally before. No one should leave a production system in the hands of a couple of college hires. We’d repeatedly launched things accidentally, including jokes we’d never intended to release to the public. If you had viewed the source at the right time on our websites, you would have noted that we’d centered all of our source code horizontally. While that worked fine in Netscape, playing with the source code formatting broke the page in IE5 (of course it did, that browser was horrific), so we had to turn it off.
My friend’s eyes got big, and he smiled wickedly.
I smiled. “Ohhhhh! But would it work? Wouldn’t we have to roll it back?” I asked.
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PARENTING
“I’d be a real jerk, wouldn’t I, if on the week after Mother’s Day I didn’t include a parenting post? But fortunately, I am not a jerk and I love my mother very much and I double-dog dare you to try getting through Jacqueline Nesi’s piece without even just slightly tearing up”
—Jacqueline Nesi, PhD in Techno Sapiens
We spend a lot of time trying to avoid feelings. Numbing ourselves behind our screens and their endless scrolls and autoplaying videos. But parenting forces you to feel something. The challenges, the joys, and that indescribable in-between. The one that squeezes your heart just a little too tight but that you wouldn’t trade for the world.
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SPIRITUALITY
“Lest you think this edition of Substack Reads is getting too upbeat, here is Joy Sullivan’s utterly overpowering account of losing her faith in God as a result of a sexual assault. On a very similar theme, I’d also recommend Faith C. Bergevin’s podcast episode ‘Coming Out as a Rape Survivor’”
—Joy Sullivan in Necessary Salt by Joy Sullivan
Honestly, I know exactly when God left me. It was February and I was 23, lying on the carpet of my friend’s house after a party. A frat bro named Joe was on top of me. That was the moment I saw God exit the front door. I watched him cut across the lawn, turn left on Gibson and then vanish into the night, his breath still hanging in the air.
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LITERATURE
“Ross Barkan is a brilliant, contrarian-minded critic and writer who has a way of tackling subject matter that everybody else seems to shy away from. Ross’s post also gives me the opportunity to cheat and mention John Pistelli, who responds to Ross as well as to, I think, all of literary history in his weekly roundup”
—Ross Barkan in Political Currents by Ross Barkan
Hurrying through my twenties, I did not achieve any wild literary success, but I was surprised to find few like me—young white male novelists, possibly Jewish—attaining anything much better. There would be no new Foers. In a strange way, this came as a relief. Those most like ourselves stoke resentment and envy.
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HEALTH AND WELLNESS
“In honest, vulnerable writing, you’re supposed to ‘show all your insides,’ and it’s hard to do better there than in Noha Beshir’s account of having a catheter in her digestive tract, only to discover that the problem is her anxiety. Noha’s posting this piece on Inner Life, rather than her base Substack, Letters from a Muslim Woman, allows me to cheat again. Inner Life—set up by storyteller Mary Tabor, memoirist Joshua Doležal, and myself—is a good place to find intellectually-minded work spotlighted from across Substack”
—Noha Beshir in Inner Life
This is how your pain manifests.
I am 13, standing in front of an x-ray machine, drinking a chalky liquid filled with barium. I’m doing this so they can look for problems in my upper digestive tract. When the results come back, my family doctor tells us nothing is wrong with me, despite the pain I feel after nearly every meal.
A few months later is a motility test. This involves putting a catheter the size of a spaghetti noodle up my nose, down my esophagus, and into my stomach while I take small sips of water.
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COMICS
“Part of what’s striking about getting outside my village is discovering some of the different forms that I didn’t know existed on Substack. Apparently there’s a thriving scene for comic strips! Here’s an epic inner journey from Grant Snider (with an assist from David Hockney) in 12 comic frames”
—Grant Snider in Incidental Comics
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Congratulations to the following writers celebrating publication.
Lilly Dancyger’s new book of essays on friendship, First Love, is out now:
Today’s the day! First Love: Essays on Friendship is officially available wherever books are sold. (The audiobook, which I narrated, is also available today!) Thank you so much to everyone who has preordered, posted, and otherwise supported First Love…
11 days ago · 25 likes · 7 comments · Lilly Dancyger
Dr Sharon Blackie shares news of her next book, Wise Women, to be published later this year:
 | | Dr Sharon Blackie 11d Book announcement – Wise Women! Sometimes I go for days or weeks without posting anything on Notes, because everything I have to say is for the river or the dogs. But today I’m delighted to be able to tell you something more about my next book, Wise Women: Myths and Stories for Midlife and Beyond, which will be out from Virago (UK & elsewhere) October 3 and New World Library in North America, October 3. Here’s my… | |  | | |
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Glenn Loury’s memoir was published this week:
 | | Glenn Loury 4d My book "Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative" is out today! Get your copy wherever books are sold: https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393881349 | |  | | |
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It’s two months until the publication of Katie Hale’s novel The Edge of Solitude, which is available for pre-order:
It’s two months till your book makes it out into the world – the culmination of all those years of hard work, and you start to wonder: how do you know if you’ve done enough? If you’ve done the right things, or if any of your publicity work has had an impact? How do you cope with the rising anxiety that people will soon be reading your book – or with the…
4 days ago · 8 likes · Katie Hale
The first of Emma Gannon’s two books with independent publisher The Pound Project for A Year of Nothing is out now:
 | | Emma Gannon 3d I have had the best few days launching this two-book special into the world! 🌳 Working with a small independent publisher has been incredible; it’s felt like a true partnership, someone I can talk to at any time with my worries, highs and lows. With traditional publishing, I have often felt very alone, on the outside of the business, with a lot on my shoulders. This is my favourite thing I’ve written, and I’m so… | |  | | |
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Laura Pashby’s new book, Chasing Fog, was named a Waterstones Bookseller Editor’s Choice for August. It is available to pre-order:
 | | Laura Pashby 7d Over the moon (and completely stunned) that my upcoming book, Chasing Fog, has been chosen as a Bookseller Editor’s Choice for August. I’ll be sharing more about Chasing Fog very soon, but if you’d like to pre-order it, I’d be thrilled: https://www.waterstones.com/book/chasing-fog/laura-pashby/9781398526990 | |  | | |
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 | | Sam Kahn 16d Writers, please don’t bash your “early work.” There’s this idea out there that you’re bad, bad, bad, and then it’s like a switch is thrown and you suddenly toggle to good. In my experience it’s never like that (although publishing companies and famous writers with short memories sometimes like to give that impression). It’s more that everything you write is true to who you are at that time. What you write now will… | | |
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| | Sam Kahn 1mo With the relentless self-promotion that is the modern workplace, who has time to do any actual work? | | |
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| | Sam Kahn 1mo There’s a feeling out there that culture is, like, an adornment. The point is a sort of vast competition with itself and people get to feel good if they participate in it or consume it in some way. It’s not that. It’s what comes out of people’s lives - the sweat and tears and inexpressible solaces of lived life. Culture must be that or nothing at all. | | |
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 | | Will Dowd 3d I always assumed if you went vegan, animals would sense it and approach you in the wild, letting you scratch behind their feral ears. This has not been my experience. | |  | | |
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 | | Remy Bazerque 3d How to say money in French? L’argent,le blé, les pépettes, l'oseille, le gen-art, le flouse, le fric, le pognon, la monnaie, la cagnotte, les sous, la galette, le grisbi, les ronds, les tunes, le pactole, la maille, le liquide, le magot, le cash, le carmel, le pèse, les biffetons, la fraîche. | | |
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 | | Aisha Joshi 4d Last year my ex bf said he fell out of love with me because I wasn’t “creatively nourishing” for him and his art. This year a man bought me these socks <3 | |  | | |
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 | | Pamela Leavey 9d I have decided to write a new book… | |  | | |
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Substack Reads is a weekly roundup of writing, ideas, art, and audio from the world of Substack. Posts are recommended by staff and readers, and this week’s digest was curated by Sam Kahn, who writes Castalia on Substack, and edited from Substack’s U.K. outpost by Hannah Ray.
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