For every new mechanism that brings people to reading, there’s a contingent of people who dismiss it. As Leigh Stein points out in this full-throated defense of TikTok’s literary side, that’s both gatekeepery and short-sighted. And whether or not you endorse the idea that there’s so such thing as a guilty pleasure, you have to admit: She Toks a good game.
I’ve been baffled by why my esteemed colleagues, who gather in the thousands at AWP to kvetch about how hard it is to make a living as a writer, are so incurious about the place on the internet where readers are buying a metric fuckton of books.
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