Money!

Are you a broke writer, giving away your words for free? Can’t get your excellent novel excerpt published at The Metropolitan Review? Well, we’re sorry to tell you that your poverty is your fault—just demand to get paid!

In episode 6, we laugh about why you’re so poor, and we discuss Harlan Ellison, being broke, making money, the 2012 collapse of paper media, the bicycling editor, Keith Gessen, Substack, the economy, show me the money, money mysticism, Martin Amis, his novel Money, zen writing, the WPA, public funding for the arts, Thatcher, Reagan, literature’s best rape joke, Amis’s The Information, art as a gift, Byronic art purist boyfriends, pain, misery, cope, death.

Also: John Gardner’s On Moral Fiction, Kingsley Amis, the quality of strangeness in literature, Melville, The Gift by Lewis Hyde, the free market, Arthur Miller and playwriting, working-class writers, nepo babies, Richard E. Grant, journalism, internships, social tension, eventual revolution, Keith McNally, Boomer spending, a future generation of heirs, Hamlet, galvanizing podcasts, magic techno fixes, losercore films: Todd Solondz, John Waters, Harmony Korine, Muriel’s Wedding, Ghost World, Clerks, Sean Baker and Anora. The concluding reading is “A Considerable Speck” by Robert Frost and the accompanying music is Rachmaninoff’s Elegie in E-flat minor.