8 Questions for... John Pistelli
Grand Hotel Abyss
is the author of the forthcoming novel Major Arcana (Belt Publishing, 2025) and the bestselling Substack Grand Hotel Abyss, home of a regular newsletter called Weekly Readings and the literary podcast The Invisible College. He holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Minnesota and has been writing and teaching for almost two decades. He lives in Pittsburgh, PA.
1. Why Substack?
When I started on Substack early in 2022, it was a frankly disreputable platform. Due to its light moderation policies, legacy media and mainstream journalists associated Substack with anti-Covid-policy activism, transphobia, and the far right. I don’t want to say this attracted me, exactly—I am not anti-trans or far right, though I did mainly oppose the pandemic mandates—but I admired the company’s controversial free-speech attitude and figured its libertarian ethos might provide an alternate source of cultural energy at a time when mainstream American literature and journalism felt particularly stifling. Since then, with the culture wars having died down a bit and many mainstream figures having come aboard, I like Substack because its network effects make it easier to build an audience and to discover new writers than on previous blogging platforms (I used WordPress for eight years before joining Substack)—and also, of course, easier to monetize that attention.
2. How long did it take you to find your groove?
About a year. In 2023 I decided to stop writing regular book reviews on my WordPress site, to put more effort into my free Substack newsletter (Weekly Readings), and to begin serializing a novel (Major Arcana) for paid subscribers. I think a combination of not competing with myself on another platform, addressing various literary, cultural, and political hot topics every week in the newsletter, and using the platform to revive the Dickensian novel for the social-media age earned me attention and notoriety on here. After I was interviewed about the novel by Ross Barkan in early 2024, Major Arcana also attracted a distinguished small press, Belt Publishing; it’s forthcoming from them in April 2025. I believe it is the first novel serialized on Substack to get a book deal. Also in 2024, I added a podcast for paid subscribers, The Invisible College, consisting of courses on canonical literature; this has also proved more popular than I expected and is the main driver of paid subscriptions.
3. How has it changed you?
Before I joined, I had pretty much given up on making any money at all from my writing. This now seems a lot more feasible. The audience is there; we just needed a new way to reach it.
4. What mistakes have you made?
Part of me thinks the free weekly newsletter is a mistake. It serves its practical purpose—it draws attention to my work—but at the risk of turning me into some kind of regular pundit or controversialist. This is not necessarily the most dignified position for the artist to be in. Such engagement might be the cost of doing literary business in the present era, though, unless you can afford to disappear for a decade between novels like Franzen or Tartt. I try to keep Weekly Readings playful enough, to use enough ironic and defamiliarizing strategies, to prevent it from seeming coarsely didactic, and to prevent me from turning into some kind of Ezra Pound would-be aspiring literary dictator, a miniature version of which the parasocial relations encouraged by these platforms can tempt one into becoming.
5. To pay or not to pay?
It’s a pretty easy question in my case, because the free and paid portions are so clearly demarcated. A free subscriber gets the free weekly newsletter. A paying subscriber gets access to the podcast, the original serialization (including audio) of Major Arcana, and free pdfs of my three prior novels. I happen to think the podcast is particularly worth the subscription price, since I now have an archive of 46 very substantive two-plus hour episodes on modern literature, including sequences on big novels like Moby-Dick, Middlemarch, and Ulysses, with another years’ worth of episodes coming 2025.
6. What artistic and technical choices have you made?
A simple example: when I serialized Major Arcana, I used the voice-over feature to create an audio version of each chapter for those who prefer to listen to novels. A more complex one: in the weekly newsletter, I make very heavy use of footnotes. I have a few reasons for this. First, Substack essays often strike me as far too long. The footnote structure allows me to produce a brief main text and then annotate it with brief addenda to qualify, amplify, provide evidence, or simply digress. The net result is a dispersed text, with the built-in irony of visibly extensive second thoughts—thus formally avoiding the danger of didacticism mentioned above and allowing the reader’s attention to wander among topics of variable interest. I’ve even built up a few by-now reliable genres of footnote, including the capsule movie review and the controversial political observation. The structure also encourages a ludic and aphoristic style of style of essay-writing, which we might grandiloquently associate with certain especially ironic, dialogical, and discursive philosophers like Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Adorno, each of whom wished to avoid totalizing discourses. (We might say this, I emphasize, only if we’re feeling grandiloquent.)
7. What’s been the effect on your writing?
I have probably become too conscious of the audience. For years, I wrote into the void and said whatever I wanted. Now that I know how many people are actually reading, and how seriously some of them seem to take what I write, I begin to feel the two contradictory urges of every writer who has grown too conscious of the audience: either to appease and flatter or to shock and offend. Inevitably, I do a little of both. This sounds like I’m complaining about my good fortune, but I actually find it a fascinating new problem to negotiate as a writer, something that barely occurred to me when I was younger.
8. In it for the long haul?
I love Substack, but I’ve been online since 2000, so I know platforms come and go. Let’s say I’m involved in literature for the long haul, wherever literature flourishes.
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Best paid subscription I own. Highly recommend.
Very interesting. Especially the part about becoming overly conscious of the audience and potentially moderating (or exaggerating) what is being written.