Unsent letters, reckless bias for action, and rhub-apple frangipane crostata
Sam Kahn selects his top Substack reads this week
This week’s digest was curated by , who writes 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
Unsent letters
“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”
—
in , recommended by
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.
FOOD
An Anglo-Italian-American mashup
“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”
—
in
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.”
BUSINESS
Reckless bias for action
“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”
—
in
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.
PARENTING
A feeling I can’t quite name
“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”
—
in
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.
SPIRITUALITY
Woman in the church pew
“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’”
—
in
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.
LITERATURE
From misogyny to no man’s land
“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”
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in
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.
HEALTH AND WELLNESS
Voices in the mind, echoes in the body
“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”
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in
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.
COMICS
A smaller me
“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”
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in
Recently launched
Coming soon
Congratulations to the following writers celebrating publication.
’s new book of essays on friendship, First Love, is out now: shares news of her next book, Wise Women, to be published later this year:
It’s two months until the publication of
’s novel The Edge of Solitude, which is available for pre-order:
The first of
’s two books with independent publisher The Pound Project for A Year of Nothing is out now:Notes from our guest editor
Noteworthy
Inspired by the writers featured in Substack Reads? Writing on your own Substack is just a few clicks away:
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
, who writes on Substack, and edited from Substack’s U.K. outpost by Hannah Ray.Got a Substack post to recommend? Tell us about it in the comments.
 | A guest post by
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Thanks, Sam for all the work you put into this selection! So happy you liked Silvio's work. Diving into the rest of the reads, my weekend just got so much better!
What a wonderful surprise! Thank you, Sam, for including me in this edition of SR. I also have to thank Alexander Ipfelkofer and Nathan Slake for signaling me to you on Notes. Regarding the half-baked, I really couldn't remember where I read it, but now that you mention it, I do. When I was writing the piece I had a blank and couldn't really pin it down. But I'm not pissed off, though. I just do not agree, respectfully. :) Again, thank you so much for this unexpected inclusion!