Every time you want to write about a book for publication, it has to be either a 4,000-word essay that you spend months on or the author has to fit into a certain idea of a persona or character to get the interview treatment. I was always reading amazing books but the window of time to write about them would zip right by...I wanted to have some infrastructure to support these ideas, short-form new writing about books and more coverage for independent presses.

Whitney Mallett is a writer and journalist whose work spans contemporary culture and criticism across many media vectors. Having previously written for publications including Vice, PIN-UP, and Office Magazine, Mallett’s interest in literature and contemporary writing led her to found The Whitney Review of New Writing in June of 2023. Mallett sits down with editor-in-chief Tess Pollok to discuss the goals and ambitions of her new project, her love of Tamara Faith Berger, and protecting the independent press.

TESS POLLOK: What inspired you to start The Whitney Review of New Writing?

WHITNEY MALLETT: I just felt like there were books I was reading and I didn’t have a place where I could write about them. Every time you want to write about a book for a publication, it has to be either a 4,000-word essay that you spend months on or the author has to fit into a certain idea of a persona or character to get the profile or interview treatment. I was always reading amazing books and the little window of time to write about them would zip right by before I’d formalized some proposal for a magazine like LA Review of Books or The Drift. I also feel like there are a lot of great smaller releases that just don’t get talked about enough. So, I wanted to have some infrastructure to support those ideas, short-form new writing about books, and more coverage for independent releases. At the time I started the Review, Bookforum had just folded, but I’m really glad that it’s back. It just felt like a bleak atmosphere around publishing.

POLLOK: And you worked for magazines before this?

MALLETT: Yeah, I’ve always worked at independent magazines. I worked at PIN-UP before this.

POLLOK: So you’re a veteran. What types of work are you looking for in The Whitney Review of New Writing?

MALLETT: I definitely want to cover more small press books, like books from Semiotext(e) and equivalent presses. But I also love when smart people talk about pop culture, so we have a healthy amount of that, there’s definitely a high-low contrast to it. Everyone’s been talking about Julia Fox’s book, but Megan Fox also wrote a book, which wasn’t covered nearly as much, but Esra Soraya Padgett wrote about it for the new issue. It’s a book of poetry. I loved it. I was shocked, like, how good.

POLLOK: Oh, really?

MALLETT: Yeah. It’s all about Machine Gun Kelly and how toxic their relationship was, and they broke up and got back together so she’s not, like, doing a ton of interviews to promote it, which might be why.

POLLOK: I’m so fascinated by her. The original macabre bad girl.

MALLETT: Jennifer’s Body is an iconic text.

POLLOK: It almost goes without saying.

MALLETT: Another thing is that readings have really blown up as an activity post-pandemic, they’re mobbed right now and there’s a lot of energy around them. But that energy just doesn’t intersect with publications like the New York Review of Books or n+1 who aren’t well-equipped to enter that space. That’s another thing I’m interested in. That and protecting queer literature, slutty literature, poetry, independent literature.

POLLOK: You must love Porn Carnival by Rachel Rabbit White, it’s checking all your boxes.

MALLETT: Oh, yeah, absolutely. That and Rachel Oyster Kim’s book, Sins Sins Sins, which was reviewed in the first issue. Ben Fama, editor of Wonder Press, helped me explore a lot of the lineage of alternative publishing and independent publishing in New York. He’s a great person to talk to about independent literature because he’s been in the scene for a long time and he knows how to preserve the histories and significance of these books beyond the timespan of an Instagram scroll. Like, he put Oyster’s book in a lineage with Porn Carnival but also Chelsea Minniss’s Pornland from 2009 which I had had no idea about. I love Brontez Purnell, he was one of the main interviews in our first issue, as well as Tamara Faith Berger, Ishmael Reed, and Samuel Delany. In this second issue, we have McKenzie Wark, Michelle Tea, and Travis Jeppesen. I’m interested in icons of small press publishing who have taken risks, people like Michelle Tea who have not only been prolific across different genres, but also have continually put other writers on, organizing readings and publishing them on indie presses.

POLLOK: Oh, I love all of that. I have many thoughts for you. First, I love McKenzie Wark. It’s so ambitious of her to write a book about redefining capital and capitalism-I mean, what she did with Capital Is Dead: Is This Something Worse? is something many people have attempted, but few ever succeed the way she did. She changed the way I think about capital and commodity. I’ll also never read the word vectors the same way ever again.

MALLETT: Absolutely. She’s great at making complex ideas accessible, too, which I always consider a real mark of great intelligence. I think that’s actually one of the hardest things to do.

POLLOK: It’s easy to hide behind academic language. Many writers without substance are doing that. Is there anything you don’t like about working in independent publishing or with small presses? Are there any trends in contemporary fiction that you hate?

MALLETT: Just when things get too predictable. It’s good to write what you know, but you have to be careful with the reader’s expectations and the context of your work-you do want to surprise people, at least to some degree.

POLLOK: Agree. When people lead similar lives and breathe similar air, the observations they make can get stale. I love that your mission statement involves protecting independent presses.

MALLETT: When I first started working in publishing, I was working at small magazines with the mindset that I was “putting in my time” to get a job at a better magazine or hired at a corporate writing job where I’d be making more money. But for some reason, I never fit anyone’s slot quite right in terms of what they were looking for at these bigger jobs-I wasn’t art enough for that position or fashion enough for this position and so on. It just got me really interested in independent publishing and small presses. I want to challenge myself and contribute to something.

POLLOK: Who are some of your favorite writers?

MALLETT: Tamara Faith Berger is one of my favorite writers, Natasha Stagg. I feel blessed that some of my favorite writers are people that I know and get to correspond with.

POLLOK: What do you love so much about Berger’s work?

MALLETT: There’s this dissonance and visceral quality in how she describes what her characters are going through. And these short, staccato sentences–something a character is feeling, how someone’s tongue feels in their mouth. She just uses simile in this way that feels so sharp and strong. I also love how she’ll transition from describing a character’s micro-feelings to how they see the world. It just really captures the way I feel we are all stimulated. Her work is really stylish, as well, like I could open it to any page and just instantly be drawn in.

POLLOK: I’ve never read any of her work! I have to now. This is my favorite part of doing interviews, learning new stuff like this. Does she write short fiction or novels?

MALLETT: Novels. They’re usually about a young woman going through a sexual awakening in some kind of coercive or complicated situation.

POLLOK: Oh my god. Wait. I need to read her. I need to read her.

MALLETT: I can lend you some of her work. She’s pretty known in Canada, but less so in the States. It’s just one of those things that happens to Canadian artists. Canada gives a lot of grants to artists, and I think that has something to do with breeding this environment where you get modest support to pursue your ambitions even if they aren’t super commercial, and then you get covered in the national newspaper, but maybe there’s not an infrastructure for reach outside that bubble. There’s maybe more working artists and less superstar artists. Also the grant system can favor this kind of moralistic and sentimental stuff-which Tamara is very much not. But it definitely feels like a downside to that system.

POLLOK: I wish the United States wasn’t so careless with their artists. I see the drawbacks of what you’re describing with Canada but it would be nice to have something like that here. I’ve had to make peace with being a broke writer in New York City and knowing there are few professional paths for me to escape that.

MALLETT: Sometimes I feel the ick of these systems is also in like the subtle ways they demand writers or artists to perform these narratives of, like, “I’m a BIPOC immigrant” in a way that’s palatable for a bunch of white people.

POLLOK: Oh, but representation poisoning is so true in the States and we don’t even have the robust public funding for the arts that Canada has. Did you read Alex Perez’s new piece for Compact, “Why Literary Elites Love POC Pain?” It’s kind of about what you’re talking about, how identity politics have taken over the publishing industry.

MALLETT: No, who’s that?

POLLOK: He was the guy who got Elizabeth Ellen fired at Hobart, basically, because she ran his piece about how the Iowa Writers Workshop is racist and classist and just generally annoying but pretends not to be-and he argued that their obsession with politically correct language is bad for art, which I agree with. He’s a firebrand, for sure. Very anti-woke. His argument in the article he wrote for Compact is that a lot of the awards that nonwhite artists receive in the publishing sphere are identity politics-driven and that it’s driven by a fetish white people have for nonwhite suffering.

MALLETT: I can see that. I also see that in the way young people on TikTok criticize art, there’s this idea that if art shows something, it’s endorsing it. That seems like a problem to me. Sometimes, especially for people who’ve gone through something, they need a narrative to unpack that or process it in some way-they need to document the process in an emotionally complex way. If there’s a character that’s doing something bad in your work, are you going to be held morally responsible for this fictional behavior? That seems ridiculous and, not to sound like a drama queen, but even dangerous.

POLLOK: Who else do you love?

MALLETT: Thomas Pynchon.

POLLOK: Oh, duh. I love him.

MALLETT: I particularly like the trashier ones, though. The ones that are a little more, like, “I’m an aging counterculture private eye.”

POLLOK: Inherent Vice?

MALLETT: Vineland is my favorite.

POLLOK: I tried and failed to read V. recently, but I feel like if I was in a different place in my life I could’ve done it. It was just so discombobulating and dreamlike, it reminded me of Twin Peaks, actually, the way it had this perfect internal logic that kind of didn’t make sense but still knew what it was doing enough and you were content to just sit there and watch it all unfold. I like that a lot about him. Although not everything he writes is like that, like I didn’t have any problems following the narrative of The Crying of Lot 49.

MALLETT: I love the conspiracies, I love the weird tangents, I love the weird rabbit holes he goes down.

POLLOK: This debate has been around forever. “Do video games cause violence?” People are always asking these questions. Since you’re Canadian, I just want to add that I watch a lot of boring Canadian TV. I love Workin’ Moms for when I’m folding laundry and not paying attention.

MALLETT: Did you know that’s what TV is designed for?

POLLOK: No!

MALLETT: It’s specifically for housewives who are doing a chore while watching it. That’s why narratives in television are aurally driven vs. movies where they’re visually driven. In movies, you’ll have scenes where someone is, like, handing off a briefcase in a silent exchange-they rarely have scenes like that in television, because you’re not even meant to be watching it. I wonder if prestige TV follows the same rules? Someone should do an analysis of Succession.

POLLOK: Oh my god, they got me. I love TV that’s like an egg. Just totally smooth and plain and round and I can fit it in the palm of my hand.

MALLETT: We’re the same. I love boring TV, but not even the fun, trashy kind with conflict, like Real Housewives. That can actually stress me out.

POLLOK: My boyfriend sometimes makes me watch prestige TV and it makes me want to kill myself. He made me watch Horace and Pete, Louis C.K.’s new web series that’s about, like, people at a bar arguing over what Trump says about America, and I was kind of just, like, I’d rather be dead right now.

MALLETT: Maybe that’s the future of the play. Two people trapped in a room watching something and a third person watching them.

POLLOK: You’re so right. The future of prestige TV is just me being forced to watch prestige TV.

MALLETT: I had an experience back when I had an OnlyFans that reminds me of what you’re talking about. I made a video for someone and my laptop was in the background playing Law & Order and a customer actually complained and was, like, “I can’t believe I paid money for this and Law & Order is playing in the background.” But part of me was like, that’s just what content is. It’s content inside of content. I’m actually giving you a powerful video work capturing our contemporary predicament.

POLLOK: That’s so funny. I had an OnlyFans, too, for a year, but I was really addicted to porn at the time so most of the money I made went, like, right back to OnlyFans. They would give me a cash out and I would basically just give it back.

MALLETT: Oh really? Who was your favorite OnlyFans star?

POLLOK: I love @puppygirljenna. She’s also really funny on Twitter. I was kind of watching it for lifestyle porn, also, like, she lives in a really nice house and has cool furniture. I’d be pausing a video to admire her couch and wonder where she got it, things like that.

MALLETT: I love that. We live in a strange age. I wanted to capture some of that energy by calling it The Whitney Review of New Writing rather than a review of books. I wanted to capture ephemera, ephemeral moments; things people might not necessarily consider literature, but they are.

Whitney Mallett is a writer, journalist, and the editor-in-chief of The Whitney Review of New Writing. Her work has appeared in Vice, PIN-UP, and Office Magazine, among others.

Tess Pollok is a writer and the editor-in-chief of Animal Blood.