Rahul Kanakia's Blog

Hey everyone, you should really subscribe to my substack if you’re still reading my work. I have been posting a bunch over there without X-posting here:

There’v...

Hey all, this is cross-posted from substack. Not all the posts from over there are even coming here, and I think I’ll stop updating this site soon and maybe turn it into a static web page and archive. Substack is just really good, offers me a lot more opportunity to grow. My wordpress traffic has been shrinking since, like, 2015, so it’s just time to move. Sign up there to get all my posts and be ready for the switch-over!

Have been going through The Penguin Freud Reader, and I am blown away ...

Sorry folks, I’ve been doing a lot of substack posting, and there are a few posts there that aren’t on here, but I’ll keep cross-posting for a while longer yet! I wouldn’t say Substack is better on a usability front–it’s just healthier, more readers, more growth. Nice to feel like someone is actually reading these posts!

As I finish the first draft of What’s So Great About The Great Books, I am going back and reading through the large list of collected links and articles that various peo...

Another post on the substacks!

The most common question I get when telling people I’m writing about the Great Books is “What do you mean by ‘The Great Books’?”

It’s a question I initially found confusing and perplexing. I’m like, “you know, Aristotle and Plato and Shakespeare and Milton and all the super-classics that you hear about but never read. “

Woman of Letters is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber....

Hey friends. The substacks, I tell you: they really get you. I have two paid subscribers over there and now I’m hooked. Sheesh. Anyway, I’m gonna start trying very slowly to transfer my remaining audience to that platform. So I’m gonna put half the essay here, and then you can find the rest there

efore the invention of race

1 it was not at all uncommon for invading peoples to incorporate ancient monuments into their religious observance. Stonehenge is a perfect example. It wasn’t const...

Okay after six months of waffling, I’m doing it. I’m going to Substack. The readership of this blog on WordPress has been dwindling for a bit, and with Twitter ending, I’m looking for a new social home. Substack is the only place on the internet where people discuss literature and ideas. Of course some of those ideas are about how trans people are delusional, but I realized not EVERYONE on substack is a transphobe.

So this post will be cross-posted from substack. And I’ll be cross-posting eve...

Hello friendly people, I realized a lot of my essays started as blog posts that got too big for me to put on here. In fact, I started a blog post yesterday with this same opening, and it turned into a three thousand word essay about how my career has been defined by the ten-year diversity boom in publishing, and about my curiosity over what the end of the boom would mean for me (probably professional ruin, mixed with aesthetic freedom). I’m sending it around now, so let’s see what happens.

I’...

Hello friends! Twitter has become even more of a cesspool, so I’ve spent less time there. Threads is obviously going to replace it, but I’m not signing up, because I’m just done with the socials. I am done. No more socials. I signed up for Facebook my freshman year, in 2004-2005. I am coming up on TWENTY YEARS of the socials, and it’s been solidly okay. Just don’t want to do it anymore.

Substack is…disappointing. The problem is that every social, in addition to its design decisions, also has a c...

Hello friendly people: I have a few upcoming publications.

I’ve recently looked at galleys for stories in WE MOSTLY COME OUT AT NIGHT: 15 QUEER TALES OF MONSTERS, ANGELS & OTHER CREATURES (ed. Rob Costello) and Out of Our League: Sixteen Stories of Girls In Sports (ed. Dahlia Adler and Jennifer Iacopelli). My story in the queer one is a lot better than my sports story, though. If I was writing it now, I’d have written a much stronger trans girl sports story. But c’est la vie.

My story “Goo...

If there’s one thing I’d like to be known for, it’s my extreme pessimism about publishing. I never believe a book will actually be published until it’s actually printed and shipped. Until then I always think something could go wrong.

But now that the text is locked, and I’ve seen galleys, and we’re sending the book out for blurbs, it does seem likely that my third YA novel, Just Happy To Be Here, will come out on January 2nd, 2024. Right now the main effect has been for me to slowly go mad wi...