The trend quickly found traction across the Atlantic. Later in the 19th century, prominent American literary figures including Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, and F. Scott Fitzgerald all published notable novels in periodic installments. As the calendar turned into the 20th century, the episodic literary format boomed yet again, capturing enthusiastic fanbases with serialized works from acclaimed authors such as Isaac Bashevis Singer, James Joyce, and Armistead Maupin.
Now, the 21st century is picking up the torch, breathing new life into a centuries-old publishing tradition.
Over at New York magazine, Emily Gould’s “Dinner Party” newsletter currently plays host to a six-part story written by the novelist and critic Lauren Oyler. Titled "The Hater," the work is a psychologically astute modern nightmare tinged with auto-fiction. The narrative revolves around a frenemy and fixation: "a tall, self-absorbed, Berlin-dwelling writer named Lauren…who has gotten herself in too deep with F., a frustrated academic turned book critic whom she met on Feeld."
Gould chalked this contemporary novella’s timing up to a sense of cultural nostalgia and a gap in modern media offerings. Today’s newspapers have largely fallen out of the habit of rewarding their readers with chunks of fiction, she noted in a forward to Oyler’s first chapter, leaving digital platforms to pick up the slack. But looking at the broader literary landscape, it seems worth asking why these episodic "chunks" of fiction remain such a potent reward for readers, what the true appeal of a serialized story is, and what makes the present media moment so ripe for its reboot.
We can attribute the first great serial boom to a few distinct historical and economic factors, starting with a hungry, highly competitive marketplace. As literary critic Dwight MacDonald writes in his essay collection Masscult and Midcult, the Grub Street where Dickens published was a rapacious place. It was populated by hacks ready to turn their hands to ballads, novels, history, encyclopedias, philosophy, reportage, or anything else, first architecting what snobs would eventually term the middlebrow aesthetic.
The pioneers of a publishing model that the industry still enlists today believed that putting out more books faster made for a healthy, vibrant marketplace—an ethos that directly affected the creative process of the writers themselves. For his magazine contributions, Dickens was famously paid by the word, earning a rate that would likely shock today’s freelancers once adjusted for inflation. It certainly behooved Old Charlie to extend his fictional universe, exploring every narrative eddy and secondary B-plot along the way. No editor was going to stop him from expanding his sprawling tales.
Dickens may well have been one of our first writers to splash around for pages and pages in what contemporary author Brandon Taylor has dubbed "character vapor"—masses of interior backstory and description that do not obviously serve the immediate plot. Stories that meander in this fashion are frequently labeled "character-driven." The enduring appeal of a novel like Bleak House, for instance, is bound up in its colorful bad actors and bizarre names rather than the rapid progression of its action. Binging a book like this—if one can be permitted to borrow a modern verb—has historically been an uphill battle. Yet the amble itself remains remarkably rewarding when meted out slowly over time.
Assuming our literary forebears were similarly unable to hold a complex plot top of mind over week-long breaks between magazine issues, we can easily account for the historical proliferation of the character-driven chronicle. Not to mention, the exact same structural rhythm paved the way for the modern television episode.
And if the first mass book marketplace begat a serial-friendly style, we must also remember that most members of that famously overworked pre-industrial populace had severely limited leisure time. One can easily imagine how Queen Victoria’s subjects would have relished the digestible installment, the charming company, and the approving, familiar frame of a trusted magazine. It all amounted to an efficient, satisfying literary hit.
Since Grub Street’s heyday, the success of the serial format has consistently seemed to coincide with a thriving magazine culture. As literary journals rose in popularity across the decades, so too did the book dispensed in bursts.
The long-defunct Metropolitan magazine famously hosted F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned. Later, the first four books in Armistead Maupin’s beloved Tales of the City series ran as a serial in the San Francisco Chronicle during an era before the publication was kneecapped by the bursting of the dot-com bubble.
Today, traditional print magazines are clutching to the cliff edge like Mufasa from The Lion King. Yet their wily digital sibling, Substack, continues to thrive. Out on the untrammeled, ungate-kept, ever-proliferating newsletter frontier, readers can find plenty of thriving serial fiction.
Examples include John Pistelli’s novel Major Arcana, which was originally serialized on the author’s Substack before Belt Publishing stepped in to pick it up in book form. Readers can also point to downtown cultural figure Matthew Gasda’s serial work Seasons Clear, and Awe.
Some offerings spun up on Substack have even leaned heavily into gamification, keeping in line with the intended interactive use of what is fundamentally a social media app. Swedish writer Jörgen Löwenfeldt has invited his readers to vote directly on the prospective directions for future chapters in his serial fiction, effectively turning the reading experience into a modern Choose-Your-Own-Adventure game.
While gamified reading is very much a modern phenomenon, many of those essential 19th-century conditions still remain intact today. Just as on Grub Street, our contemporary literary marketplace also rewards an ethos of "more, and faster!" at almost every level. And though few writers today are getting paid generously by the word, the modern digital subscription model inherently demands and rewards creative excess and narrative meandering.
Finally, though our daily downtime may not be constricted by grueling 12-hour pre-industrial workdays in most cases, our collective attention has been fractured by technology companies that prefer to bleed our focus slow. We of the scrolling generation are already thoroughly habituated to the serial format because we are already accustomed to taking our media lightly, looking away, following faces across screens, and then coming back for more.
Gould’s "Dinner Party" project is not the only institutional newsletter or struggling media outlet to take note of the quiet resurgence and success of the Substack serial. But Lauren Oyler’s "The Hater" certainly seems to have its finger firmly on the pulse of the medium.
Oyler’s story is a nicely paced paragon of the serialized form. Its core themes and concerns—such as internet dating psychosis, app-based social hijinks, and parasocial relationships—are hyper-contemporary. Structure-wise, it features deliberate pockets of character vapor, though reader mileage on that stylistic choice naturally varies.
There is also a pleasing, meta-level self-awareness about the project, offering a knowing wink to the bugs and features of a digital container that is specifically designed to please intermittently. As Oyler’s narrator observes in the third chapter: "Part of my agitation, I reflected in the stall, was that it was not hard to see where Lauren’s story was going, but she was taking quite a while to get there."
Perhaps that is the real, enduring pleasure of the narrative chunk, as well as its unique modern utility. It can occasionally be frustrating to see the ultimate destination looming on the horizon, but in today’s fast-paced economic and media landscape—where we would all arguably do well to slow down—many readers would rather just amble along for the ride.
