[C4G Books; 2024]
In 2024, whilst the world unraveled, alt-lit darlings Jon Lindsey and Harris Lahti built an indie press. Their new venture, Cash 4 Gold Books (C4G), conjures up the famously insolvent company of the same name (minus the “Books”), which spent half-a-decade hammering airwaves and swindling customers before declaring bankruptcy. Any unfavorable associations with the “Cash 4 Gold” moniker won’t be assuaged by a cursory glance at C4G’s website, which features a distinctly early-aughts, GeoCities vibe complete with floating hyperlinks, ample empty space, and the kinds of flashing advertisements you’d see outside a strip mall massage parlor. It’s a less pastel version of Madeline Cash and Co’s aesthetic over at Forever Mag—where both Lindsey and Lahti have been published—that toes a fine line between wry amusement and tired gimmickry. You’re smiling if you’re in on the joke, but you’re probably not if you’re the type of person who drops the $250 necessary to secure an advanced copy of one of C4G’s books, and Lahti informed me that someone actually did pay that much on Amazon for an early look at Peter Vack’s debut (rest assured their post-release date copies are more conventionally priced).
Gimmickry of the sort attracts eyeballs, and it earns nods of approval from the literati’s anti-establishment, but, thankfully, such parlor tricks barely scratch the surface on C4G’s refreshingly eclectic ambitions. I’d expect nothing less from Jon Lindsey, whose novel, Body High, is a gloriously debauched fever dream of contemporary Los Angeles; and from Harris Lahti, who’s consistently writing some of the internet’s most peculiar, engrossing fiction (he’s also an editor at Fence). Lahti told Write or Die Magazine that C4G is less concerned with a stable mission statement than they are with finding voices that “needed to write [their] book,” clarifying that the subject matter need not be “heavy to create that feeling of urgency”: “this is going to sound insane,” said Lahti, “but I really think a book about World War II can have the same stakes, the same tension, intrigue, etc, as a book about someone who has to pee really bad.”
C4G has yet to publish a book about someone who has to pee really bad (though there is some IBS in Nathan Dragon’s debut). They opened their inaugural year with Suicide: An Anthology, co-published with House of Vlad Press, and they made their solo debut this past spring with multi-hyphenate Peter Vack’s first novel, Sillyboy.
Call it post-autofiction, or anti-autofiction, Sillyboy, set in the ancient, bygone era of 2015, centers on the inevitable collapse of a dysfunctional relationship. The titular Sillyboi—he swipes out the “y” for an “i” because “y” exists in a “perpetual state of questioning”—is a twenty-eight-year-old actor with a half-decent IMDb who spends much of the novel haunting Bushwick coffee shops, starting and re-starting his screenplay. Possibly addicted to porn, and probably addicted to weed, Sillyboi, who is insanely hot, met the much-younger Chloe, an aspiring tattoo artist who is also insanely hot, on a pre-Tinder dating site. Their origin story slowly materializes through achronological flashbacks, and in the novel’s present they share an apartment. Walls are punched. Doors are slammed. Gaslighting is not yet part of the cultural lexicon, but there’s plenty of that, too. The novel features sporadic confessional digressions drenched in armchair psychoanalysis (Sillyboi comes from a family of therapists), the most striking of which details Sillyboi’s fixation on porn where the actresses “resembled his high school peers.” His formative years were “lived in a fantasy world created by ‘teen porn,’” and now, in his late twenties, his goal is to “find a 19-year-old girl on the Internet to fuck.” He finds Chloe.
Sillyboi’s sexual proclivities might be read as a manifestation of our porn-sick culture. A Wi-Fi connection grants us access to a boundless library of explicit content, and we have free reign to carefully curate our own fantasies. This level of control is as titillating as it is damaging, because it cripples our ability to surrender to the inherent messiness of real-life (IRL!) human intimacy. “Eroticism occurs only when we enter into the interhuman,” writes Becca Rothfeld. Sex is an act of mutual creation, not of “[assimilation] to preexistent fantasy.” Porn-bred sexual dysfunction is increasingly becoming the stuff of literature, as Tony Tulathimutte’s pitiable incels can attest to in Rejection, and Vack’s novel hits on similar notes. During Sillyboi’s first few sexual encounters with Chloe, he had to remind himself that she “was not pornography. The light entering his eyes was not from an image on a screen.”
Of course, porn sickness can also be deemed a convenient excuse for what is, at its abject core, a moderately successful actor on the brink of thirty scouring the internet for teenagers. Sillyboi is surely, as we term it in modern parlance, a Fuckboi, something Vack’s highly self-referential novel shows awareness of in lengthy parentheticals—often written as responses to his mother’s reproach—that respond to anticipated criticism. “I am indicting a whole generation,” reads one such section; “It’s cultural criticism!” I laughed out loud here, skewering as it does all the (mostly white and male) novelists who seem to think that the act of skillfully writing about dirtbags amounts to an artful indictment of dirtbagery. I’m not saying that fiction needs to make any kind of moralistic justification for its existence, but Truffaut’s thoughts on the impossibility of making an anti-war film might also apply to writing an anti-Fuckboi book. That is, if you do a good enough job, someone will find a way to glorify something.
Appropriately, many of the most promising portions of Vack’s debut take place when we slide on out of Sillyboi’s perspective. In a surprising show of authorial empathy, much of the novel—especially in the back half—is surrendered to Chloe, who recently abandoned NYU, deeming it “an institution founded on pretense that was, at best, a narrow entry point to the even greater pretension of the Art World.” This is, undoubtedly, accurate, although Chloe’s resentment of the Art School Industrial Complex may also have something to do with her work being dismissed as “irrelevant, cute, and worst of all, commercial.” Her rebellion might be a protest of corporatized art education. It also might be an affected posture developed in response to her perceived rejection. We never get a definitive answer, since Chloe herself likely isn’t sure, but we do get lengthy passages on Chloe’s origin story—she grew up in DC with an acquiescent mother who “would participate in genocide” if “commanded to so” and with an abusive father. “[H]e hit me a lot growing up,” Chloe tells Sillyboi, justifying his behavior by explaining that “[p]hysical abuse is a part of being a parent in China,” and her dad “moved to the US when he was thirty.” Psychoanalysis seems to be Vack’s literary theory of choice, so we see these same dynamics present themselves in Chloe’s romantic relationships.
There is a deliberate attempt to imbue Chloe with (often heartbreaking) dimensionality. It’s a noble instinct, but the promise of her character is never fulfilled, as the unraveling of her past trauma takes precedent over present-day depth. Most of Chloe’s immediate concerns revolve around obsessing over Sillyboi’s infidelity, while most of Sillyboi’s inner life is consumed with his magnum opus (his script’s working title is, appropriately, Launching Pad). Since this novel is so submerged in its own metacommentary, I suppose a generous reading would argue that these contrasting concerns are intentionally incriminating and, possibly, satirical. But all the layers of self-referentiality are so exhausting as to be self-defeating.
What’s ultimately most intriguing about Sillyboi has less to do with relationship dynamics than with atmosphere, as Vack successfully evokes a pre-TikTok internet. His multimodal novel—it features screenplays, text messages, imaginary conversations with the rapper Future—occasionally reads like a simulacrum of Twitter, where the world so rapidly alternates between impenetrable irony and excruciating sincerity as to make them indistinguishable from each other. Anything and everything is flattened into one thing—content, I guess—a phenomenon hilariously encapsulated by Chloe’s reaction to Sillyboi’s meandering tirade against social media activism: “You sound crazy,” she says, “like, alt-right, or something.” “Alt-right? L.M.A.O.,” responds Sillyboi. “I am so far left, I’m left out…I’m too psychoanalyzed to be alt-right.” Vack is a noted member of the Dimes Square crew—edgelord-in-arms Dasha Nekrasova blurbed his book—and this seems to be an acute rendering of the Manhattan microneighborhood’s confounding cultural footprint, which has alternately been the epicenter of the dirtbag left, and the new right, and Gen Z’s post-ironic brand of Catholicism.
Vack’s novel epitomizes a certain subset of social media-inflected urbanity, circa 2015, where microcelebrities and proto-influencers scour the internet for intimacy and go to film premieres that include people saying things like: “Race is pretty hot right now. Racism too, I guess.” C4G’s second release of 2024, Nathan Dragon’s debut story collection The Champ is Here, swaps out the contemporary city for the timeless, pastoral present. Dragon’s collected stories are ostensibly taking place in the here and now, and yet one of the only mentions of anything resembling current technology is a phone number that used to belong to someone else: “I get calls for Bruce and for the electric pet fence guy—I forget his name—all the time,” shares one of Dragon’s unnamed narrators, soon ending the half-page story on a characteristically subdued note: “His name might’ve been Bruce Adams too. / There are probably a lot of Bruce Adamses.”
“Bruce Adams” sounds common enough indeed, but there’s nothing common about Nathan Dragon, who has been publishing in alt-lit journals the internet over for the better part of a decade: Muumuu House, New York Tyrant, Post Road, Fence, and, most notably, NOON, Diane Williams’s influential literary annual where Dragon has become a house favorite. Like many of his NOON counterparts, Dragon’s work, and The Champ is Here in particular, is difficult to classify. It’s tempting to call it “flash” but, per an interview with The Creative Independent, Dragon takes issue with the term. There’s also, certainly, a prose poetry quality, and while it might be a passé comparison, some of his careful portraits of domesticity do evoke Carver’s verse. Taken as a whole, his debut is probably a linked story collection, or maybe a novel-in-stories if you focus in on his most commonly recurring narrator—the one who seems to be the most transparent stand-in for Dragon. Personally, most of the artistic antecedents I detect come from other mediums entirely; I wasn’t surprised to read that Dragon has a soft spot for early Reichardt and Jarmusch, and I was charmed to see that folk-rocker MJ Lenderman blurbed his book, as both artists have a talent for uncanny poetry (“Joker Lips” is a good place to start for proof of Lenderman’s bona fides).
Classify it however you want, but I’m sure we can all agree that Dragon’s work is of the quiet variety, dealing as it does with outwardly unremarkable characters partial to, among other things, wood in its many forms: wood decks, woodpeckers, lying flat on plywood floors (they especially like this one). Dragon’s narrators—sometimes the same guy, always spiritual siblings of one another—lead self-contained lives where the only external proof of existence might be a punch clock confirming they’re “IN AT ALL,” or a dog who “tilts its head” to corroborate that its owner is, in fact, speaking aloud. And while there’s a seductively idyllic quality to the Dragon-verse, this only serves to belie a crippling longing bubbling beneath the surface. Sometimes the narrator pinpoints a specific object for his yearning: “I want so badly to be let in on it,” says one, jealously observing small town shopkeepers as they “[speak] candidly with each other.” Most of the time their desires are inarticulable: “he wanted something that he wasn’t sure he’d had in a while and couldn’t remember what to call it.” (“Good luck finding it,” I wrote in the margins of my book, like an asshole.)
This, in short, is the alchemy propelling Dragon’s work: he writes with extraordinary understanding and precision about ordinary folks’ vast and ineffable dreams. Dragon’s characters often work blue-collar jobs, and yet they’re really full-time daydreamers—and sometimes, predictably, writers—installing roofs to make ends meet. In that way they’re not so different from the narrators you’d find in more traditional literary debuts: Küntslerromans set in Brooklyn rather than the boondocks, where characters mix drinks on the side rather than cement. But unlike their coastal city counterparts who might be MFAs (guilty as charged) or lapsed PhDs, these working-class characters, siloed from any academic or literary establishment, aren’t usually granted the privilege of having their aimlessness intellectualized. A rudderless grad student is a tortured intellectual—the stuff of literature. A rudderless roofer is a rudderless roofer.
Dragon’s glacial-paced protagonists do find beauty in their world’s quotidian wonders— “a pair of empty shoes” looks like it “holds a posture”; “dried leaves” on the car floor look “like fish flakes”—but they’re far from satisfied with their circumstances. Really, they’re drifting through “Lacunae,” the title of one of Dragon’s longer stories (five pages in this collection constituting an epic). And while a lacuna might be restful, it’s also, importantly, far from a permanent resting place. It’s an interval; a bridge between two poles. “The grass will be greener once I make it through,” says the narrator in “Walking,” though he never specifies what exactly he’s getting through (never mind what he’s getting to). “I want to want nothing,” he later says in a lucid flash of surrender, seemingly crippled by his boundless desires, a hamstrung feeling shackling many of Dragon’s characters as they’re pelted by their own intrusive thoughts. In “A Waterless, White-Sand Beach,” the close-third person narrator—Dragon alternates between that and first—recognizes that “his thoughts slip too much” and that he needs to “get control again.” There’s an obsessive-compulsive quality to the protagonist as he worries over details as small as blowing out the candle: “once they were with people and they had to turn back around to check if he remembered.” These asides are easy to dismiss as the quirks of easy, bucolic life. But after a while their recurrence’s cumulative impact has a disquieting effect. Don’t mistake slowness for calmness—in Dragon’s collection, the tension builds.
What exactly this tension builds towards is amorphous. Dragon’s characters often read as being decidedly directionless, and their hazy trajectories serve, somewhat paradoxically, as both the heart of the story’s dramatic conflict—the protagonist grapples with how to move forward—and as the source of the story’s lack of dramatic conflict: the protagonist won’t move forward. But even when his characters resist any kind of clearly delineated shape, Dragon still, without fail, approaches them with near pathological precision. There’s a deceptively casual quality to Dragon’s smooth, affectless prose, but bursts of hairsplitting perfectionism provide glimpses of his exacting nature. Ice cubes are described as “not quite clinking in his favorite cup”— “clunking, the more accurate word.” The absence of a “single sound” is not a “quiet” feeling—it’s “a feeling of the sound having been sucked out.” The narrator will regularly take a digressive beat to revise his own thinking, as if there’s no greater sin than improperly representing something as simple as yanking a hair from your head—one of my favorite analogies in the collection, this is described as “Almost the perfect reverse of slurping a noodle.” One of Champ’s stories opens with a proclamation: “Everything that is said or that can be said about something, whatever it is, reduces it.” Heeding his own warning, Dragon is meticulous about sketching even the most mundane occurrences with care.
That careful attention denotes Dragon’s obvious reverence for words. There’s an infectious love of language in The Champ is Here—these are people who value “the short and long life of a one-liner,” and who appreciate “dawn” as a “great word in both how it looks, letter-wise, and how it looks when [they’re] awake for it.” Even when characters can’t quite find the name for something they’re happy to give it “a handful of words,” something like “color-bound to an orange hue and slammed.” It’s a description that makes no sense, but it also makes perfect sense, kind of like lotion that reminds someone of “music instead of the fruit it says it smelled like.” These are people desperate to use the words available to them to get to some sort of “A Point,” as one of the collection’s most memorable stories is titled, written in a breathless sentence rather than Dragon’s typically fragmented paragraphs. But the problem, as we learn, is that “it’s hard to say what this getting to a point means,” and the narrator’s frustrated that “he keeps getting distracted” from it; he “keeps thinking and talking about woodpeckers when he shouldn’t be.” “What have I been doing?” he asks himself, wondering if he needs to “justify it or not.” He spends his days “Working, walking, sitting on the porch, laying in the sun on the floor like the dog, watching the dog lie in the sun.” The story ends there—somewhat abruptly—before we get the chance to learn what it all means. And I guess that’s the point; we’re waiting for a justification that won’t come because these things, whatever they are, need not be justified. It’s a fitting non-ending to a standout story in a standout collection—probably my favorite book of 2024. I don’t quite have the words to encapsulate my affection for it, and its author has instilled a fear in me of reaching for the wrong ones.
Nathan Dragon is, unequivocally, here, as is Cash 4 Gold Books. It seems futile to pinpoint a definitive C4G ethos in these—it’s early days—but I do detect a certain psychological acuity in both books. That is, C4G seems interested in publishing writers who take the machinery of their own minds seriously, no matter how unglamorous it may be. In Vack’s novel this often manifests itself as an excruciatingly earnest exploration of the creative process, complete with its illusions of grandeur and its utter abjection: “I am in awe of my capacity to create,” says Sillyboi, “it gives me so much joy and so much angst!” In Dragon’s stories this might mean giving form to formless longings: “I need something to defend. A world record or something.”
The key difference is that Dragon is a master at articulating self-curiosity without reaching for wide-ranging conclusions—I’m reminded again of his fears about “reducing” something, “whatever it is.” There’s a real restraint in his refusal to globalize individual idiosyncrasies, and I find that meaningful connections to a book usually originate in that sort of specificity. Sillyboy’s psychologizing is of the more sweeping and didactic variety. It’s written by someone who has spent a little time reading Freud and a lot of time on Twitter: “If I were a woman my take would be heralded as ‘essential,’ ‘subversive,’ and ‘necessary,’” reads one of Sillyboi’s metatextual flourishes, written in response to an imagined critic saying his book is “‘lousy with latent misogyny.’” While Vack’s evocations of a fledgling social media landscape and of the writer as a self-hating young man can be dazzling, this kind of half-baked mockery of a “woke” critic, even if it is satirical, and even if it is born from the protagonist’s insecurity about his own work, isn’t transgressive in any meaningful way; it doesn’t actually do anything to push the boundaries of literary conversations. All it does is reduce them.
The other key difference between the two writers is, well, just about everything else—this is true as it relates to form, style, and subject matter. Taken as a whole, I’m excited about that contrast, speaking as it does to C4G’s varied taste. “All the books I love are the total freaks,” Lahti told Write or Die, and his inclinations are reflected in C4G’s first two releases: Vack is a freak in his compulsive need to divulge everything. Dragon’s freakishness lies in the preternatural precision of his prose. And while I’m getting as close as I can to capsulizing each writer’s style, “freak” is, ultimately, the word you use when none of the other words work. Freaks rarely please everyone, but they are beloved by someone. We need more people willing to track these freaks down. Lahti and Lindsay are off to a promising start.
Michael Knapp’s writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Cleveland Review of Books, Full Stop, and elsewhere.
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