“There’s a real Betty-Veronica thing going on,” photographer and VICE journalist Nick Dove texts me.
Nick is referring to his photos of Sophia June and Layla Halabian, the powerhouse duo behind the literary newsletter Language Arts, which recently celebrated two years on Substack. And it’s true; the team is one part blonde and one part brunette, but rather than knocking elbows for the affections of some fickle ginger, these two have a greater calling.
While both writers have an impressive scattering of bylines between them (The New York Times, Vanity Fair, Dazed, and The FADER, to name just a few), Sophia and Layla sought an escape from the “rules and regulations of the media machine.” The two met behind the culture desk at NYLON, creatively covering literature, nightlife, and entertainment for the magazine until early 2024, when they were advised to exclusively prioritize celebrities, shopping, and SEO bait.
“They were like, ‘You can’t write about someone who doesn’t have at least 20,000 followers on Instagram,’” Sophia tells me. “The vibe truly went from Allie Rowbottom’s botox Georgia Room party to Chanel dinner overnight.”
In many ways, we have this “new regime” to thank for the existence of Language Arts, which firmly rejects fluffy celeb bullshit in favor of “indie and emerging literature, with an eye for books that are strange, surprising, and irreverent.”
To the absolute shock of media overlords everywhere, there is, in fact, a growing audience for this type of content. (Our meeting in early June followed the heavily-hyped launch party for Allie Rowbottom’s Lovers XXX and Language Arts’ own launch party for Anna Dorn’s American Spirits.)
Between roundtable pours from a carafe of wine or two at Cellar 36, we discuss the pitfalls of the corporate media world, the evolution of the Literary It Girl, and what Lena Dunham’s Substack book tour suggests about the future of book promotion.
Let’s discuss the Lena Blueprint.
Sophia June: Since Lena Dunham’s Substack book tour, so many more people have reached out being like, “We want this author featured in Language Arts, specifically.” Sometimes I’ll be interested in covering a book in a bigger outlet, and they’re like, “No, we want Substack.” Because that’s what actually moves copies. That stuff actually translates to sales.
Layla Halabian: There’s also this level of trust, because it’s not like we have a C-suite that’s like, “Hey, write about my friend’s book.” It’s a matter of trusting certain people who have agency, and I really don’t feel like that’s the case in media. There are a lot of tied-up interests.
SJ: It truly feels so impossible to publish an interview with an author who’s not Caro Claire Burke who wrote Yesteryear. Forget indie presses, it’s hard to even publish an interview with a best-selling author. So I feel like people trust our Language Arts ecosystem more. It’s actually connecting readers, and I really think it’s physically putting books in readers’ hands, sometimes literally, through giveaways.
You two famously met through NYLON. What was your dynamic like while working there, and when did you discover you had a shared interest in covering literature?
LH: I actually hired Sophia because NYLON created a culture section. I became the culture editor and I got to hire a writer. I look back on it now and I think it’s really cool because Sophia and I didn’t have any mutuals. I didn’t know who she was at all. I read her edit test and spoke with her, and I really had a gut feeling [about her].
SJ: I have chills.
LH: I remember thinking, “I can tell this girl really wants to write. She wants to have a chance to write about the things she’s passionate about.” At the time, I was building out my vision for the section, and I was like, “I really miss when magazines did real book coverage.” Then, when I was talking to Sophia, she was like, “Yeah, I love reading.” So I felt she was really aligning with what I found cool and interesting, and we ended up working super well together and being on the same wavelength. It was very easy from the jump, and [our relationship] just got stronger and stronger.
SJ: I wrote book reviews for my college newspaper so I was especially excited. It’s so funny that we didn’t know each other because I feel like everyone who gets a media job knows everyone [ahead of time].
It certainly seems that way now, yeah.
LH: I know that the jobs I had gotten in the past were a matter of somebody taking a chance on me, essentially, so hiring Sophia felt very true to what I wanted the world to be like, and it ended up working out better than I could have imagined.
SJ: We really got to do whatever the fuck we wanted at NYLON until we couldn’t. Alyssa [Vingan] was our editor-in-chief, and it was a really small team and still the pandemic. They really trusted us, especially with books. I didn’t really know how to find books—I’d just go to all of the publishers and look at everything that’s coming out. Then people started sending us things. Nada Alic was one of the first people to reach out and say: “I have a book coming out, I like what you guys are doing.” She connected us to Allie [Rowbottom], who connected us to Madeline [Cash], Anika [Jade Levy], and so many other people. It all happened really organically before this larger books moment. We’ve always been ahead.
LH: Story of our lives. It’s fun to see, for example, Coach doing a very book-related campaign. It’s like Elle Fanning reading Jane Austen. That’s really cool because when we were at NYLON, it was not popular. I don’t think brands realized that people were interested at all, and I think a lot of people didn’t even realize it themselves. It was very cool to have already built this sense of taste and trust before the boom, so to speak, began.
You guys have theorized that books are becoming symbols of luxury, as leisure time is increasingly the most luxurious thing life can offer us.
SJ: You have to have the attention span to read.
LH: [Attention] is the newest currency and everyone is broke.
How has your relationship to reading changed since moving to New York? My reading has fallen off very steeply since I moved here. I don’t read half as much as I used to, and I hate that.
LH: It takes me so much longer to read. When I do zip through a book, I know that it’s major. Honestly, sometimes I feel like it takes me three times as long to read a book. It has to be a super conscious choice. I try not to create arbitrary rules for myself, but when it comes to reading, that is really helpful. Like if I’m on a train, I’m reading a book. Or if I feel very compelled by the Lord of the Rings audiobooks—I’m having the time of my life listening to those.
SJ: It goes on and off. When I’ve read the most in my life it’s because I’m going through a hard time and I’m trying to majorly dissociate. That’s when I’ll plow through books super quickly. When I’m more embedded in my life it’s harder, unless [the book is] so propulsive and hard to put down. A lot of indie literature isn’t like that, which doesn’t mean it’s bad, but sometimes I find myself going towards classics I’ve never read that I know are going to hit. I just picked up Emma Cline’s The Girls, which came out literally ten years ago, but it’s so good. I think because we’re writing about books all the time, you think a book that came out last month is over. You miss those random good books from, like, 2012.
So true, the consumption cycle is insane.
SJ: I try to remind myself that normal people don’t consume books like that. I’m on Goodreads with people who aren’t in the book world and they’re reading [Anna Dorn’s] Perfume and Pain right now. It came out two years ago and it’s so good, but I’m like, “What do you mean you just heard about that book?” And that’s completely normal, but for us that was so two books ago.
LH: We have galley disease.
SJ: I also listen to a lot of audiobooks. I’m not afraid to say it.
LH: If you’re reading a memoir, you gotta listen in the person’s voice. It really adds so much to it.
SJ: Non-fiction—like this could be a podcast. Maybe it just should be.
Did you listen to Famesick?
LH: Well, I was thinking about the Mariah Carey and the Julia Fox audiobooks.
SJ: I read Lena’s book. I thought about [listening to] the audiobook, but actually I just couldn’t put down the book. I read it in two days and it was so good. I interviewed her when we were at NYLON. I did the call at the Whole Foods on Bowery.
You introduced Language Arts as an escape from the rules and regulations of the media machine. What were you seeing internally at NYLON that inspired this decisive move?
SJ: Basically, they started this new regime that was suddenly about page views and celebrities.
LH: It became true celebrity worship in a way that I don’t think anybody on the team liked. We always had so many good ideas that would be butchered to the point where instead of cutting the fat, it just became all fat.
SJ: They were like, ‘You can’t write about someone who doesn’t have at least 20,000 followers on Instagram.’
Wow, so it was that explicit.
SJ: It was literally written down. They were like, ‘We’re not doing books anymore, we’re not doing artists anymore, we’re not doing anything niche or downtown.’ Everything that we wrote about. Overnight, they were like, ‘We’re not doing that anymore. In fact, you should write shopping stories.’
LH: A rule was [to] only write about someone if you can imagine them at a Chanel dinner.
Psychotic.
SJ: The vibe truly went from Allie Rowbottom’s botox Georgia Room party to Chanel dinner overnight.
What year was this?
LH: The beginning of 2024. What’s really interesting is that the things our team created got noticed. For example, the “Literary It Girl” story is something that NYLON is referenced for all the time. It just felt very counterintuitive, because the things that we’re doing really well and becoming respected for are now suddenly trash.
Has there been any reversal on it? Has NYLON tried to get you back?
LH: I don’t think anyone works there, genuinely.
SJ: They don’t publish anything except an occasional digital cover. They’re an events company now.
LH: Nothing has come across my desk culturally to be like, “Oh, let me click on this article!”
SJ: It’s really sad because I do feel like we were often the first press that people got, and if you’re an artist or writer, getting that first press helps you so much. It’s so hard to get that first press now. The places to do that are kind of gone. There’s Substack, which is why we’re on Substack.
LH: I think Substack does become the first press for a lot of people.
SJ: That’s what we do best. We’ll have more established writers on there, but our favorite thing is the weird debut. The sexy debut. Or an excerpt from a book that might be on a big five [publisher], but is not getting the Yesteryear treatment, so no one will know about it.
LH: Or even noticing a trend and being able to coherently say something about it.
Right, because there’s also the value of your perspective. You guys are both very active in New York. You’re going out, you’re talking to people. It’s a boots-on-the-ground perspective that a stuffy C-suite has no sense of. That’s why they’re collapsing.
SJ: They want to be cool so bad.
LH: It’s very sad to essentially hire people because you think they’re interesting and cool, and then be like, ‘Actually, no. We’re not going to listen to you.’ But ultimately you see that stuff doesn’t work out, and you just continue doing what you’re doing. It ends up paying off.
It’s funny because I really associate your names with NYLON. I just remember all of the best articles I read were written by you guys.
SJ: It was a super small team of, like, five people. Everyone was amazing, but if you liked a certain kind of thing, we probably wrote [about] it.
LH: Honestly, it was super fun.
SJ: It was the best job I ever had.
Sophia, I feel like the recent viral equivalent of your “Literary It Girl” article would be Daniel Kolitz’s gooner article [for Harper’s]...
SJ: Wow, I’m putting that on my resume.
LH: It got people riled up.
Do you still get shit [for it]?
SJ: I actually don’t think anyone knows that it came from us. I try to say it a lot. I’m always like, “I coined [Literary It Girl].” Because we’re not new to this, we’re true to this. Like, you heard about Miu Miu liking books yesterday. I feel like it comes up constantly, but it’s always with a knowing eye-roll, where we’re all in on this joke.
Yeah, it’s been fully absorbed into the lexicon. Do you have any thoughts on how the Literary It Girl will evolve, or what the next big literary marketing archetype might be?
SJ: As things become more atomized, I feel like the Literary It Girl is on Substack now. Sure, she might be doing a press tour if she’s very lucky, but she’s probably just making it happen on Substack and might be lucky enough to have a publicist who is going to pitch Substacks, too.
LH: Yeah, the Literary It Girl is tearing it up on Substack Notes as we speak.
SJ: When that article came out, the idea of throwing your own party, making merch, or having a moment around your book was not something that people did. I feel like every author knows now that that’s just part of the deal. It’s cool that now there’s more knowledge about the economic engines that power a book launch.
LH: Before, [the belief was that] the publisher doled out all this money, but actually no, it comes from your pocket. Or you get a sponsor, like we did for Anna [Dorn]’s book, American Spirits. We got Rec League as a sponsor. That was super sick. We were able to ask ourselves: “What is the type of event that we would remember?” People put so much time and energy into writing a book, and then to have it be a blip feels very heartbreaking, especially for these authors that we’ve developed real friendships with. Anna and I became friends on Twitter a really long time ago. We bonded over astrology and Lana Del Rey.
SJ: And you’ve written about literally all of her books.
LH: Let it be known I’ve been an Anna Dorn fan from day one. We’re really lucky that Rec League also thought that Anna was cool. They believe in us as people and believe in our vision, and we’re able to deliver. It becomes bigger and bigger every time.
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THEY'RE SO COOL!!