From W Magazine:
During Art Basel earlier this month, TMZ and the Daily Mail published photos of Kendall Jenner on a yacht off the coast of Miami Beach.
While a crowd of men in rumpled graphic T-shirts huddled in the shade behind her, Jenner lounged in a shaft of tropical winter sunlight, impeccably styled in a rust colored bikini and an open green shirt, her sharply parted hair tied in a ponytail at the nape of her neck.
She was reading a turquoise post-it dotted copy of Tonight I’m Someone Else, an essay collection by the Brooklyn-based writer and Bennington College professor Chelsea Hodson. In some photos, a copy of Black Swans, by the bohemian 70’s satirist (and resurgent literary world favorite) Eve Babitz, could be seen peeking out from Jenner’s furry orange tote.
It’s not the first time that Jenner has been seen reading what some people refer to as “alt lit.”
By the pool at the Hotel du Cap Eden Roc in France in May, she was snapped reading Darcie Wilder’s debut novel literally show me a healthy person, a brooding cult hit about grief. Next to her, Luka Sabbat rifled through a copy of No One Belongs Here More Than You, a collection of short stories by Miranda July. It, too, sported post-it notes.
Both Hodson’s and Wilder’s books sold out on Amazon within 24 hours after the photographs were published. The reaction online, from the authors themselves as well as those in their circles, was a mix of shock, delight and outright celebration: Very rarely do the worlds of mass celebrity and independent book publishing intersect.
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And rarely has the power of “influence” been felt so acutely in an industry in which a media blitz usually involves not much more than a handful of speaking events at local bookstores. For the kinds of people who post Ben Lerner galleys on their Instagram stories to telegraph good taste, intelligence and access, Jenner’s paparazzi images created a sort of cognitive dissonance.
. . . .
And rarely has the power of “influence” been felt so acutely in an industry in which a media blitz usually involves not much more than a handful of speaking events at local bookstores. For the kinds of people who post Ben Lerner galleys on their Instagram stories to telegraph good taste, intelligence and access, Jenner’s paparazzi images created a sort of cognitive dissonance.
. . . .
“Most of the writers I know expect very little in terms of success. Or, if they expect a lot, they’re disappointed,” she told me. “I think that every writer, on some level, wants an audience, and I certainly want my book to reach people who have never heard of me,” she added. “So, I’m really grateful that Kendall Jenner and even these tabloid publications helped me to do that a year and a half after my book’s publication. It seems clear to me now that her influence has the power to truly change people’s lives.”
After the Hotel du Cap photos, Wilder said she remembers being “shocked and amused at the absurdity of it, also confused. It doesn’t make sense but I’m into it.”
Hodson says that her students were the most enthusiastic about the news. “I actually received so much attention that day that it started to depress me,” she said. “I realized that almost no one is immune to the power of celebrity. Celebrities are at the center of our culture, and books are typically somewhere in the periphery of that, so I think it excited people to see those two things side by side.”
Link to the rest at W Magazine
PG understands (perhaps incorrectly) that professional Instagram, etc., personalities seldom/never talk about a product unless they’ve been paid to do so.