Selina Search results for: Selina Chan 10 m ago @richardpapensvape: lol that panel video. i love how selina chan so completely does not care about these impotent men and their feelings. low-empathy icon. emotionless queen 14 m ago @infpcatlady: I mean, people hated Selina Chan for years before this, though? Did we all forget that being an asshole doesn’t make you smart or aspirational, even if that asshole is a woman?? 27 m ago @Lola Xu: Ok everybody, if you want to sign my petition asking @Th e Paris Review to take down Parker Navarro’s disgusting story about Selina Chan, HERE’S THE LINK!! Tysm to everybody who thought of more points to add about how this is borderline sexual harassment and maybe also a death threat???? [LINK] 41 m ago @Christian Gatehead Author: On the heels of Saturday’s panel, a new interview with @Electric Lit about the decline of our literary culture and, yes, Selina Chan and her ilk. [LINK] 51 m ago @2223333 windo: @Selina Chan bitch The City office occupied the top floor of the Baumgartner, a historic nineteenth-century building a stone’s throw from Union Square, whose austere limestone dripped with black rain marks. When you exited the elevator on our floor, you were greeted by a vast oaken wall, CITY MAGAZINE carved into its polished surface. Each letter was six inches de ep and a foot high. Some mornings, I still stopped opposite the two enormous words and let their impact ring through me. I thought about the writers who had paused in that spot, taking in this monument to City’s work.
The Monday after the Wiseman Festival, I hesitated longer than usual. I told myself that this place had chosen me for a reason. When I reached my office, I found the door open. Scott was standing at the window, gazing outside with his hands folded behind his back. This would have looked more impressive if my window hadn’t been three feet from the adjacent building, with a view of a brick wall and a drainpipe oozing slime. I knocked twice on the doorjamb. “Morning.” “Selina. Hi.” Scott turned to me with a troubled air. “How was your weekend?” “Not especially noteworthy, but let’s speak about yours. Hayden sent me the video of the festival program.” I tugged the door shut. “Was she not happy with it?” “No, no, she was thrilled. She said something about a clip blowing up on Tik Tok.” “I thought I’d die before I ever heard you say the words ‘blowing up on Tik Tok.’” “And yet.” Scott took the chair in the corner with a groan. “Did you see the morning’s updates?” “You mean Christian Gatehead’s interview?” I tossed my purse onto my desk. “Or Lola Xu’s petition making me out to be a tragic martyr?” “Both. Look, Selina, I’m concerned that this feud is beginning to overst ep some boundaries for you.” “I don’t care what Christian Gatehead thinks about me.” He adjusted the knot of his tie, his silence oozing sk epticism. “Seriously,” I said, “I’ve taken worse.” “You shouldn’t have to ‘take’ anything. Something like Saturday is a world away from your job description.” “Right, but if it’s benefiting City—” “You’re a critic. What benefits City is your criticism.” I angled myself away from Scott to unshoulder my backpack, not overfond of the way he was watching me, as
though I needed a rescuer. Still, he made a fair point. As recently as two months ago, I’d spent my days reading new releases. Drafting reviews. Cooking dinner without opening social media and reading about every way in which I was insufferable or evil or pitiable or laughable. I sank into my office chair, feeling exhausted. I’d sl ept terribly since Saturday, my parents’ call circling my head like a buzzard. They’d emailed a follow-up as I’d left the bar. Xiao Yan—We are sorry to hear about the fight. We want to know how you are handling it. If you call we will talk again. From Dad and Mom. I hadn’t r eplied and didn’t know if I would. “What about Hayden?” I said. “I already spoke with her,” Scott said. “She ... well, her ideal scenario was that you sign this petition and sue The Paris Review for libel, but I told her you’d be more interested in being roasted alive over a slow flame.” “You know me so well.” “I try.” Scott took a small mock bow. “Anyway, as an alternative, she agreed that it’s not a bad idea for you to lie low. Right now, public sympathy for you and City is high. You were just doing your job, and here come these men making vindictive public attacks and writing ... unusually detailed short stories ... you see the angle. And if you fire back, the goodwill could vanish. So, she thinks you could cool things off while she figures out next st eps.” “What next st eps?” “Unclear. She did also suggest that, short of mentioning the petition, you post something on your social media reminding the world that you’re a human being with feelings.” “So, she’s saying play the victim.” Scott sighed. “She’s saying let people be on your side, Selina. Is that so hard?” I didn’t answer. He stood. “If Parker Navarro responds to the petition, or to the Gatehead piece, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. For now, I want you doing coverage of the Booker and the
Nobel. People think it’s Murakami’s year. Sound good?” “Okay. Yes, understood.” Scott hesitated. I pulled my laptop from its protective sleeve, avoiding his eyes, though I could feel him watching me. “Let me tell you something,” he finally said. “I joined the staff of City in 1987. The first time I gave a book a really blistering review was eighty- eight, I think. The week after that review ran, the author mailed a four-page letter to the office saying he hoped I never wanted to work in fiction publishing, because his uncle was the publisher at Random House and he’d see to it that nobody in New York would so much as sniff a manuscript with my name on it.” My hands had stilled on my laptop. In the seven years I’d worked at City, I could count on one hand the number of times Scott had said anything this personal. “What did you do?” I asked. “I showed the letter to Sandy Reilly. She was the editor then. And Sandy said to me, ‘Scott, are you planning on leaving City in the near future?’ And I said, ‘Well, no.’ And she said, ‘Then you just ke ep writing like you have nothing to worry about.’” Scott opened the door. “It’s a gift,” he said, “to write like that. You’d better not lose it.” A week passed, but Navarro didn’t respond to the Gatehead interview or Lola Xu’s petition. He didn’t mention me in any more articles or venomous short stories. On social media he devoted himself to more normal forms of self-promotion, like inflicting excerpts from High and Dry on the public. At meetings, Hayden k ept dropping hints about “marketing cooking up exciting things behind the scenes” and, more cryptically, about “important takeaways,” but in the meantime, my job returned to normal. I felt marginally more sane, as though some enormous hand were untwisting the clamp that
had, for the past month, contained my head. The Monday before Thanksgiving, the editorial staff arrived in the library to find Erica Robson, City’s head of marketing, tugging a projection screen over one of the bookshelves. Erica was tall and rangy and alert, eighteen-inch microbraids swaying down the back of her patterned pantsuits. She gave off the air of somebody who could face a tornado without so much as a raised eyebrow. Trying for fifteen years to make City profitable could do that to a person. “Afternoon, everybody,” Erica said. “Is this the part where we find out what Hayden’s been making y’all do downstairs for the last three weeks?” said Kellie. “Y ep. New site feature. It’s really not the worst idea, though.” With a click of Erica’s remote, my review of High and Dry appeared onscreen. “The question was how to take advantage of articles that catch fire. The day after Selina’s video, this review got two and a half million page views, but since we give people four free articles a month, most of them didn’t have to engage with the paywall. So...” She scrolled down to the bottom of my article. After the end mark, a graphic of a piggybank contained a box that read: Tip this article: [$1]. [Add comment...] “Wait,” said Kellie, “do we actually make tips?” Erica grimaced. “No. Sorry, that’s just the language they wanted to use.” Kellie blew her bangs off her forehead like a horse dislodging a fly. “Any other questions?” said Erica. “Add comment,” I said, eyeing the second box. City had never had a comments section, something that brought me more joy every time I browsed the comments of the Times and The Washington Post.
Erica met my eye. “Don’t worry, they’re not public comments. I had to fight for that one. They’ll come through to email, like a thank-you note. I figured having a say might encourage people to pitch in, and if you’re spending money on the site, you’re pretty likely to be supportive and not ... you know.” “Teeming with verbal abuse?” I said. “That’s the one. You don’t have to read the messages, but there’s a new tab in your emails if you want to check them.” A flurry of clicking and laptop-opening as we all navigated to our inboxes. “Oh, look,” said Mike to Joyce. “This is very genteel, isn’t it?” I leaned over to read his screen. Tip alert: $3 From: Robert (Chicago, IL) Happy that City Magazine has introduced this “feature” to express appreciation for pieces of “especially fine journalism.” I can only hope that “number of tips” will result in higher end-of-year bonuses! Ke ep up the good work, Mike! “Quotation marks,” said Joyce, with sympathy. “Always a killer.” Curious, I clicked on the Tip Jar tab at the top of my own inbox. A dozen emails appeared, and halfway down the list, a familiar name caught my eye. Tip alert: $5 From: Parker (New York City, NY) To tide you over when City folds. I snapped my laptop shut and looked back up at Erica’s presentation, trying to re capture the thread. After the meeting, alone in my office, I reopened my laptop to study the message. What was Parker trying to accomplish, exactly? All those years of pirating my writing, and he’d caved just to make this petty jab?
I narrowed my eyes at the screen. Maybe he expected me to screenshot the comment, post it online with an insulting response, and generate more free publicity for his book. If I told Hayden, she’d probably encourage me to do exactly that. But unfortunately for both Hayden and Parker, I’d been enjoying the relative calm of the last week and a half. Yes, I told myself, exiting my email. There was no need to respond at all. No need, exc ept that now I was imagining the self-satisfied expression he’d probably been wearing as he’d submitted the comment. I was remembering his belligerent look at our panel, when he’d recommended Aiden Linville’s Desperations to that poor crowd of people. This was the person currently mocking me by email. Lips pursed, I opened my phone, tapped into Venmo, and searched Parker Navarro. Just like that, he appeared at the top of the list. That same brooding headshot. I hit Pay, then entered $5. I drummed into the message field: Your next advance. Are you sure you know this user? Venmo asked me. I tapped Confirm and set my phone face down on the desk, hard. I needed to focus. Scott was expecting a review of that Ariana Okoro book. I needed a draft by the end of the day. But as I opened my laptop, I found myself clicking back to Parker Navarro’s social media. This is unproductive, I told myself, even as my fingers flicked to scroll, flicked to scroll, flicked to scroll. @Parker Navarro Writes: Had a wonderful time at @Wiseman Foundation @WFLF. Thanks to all who came! @Parker Navarro Writes: Appreciated this review of High and Dry in the @Austin Dispatch! Written by @CBHenderson, a generous reader
and electrifying writer. I switched to R eplies. @Parker Navarro Writes: @Robot Cats Unite Hahahaha yes! Made me laugh on the train! @Parker Navarro Writes: @Jenn Diagram I’ve never read it, although clearly I should! The page went on and on like that. Laughter, permissiveness, acc eptance, absorption. Exhausting. And on his main feed: the voice of some wide-eyed ingenue, a person whose sole purpose in life was to react rather than to generate a thought of his own. This annoyed me in a way I wasn’t used to being annoyed. Parker Navarro was already an egotist and a bad writer. He didn’t need to make himself seem even worse than he actually was. This version of him was nowhere near the real thing, the person who, at our panel, had at least displayed the ability to put an idea into words, the person who had approached me in the bar to confront me about Asylum Piece. I was still wrestling with that overlap in our tastes. It shouldn’t have meant anything that he’d read Asylum Piece half a dozen times, but somehow it did. Sometimes a book forms such a foundational part of you that to meet somebody else who loves it, who really cares about it, feels like stumbling into a stranger in another country who comes from your hometown. At some point in the past decade, Parker Navarro and I might have been rereading at the same time, tugging out our paperbacks and letting them accordion open, grateful that, though other books might let us down, this one never would. It was strange to know that Parker had come to the book from Marcy D’Artagnan’s City review, too. Unwillingly, I pictured him then,
adolescent, a copy of City stuffed into an overfull backpack and Asylum Piece open before him on a high school desk. I’d been sixteen and desperately lonely the first time I’d read it. Like me, had he been blasted back in his seat by the sheer possibilities of language that slender book revealed, like a pilot experiencing the kickback of a jet engine? I realized I’d been staring, unseeing, at an @ symbol on his profile for upward of a minute. Sixty seconds of my life I’d never get back, thinking about a teenage Parker Navarro. I closed the tab and got back to work.