Announcing Magazine Non Grata

A new magazine for literature and culture

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: A revolution in culture is now a necessity. With the arts in the gutter all we got is porn, God bless it, but what the hell happened to literature, film, music?

It seems to us that the “Creative” Establishment is the primary tumor. Big publishers, movie studios, record labels—and all the smaller institutions around them—are now corroded and corrupted. Their goal is to make money, to placate, to appease, to avoid anyone that goes against the prevailing Ideology in pursuit of truth. The result? The worst cultural stagnation in decades.

Institutions, to be clear, are often correct in ignoring anti-Establishment art. Just because a work is pornographic or reactionary does not mean that it’s good. There’s nothing impressive in scribbling thousands of dirty words or inventing a series of depraved scenes.

But when controversial art also has artistic merit it’s much more powerful than the compositions Penguin and Universal poop out. In guerrilla art one finds the crude gutter slang normally reserved for use with close friends. One discovers the hurricane of private thoughts and emotions too vulgar and shameful to speak. Rebellious art leopard crawls into the secret crevices of the mind. Not only is it more truthful than the traditional, but more innovative too. The artist willing to mar his reputation or forgo publication is more likely to break all convention than the party man. It was Céline who pushed the novel one hundred years forward because—after first torching the rules of pretentious literary language—he then tore down those of form, structure, and subject matter.

But the “Creative” Establishment is only part of the problem. Now we’re dealing with the technophiles too, those that want to steal human creativity and give it to the machines. We’re dealing with the purveyors of algorithms that have made us lose our minds, with the swindlers of devices that destroy our attention spans. We’re supposed to be the most advanced generation of all, yet we can’t reach the beauty of a Melville novel, can’t lose ourselves in the landscapes of a Kubrick movie, can’t hear the instruments of a Bach piece. Something has got to give.

The aim of Non Grata is to play a role in rerouting culture. The mission is clear: Give the rebels a platform. Get people off their phones. Spread beauty.

It starts with a print magazine that features viewpoints bound not by ideology but by truth, beauty, bravery, and novelty. We will post online too, but the best tools for escaping the Algorithm are handheld. Physicality is essential for culture. Great film photos are more striking in your hands than on screens. Great fiction cannot exist amongst a barrage of notifications and messages. Great long-form essays and interviews read better with the iPhone hidden away or, best of all, abandoned.

The first edition of the magazine ships this November. If you want to get your hands on it you can send us a one-time $20 payment here. If you sign up for the annual subscription on Substack ($40), we’ll mail you the first edition of 2026 as well. For those that are really gung-ho on the rebels, the founding membership ($80) offers four print volumes a year. In addition to this paid subscribers get access to every article, interview, essay, and story that we publish online. Free subscribers will get access to much, but not all, of this work as well.

Lastly, paid subscribers will receive invitations to every event that we host. For the first year they’ll be in New York, Rio de Janeiro, and Paris. These events aren’t just for drinking, though I’m sure there’ll be plenty of that, they’re for getting open minds out of the silos confining them today. In the past great ideas came from small bands of kindred spirits meeting, and then working, in close proximity: The Impressionists, the Lost Generation, the Barranquilla Group. What’s stopping us from doing that today?

For the first time in history men and women, at scale, have the opportunity to champion the next Hunter S. Thompson, the next Lou Reed, the next Harmony Korine. If culture is to be reborn it will not be because of government grants or billionaire patrons. It will be because hundreds or thousands or millions unified around their love for the people producing it. If culture is to have a renaissance, it is the pirates and their supporters who will bring it about. We, at Non Grata, are here to contribute as best we can.

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